Brendan Jacobs

University of New England | UNE · School of Education

This chapter reinforces the student-centred focus of the book through the title ‘Learning from the Driver’s Seat’. Constructionism is what you will find here and the particular variety is the co-construction of animation artefacts. Student-authored animations as digital pedagogy is an exciting new area of research and classroom practice as it build...

This chapter presents insights from the Reverse engineering Explanatory Animation Learning Method (REALM). Such insights include the idea that the evolving digital animation artefacts embody each child’s learning and provide multimodal assessment data. When children focus on designing and making animations, the way they approach their work is essen...

This chapter details the methodology and Explanatory Animation Framework (EAF). The literature here is entrenched with the assumption that children are animation viewers rather than animation authors. The EAF is a list of four pedagogical principles with succinct animation guidelines to assist animation authors of any age. These design principles i...

This chapter provides a theoretical framework for the animation creation task and covers many areas because this is clearly a multifaceted task. The most prominent and interesting feature here is Vygotsky and Sakharov’s dual stimulation method as they introduced the idea that the resolution of conceptual tasks can provide evidence of conceptual con...

While the field of digital humanities continues to evolve and expand, the affordances of the digital medium are becoming increasingly applicable to research in the field of education. This article provides an overview of some of the issues involved with publishing educational research as a digital web-based thesis. It also introduces the term multi...

In his writing on pedology from 1928 to 1931, Vygotsky (1998) discusses how the social environment provides the context and source for human development. During the almost century since, Vygotsky’s ideas have developed to inform our understanding of groups and institutions through Cultural Historical Activity Theory. In this paper we examine the ev...

This article provides an overview of some of the issues involved in publishing educational research as a digital web-based thesis. The purpose of this article is twofold: (1) to offer some guidelines for other researchers who wish to pursue the multimodal publication option and (2) to report on a range of unanticipated affordances arising from this...

The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is one of the most widely accepted concepts in education but new research using digital technologies has shown that the co-construction of knowledge in the ZPD can also provide a window into the process of conceptual consolidation. This paper uses digital data from primary school children to demonstrate how mu...

The co-construction of learning is an important part of education in the early years, but new research using digital technologies is showing that supervising student projects can also impact the learning of the supervisor/teacher by creating mutual zones of proximal development. This paper uses evidence from three case studies to demonstrate how mu...

This article explores the relationship between abstract and concrete as categories of knowledge and Wilensky’s (1991) theory that all ideas are abstract until they become concrete. Dewey (1910/1997) made a similar claim by suggesting that ideas are initially beyond our comprehension until they have become consolidated. This article documents the ev...

This article discusses the affordances of the explanatory animation creation process on the person who makes the animation, specifically, how his or her own conceptual understanding of any chosen topic is challenged, deepened, and ultimately consolidated throughout this process. Third generation activity theory was used in this study as a methodolo...