Christian Voigt

Hochschule Düsseldorf · Department of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies

The Maker Movement emerged from a renewed interest in the physical side of innovation following the dot-com bubble and the rise of the participatory Web 2.0 and the decreasing costs of many digital fabrication technologies. Classifying concepts, i.e. building taxonomies, is a fundamental practice when developing a topic of interest into a research...

Diversity and inclusion in the technology sector is increasingly debated , specially in the context of equal opportunities for all and a shortage of experts in many tech related industries. The need to be more inclusive can refer to different age groups, people with diverse culturally and linguistically backgrounds or gender. All in all, ethnic, ge...

One of the main challenges in designing learning activities at the intersection of digital fabrication and solving complex problems is creating a motivating context to keep up children's engagement with the problem and going through the iterations of design thinking. Based on a four day out-of-school learning workshop with 18 children, we reflected...

Makerspaces and the availability of digital maker tools offer opportunities to create with their hands. Makerspaces and making have increasingly found their ways into institutions of formal and informal education but have yet not been explored in entrepreneurship education. Maker education holds the premise that learners work in a self-regulated an...

This paper explores the use of maker technologies as activities embedded in a wider educational ecosystem. Innovations are generally described as the exploitation of new ideas; hence novel technologies and processes need to be adopted by the relevant user groups. The paper starts with a conceptual overview of maker technologies, innovation types an...

This chapter presents design elements for technology-mediated case-based learning as well as methods to monitor their impact. It is argued that course designs need to include (static) enabling elements and (dynamic) adaptations to be responsive to changing and emerging learning conditions. The process of continuously monitoring and adapting design...

Several studies have investigated the way learners connect with science, re-emphasising persisting inequalities in science learning. This article combines the concept of intersectionality with the theoretical lens of science learning ecologies to focus on inequalities in connecting with science: Which factors influence the formation of a positive s...

The SySTEM2020 project has set out to generate an in-depth look at science learning in the non-formal sector, designing a toolkit of frameworks, tools, and practices for the evaluation of non-formal science education programmes. The goal is to enable learners to evaluate their own learning under a number of different metrics including their engagem...

In this paper we explore gender issues in the maker movement using four different methods of data analysis: standardised questionnaires, analysis of makerspaces’ social media, statistical analysis of machine use and the coding of interviews and focus groups. The objective is to give a voice to female makers and makerspace managers, looking at the m...

This paper presents a pilot evaluation study, focusing on a variety of mechanisms to successfully integrate the learning of physical computing, entrepreneurship and game development. First, we introduce a workshop design framework developed as part of the European project DOIT (Entrepreneurial skills for young social innovators in an open digital w...

Interest in science learning is on the raise and often related to the need for future innovators, entrepreneurs and, more generally, problem solvers. Yet, there is a concerning persistence of inequalities in educational systems, that can be traced back to learners’ family, gender stereotypes or discrimination based on migratory experiences. In this...

Digital fabrication consists of a range of techniques used to create products from digital designs. For the development of the digital citizen, digital literacy is a fundamental skill that digital fabrication could assist in developing. However, the main question is how to support education systems in order to promote fundamental skills, since the...

The European project DOIT follows the maker pedagogy approach to develop an early entrepreneurial education program for children between the age of six and sixteen. In this program, children work collaboratively on solutions for challenges that they know from their personal environments with the aim to aspire to the entrepreneurial spirit and socia...

This paper introduces the Maker movement as a bottom-up movement, placing digital fabrication technologies on people’s desks to produce “almost anything”. It explores further the pedagogical value of making in education in general and in early entrepreneurial education in particular. Making as a pedagogical approach is analysed referencing establis...

The paper addresses the need to rethink education to be effective in a changing environment. More concretely we look at the intersection of craft-based learning, digital fabrication technologies and schools’ capacities to absorb educational innovations. Although making and hacking are known activities within constructionist learning settings, they...

The H2020 project DOIT and its 13 partners contribute to youth employment and to the creation of new jobs in the social economy by nurturing in young pupils’ entrepreneurial mind-sets, knowhow and skills. The project empowers primary and secondary school pupils (6-16 years) alongside educators to apply open innovation methods, digital maker tools a...

ICT has already revolutionized content creation and communications. In principle, today, everybody with Internet access, the right skills and equipment can produce digital content composed of virtual "bits" and make it instantly available across the globe. The same is now happening to manufacturing for everyone with access to tools like 3D printers...

Teams of students creating digital artefacts using crafts, 3D printing, electronics, microcontrollers, and computer programming can result in significant science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics (STEAM) learning. An ecosystem of carefully selected tools, diverse project ideas, and a well-designed pedagogic structure can greatly facili...

A better understanding of how information in networks is reused or mixed, has the potential to significantly contribute to the way value is exchanged under a market-or commons-based paradigm. Data as collaborative commons, distributed under creative commons licenses, can generate novel business models and significantly spur the continuing developme...

The Maker movement represents a return of interest to the physical side of digital innovation. To explore expectations and values within the Maker movement, we applied qualitative research method, interviewing 10 manag-ers of maker initiative as well as 39 makers from eight different countries. The paper analyses how the Maker movement is contribut...

Neil Gershenfeld called the Maker movement the next digital revolution as it placed the means of fabrication on people's desks. This paper looks at makers' ambition to do socially valuable things and critically reflects on their potential impact, whether makers' societal impact can be recognised on micro-, meso-or macro-level. Paraphrasing Schumpet...

User acceptance is key for the adoption of a new technology. In this work we experiment with a novel service for tutors in workplace learning settings. Sentiment analysis is a way to extract feelings and emotions from a text. In a learning setting such a sentiment analysis can be part of learning analytics. It has the potential to foster the unders...

The proposed paper discusses open evaluation in the context of two fields of knowledge-intensive “production” that are in varied ways and to varied degrees based on “openness” themselves: scientific publishing and peer2peer production (maker movement). The paper starts with the outline of a rough evolutionary perspective that provides a heuristic...

Participation platforms, such as OpenStreetMap.org or Wheelmap.org represent a shift from a world defined by the few to a world where almost everyone can participate voluntarily. Emerging cultures of participation offer powerful mechanisms to raise awareness of some of today's most pressing societal problems. However, just because citizens could co...

This paper addresses the implications of 'big data' on the smart city paradigm. In addition to grids of sensors to track traffic flows or monitor service delivery, urban governments around the world are starting to experiment with re-purposing stores of data collected by third parties: using mobile phone data to track movement or social media to id...

Social innovations are increasingly being seen as a way of compensating for insufficiencies of both, state and market to create inclusive and accessible environments. In this paper we explore crowdsourcing accessibility information as a form of social innovation, requiring adequate engagement strategies that fit the skills of the intended group of...

Social innovations are increasingly being seen as a way of compensating for insufficiencies of both, state and market to create inclusive and accessible environments. In this paper we explore crowdsourcing accessibility information as a form of social innovation, requiring adequate engagement strategies that fit the skills of the intended group of...

Relativist interpretations are often portrayed as a consequence of different assumptions on a methodological level. Relativism implies that the findings of qualitative and quantitative research co-exist but remain incomparable due to the lack of an overarching frame of reference. This is not a concern if findings from different research approaches...

Welfare systems are continuously under pressure to find innovative responses to demographic change, a global economy, increasing levels of migration and emerging technologies, to mention a few of the multiple challenges that confront social policy. Recent efforts to address these challenges at a European level include the Social Investment Package,...

Design Thinking hat in den letzten Jahren in ganz verschiedenen Kontexten an Aufmerk- samkeit gewonnen, wobei sich mannigfache Anwendungsfelder, Vorgehensweisen und Methoden herausgebildet haben. Im Wesent- lichen geht es darum, Menschen aus ansons- ten separierten Disziplinen und Kontexten zusammenzubringen und deren Kreativität zur Problemlösung...

Cities are complex systems. Different stakeholders with diverse interests and intentions come from public administration, industry sectors, research, real estate, service providers, civil society organisations, etc. In order to make sound decisions for a city, decision makers need to cross thematic as well as administrative borders. Novel ways of d...

An increasingly aging population as well as a change in awareness of the needs of people with mobility impairments raises the importance of having meaningful information on accessibility to guide further action. This challenge is likely to increase, as 24% of the whole population in Vienna will be aged 65 plus by 2030 (Statistics Austria, 2014). In...

The phenomenon of Microlearning - learning small chunks during short interactions with content or peers – seems to be a sign of changing assumptions about the nature of knowledge; knowledge is becoming more short-lived in its relevance, less coherent and more distributed than ever before (Hug & Friesen, 2007). Learning under these circumstances is...

Research 2.0 is largely understood as the use of Web 2.0 technologies for research related activities such as engaging with communities or exploring community generated data. The latter is the focus of this paper, which investigates the potential of text mining blog posts in order to inform roadmapping processes. The paper sets out to discuss the r...

The influential role of contextual factors in determining success or failure of e-learning initiatives is widely acknowledged, yet systematic approaches to catpture, analyse and possibly instrumentalise these factors are still rare. This paper presents a three stages roadmapping process including : (1) the appreciation of existing needs, visions an...

Technology Enhanced Learning is facing the challenge of ever-faster changes producing new technologies as well as altering expectations about what education should look like in the future. Hence, stakeholder groups such as policy makers, technology providers as well as end users need to keep track of emerging signs of change – weak signals. However...

There is widespread discussion of the suitability of design patterns for disseminating praxis-relevant design knowledge. Much of their appeal arises from the disappointing take up of design recommendations. The current interest in design patterns can be seen as a reaction against an increasing number of models that only partially fit the needs of e...

This paper gives a critical account of how a strategy group selected a university-wide ePortfolio solution. While the strategy group's cross-disciplinary and cross-departmental nature ensured a comprehensive perspective on the issues, the diverse expertise of all participants did also pose the challenge of integrating the different knowledge domain...

Different forms of blended and fully online learning play an ever more important role in today's higher education. Consequently, universities ramp up their provisions of educational technologies in order to increase students' flexibility and create more engaging learning environments. Given that implementing new technologies requires substantial in...

Existing implementation guidelines for ePortfolios frequently assert that a thorough long term strategy is needed. However, the implications of such a demand are not entirely clear. Research on ePortfolios is primarily focused on promoting learning, accreditation or career development of individuals. This paper makes a point for broadening the scop...

This paper evolves around the challenge of ensuring sufficiently guided learning on one side and self-directed, learner-centred learning on the other side. An online course using collaborative case-based learning is taken as an example to discuss tradeoffs between designing collaborative processes upfront and the need to allow for emergent, unspeci...

In this paper we analyse the use of patterns across a number of fields including architecture, software development and educational technology design. Focusing on the reusability of a pattern outside its area of development, we have identified several issues related to the context and the value system of a pattern. The paper draws together lessons...

This article presents the first stage of a design-based research project to introduce case-based learning using existing interactive technologies in a major Australian university. The paper initially outlines the relationship between casebased learning, student interaction and the study of interactions - and includes a review of research into techn...

The present paper follows up earlier research about the implementation of case discussions online which has shown the need for more procedural guidance to avoid shallow case discussion. The limited success of case discussions in an online environment demanded a more comprehensive approach to modeling the online interaction space. In the first part...

In this paper we present a perspective of case discussions in an online learning environment based on Activity Theory, which allows us to analyse the embedded nature of students' learning activities. We see Activity Theory as a first step towards structuring the complexity of students' experiences in today's higher education systems, recognising th...

The rapid growth of online learning environments in educational institutions of all sorts is leading to a search for effective methods of teaching in an online environment. Existing techniques, while adequate for most purposes, have some real limitations – one of which is the provision of effective learning while ensuring successful interaction amo...

The use of cases for teaching and learning, while increasingly popular, is a challenging endeavour for both students and instructors. This paper introduces a model which encapsulates the issues involved in online case based learning. The authors argue that, unlike traditional case discussions, students in an online case discussion environment must...

In this paper we offer a view of case discussions in an online learning environment based on activity theory, which allows us to analyse the inherent contradictions in students' learning activities. We see activity theory as a first step towards structuring the complexity of students' experiences in today's higher education systems, so as to increa...

The rapid growth of online learning in educational institutions of all sorts is leading to a search for effective methods of teaching in an online environment. Existing techniques, while adequate for most purposes, have some real limitations – one of which is the provision of effective learning, while ensuring effective interaction among groups of...

The evaluation of solutions is a major unresolved issue for all those involved in e-learning. In this paper we illustrate the importance of context by means of a qualitative comparison of two e-learning prototype implementations--an action research case undertaken in conjunction with a major German insurance company; and a more experimental approac...

The following paper discusses the implications of introducing social networking into a university teaching environment and suggests that further understanding and investigation into the role technology plays in such an environment is needed. In examining in-class technologies such as Clickers, online teaching tools such as Centra and Moodle and soc...