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An Alternative History of Educational Technology
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Academic abstract:
Social psychology's disconnect from the vital and urgent questions of people's lived experiences reveals limitations in the current paradigm. We draw on a related perspective in social psychology1-the sociocultural approach-and argue how this perspective can be elaborated to consider not only social psychology as a historical science but also social psychology of and for world-making. This conceptualization can make sense of key theoretical and methodological challenges faced by contemporary social psychology. As such, we describe the ontology, epistemology, ethics, and methods of social psychology of and for world-making. We illustrate our framework with concrete examples from social psychology. We argue that reconceptualizing social psychology in terms of world-making can make it more humble yet also more relevant, reconnecting it with the pressing issues of our time.
Public abstract:
We propose that social psychology should focus on "world-making" in two senses. First, people are future-oriented and often are guided more by what could be than what is. Second, social psychology can contribute to this future orientation by supporting people's world-making and also critically reflecting on the role of social psychological research in world-making. We unpack the philosophical assumptions, methodological procedures, and ethical considerations that underpin a social psychology of and for world-making. Social psychological research, whether it is intended or not, contributes to the societies and cultures in which we live, and thus it cannot be a passive bystander of world-making. By embracing social psychology of and for world-making and facing up to the contemporary societal challenges upon which our collective future depends will make social psychology more humble but also more relevant.
Recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have generated great expectations for the future impact of AI in education and learning (AIED). Often these expectations have been based on misunderstanding current technical possibilities, lack of knowledge about state-of-the-art AI in education, and exceedingly narrow views on the functions of education in society. In this article, we provide a review of existing AI systems in education and their pedagogic and educational assumptions. We develop a typology of AIED systems and describe different ways of using AI in education and learning, show how these are grounded in different interpretations of what AI and education is or could be, and discuss some potential roadblocks on the AIED highway.
School curricula have often struggled to authentically engage young people with the world of work. This chapter examines the potential of ‘simulated’ school classroom-based internships to support collaborative and creative learning and links to the workplace. It reports on design-based research in areas of low social mobility in England. This investigates how simulated internships give students access to authentic experiences of workplace practices in addition to enhancing skills associated with collaborative creativity. Through a challenge-based learning pedagogy implemented as part of regular classroom instruction, simulated internships involve small groups of students aged 11–13 studying Computing or Design and Technology. Over six-to-seven-weeks, together they design, model, or build a local solution to a global challenge presented virtually by engineers in two leading international telecommunications companies. An empirical ‘case study’, based on discourse and thematic analysis, is provided to evidence the scope and challenges of embedding a mutual focus on creative collaboration and supporting authentic insights into the world of work. Reported research is significant as it offers a proof of concept that identifies the potential of simulated internships in generating meaningful insights into the world of work. Focused on the development of collaborative creativity, this conceptualisation of simulated internships can inform and guide future pedagogical and research initiatives. Potentially this could expand to cover other curricular areas and, indeed, other educational settings.KeywordsSimulated internshipsSchoolsCollaborationDialogueCreativityIndustryWorld of work
After its rejection of the linguistic turn, influential strands in empirically-oriented philosophy of technology tend to neglect or are even hostile towards structuralist and transcendental approaches to technology. Drawing on Cassirer, Bourdieu, Wittgenstein, and Ricoeur, this article offers an account of the meaning of technologies that theorizes precisely those aspects of technology and shows what this hermeneutics means for understanding digital technologies such as AI and algorithmic data processing. It argues that a transcendental and structuralist approach helps us to reveal and evaluate the linguistic, social-political, bodily, and material preconditions for AI and, more generally, of digital technologies. Considering some issues raised by AI and robotics, the article shows that these transcendental structures or "grammars" make possible the meaning and use of AI, but at the same time constrain it. The proposed framework and research program therefore enables not only a better understanding of digital and other technologies but also their critique, leading to nothing less than the philosophical task of questioning our ways of being in the world.
This paper attempts to clarify the notion of goal-directedness, which is often misunderstood as being inconsistent with standard causal mechanisms. We first note that goal-directedness does not presuppose any mysterious forces, such as intelligent design, vitalism, conscious intention or backward causation. We then review attempts at defining goal-directedness by means of more operational characteristics: equifinality, plasticity, persistence, concerted action and negative feedback. We show that all these features can be explained by interpreting a goal as a far-from-equilibrium attractor of a dynamical system. This implies that perturbations that make the system deviate from its goal-directed trajectory are automatically compensated—at least as long as the system stays within the same basin of attraction. We argue that attractors and basins with the necessary degree of resilience tend to self-organize in complex reaction networks, thus producing self-maintaining ‘organizations’. These can be seen as an abstract model of the first goal-directed systems, and thus of the origin of life.
This article explores how the adoption of educational robotics, cloud-based animation software, and simplified visual programming software can provide valuable opportunities for dialogic interaction and learning. The potentialities of this type of activity are often overlooked in dialogic investigations. Based on empirical illustration, we discuss how open-ended educational tasks involving the creation of material-digital artifacts can promote the expression of the students’ voices and the emergence of a dialogic space in which both human and non-human Others, as well as chronotropic dynamics and materiality, play a crucial role. To provide a polyphonic account of the dialogical processes detected, we analyzed excerpts from two group interviews with seven lower secondary school students (aged 11-12) and excerpts taken from meetings with their teacher. Our qualitative analysis shows that the technology-mediated activity provided valuable opportunities for opening a dialogic space in which the students could express their own voice in interaction with both human and non-human Others. The material world (including the virtual materiality of computer-generated objects) seems to play a twofold role. First, the resistance of the virtual and material objects can contribute to the opening of a dialogical space between the child and the world; second, the chronotopic relations seem to have an impact on the dialogic learning process. These are valid opportunities for educationally relevant dialogic interaction. They should be cultivated and supported to further advance the pedagogical value of educational robotics and coding.
Mature students transitioning into their first year of higher education face many difficulties that affect their motivation, participation and success. Their feelings of being disconnected from their peers and from their institutions are among the key barriers to the successful completion of their courses. Encouraging online student engagement among mature students to establish social connection with their instructors and peers can reduce their isolation and enhance their ‘sense of belonging’. During the academic year 2020/2021, the Lifelong Learning Centre (LLC) at the University of Leeds in the UK, decided to pilot an online chat platform ‘Differ’ including a chatbot ‘Bo’ after it had seen a decline in the use of programme Facebook groups. To promote student engagement and monitor the Differ online communities, sixteen digital student mentors were recruited and trained. During the pilot, feedback was collected from students and student mentors. A mixed-methods approach was adopted to boost robustness through triangulation. Several forms of data collection methods were used: a mentimeter, an online survey, three focus group sessions and a semi-structured interview. This study sheds light on the different aspects of creating student-led online communities and provides recommendations on how to improve the uptake of students in the future.
‘Pedagogy first’ has become a mantra for educators, supported by the metaphor of the ‘pedagogical horse’ driving the ‘technological cart’. Yet putting technology first or last separates it from pedagogy, making us susceptible to technological or pedagogical determinism (i.e. where technology is seen either as the driving force of change or as a set of neutral tools). In this paper, I present a model of entangled pedagogy that encapsulates the mutual shaping of technology, teaching methods, purposes, values and context. Entangled pedagogy is collective, and agency is negotiated between teachers, students and other stakeholders. Outcomes are contingent on complex relations and cannot be determined in advance. I then outline an aspirational view of how teachers, students and others can collaborate whilst embracing uncertainty, imperfection, openness and honesty, and developing pedagogical knowledge that is collective, responsive and ethical. Finally, I discuss implications for evaluation and research, arguing that we must look beyond isolated ideas of technologies or teaching methods, to the situated, entangled combinations of diverse elements involved in educational activity.
Many agree that education needs new goals that reflect the demands of the future. These are often called ‘Future Skills’, referring to the knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, and competencies intended to prepare learners for the future. The need to teach such Future Skills is often cited, justified by the perception that the future will present new challenges for society.
However, the various frameworks discussing Future Skills, often created and published without consensus, use hundreds of terms to refer to such skills and competencies, presenting a barrier to discussion of education futures. If we are to design a better future for education, then a cohesive analysis must link and synthesise these isolated frameworks published worldwide.
This scoping review utilises thematic analysis and Social Network Analysis to develop meta-categories representing clusters of future skills reported by extant research. Having started with 99 frameworks identified following a systematic search of the literature, which together included 341 different terms, our review identifies nine categories that provide a valuable overview of the field to inform the conceptualisation of Future Skills. Educational practitioners, human resource professionals, policy makers, and educational technology developers can use the meta-categories to prioritise the integration of certain skills into teaching, learning, and retraining. This will help ensure that students and professionals are better prepared to thrive in an uncertain future.
Martin Buber’s writings on technology are scarce and seemingly subordinated to what he described in I and Thou as the “tyranny of the It”. But a closer look at his writings reveals, in fact, a life-long reflection on the dialogical potentiality of things—whether artworks, buildings, or machines—that echoed broader discourses on technology at the time. Beginning with Julius Goldstein’s Die Technik (1912), which Buber edited for his series Die Gesellschaft, and concluding with Buber’s reception and critique of Heidegger, especially during the 1950s, we can see that Buber critically engaged with the question of technology with respect to labor and community, art and artisanship, and the ethics of thinghood. The essay contextualizes Buber’s repeated call to “humanize technology” in early 20th-century debates on technology and in the post-1945 crisis of humanism. What it argues is that Buber framed technology not only through its aesthetic potential, as Werk, but also as another form of solidarity and care without which community and respect for our environment would not be possible.
In the era of digital communication, collective problem solving is increasingly important. Large groups can now resolve issues together in completely different ways, which has transformed the arts, sciences, business, education, technology, and medicine. Collective intelligence is something we share with animals and is different from machine learning and artificial intelligence. To design and utilize human collective intelligence, we must understand how its problem-solving mechanisms work. From democracy in ancient Athens, through the invention of the printing press, to COVID-19, this book analyzes how humans developed the ability to find solutions together. This wide-ranging, thought-provoking book is a game-changer for those working strategically with collective problem solving within organizations and using a variety of innovative methods. It sheds light on how humans work effectively alongside machines to confront challenges that are more urgent than what humanity has faced before. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Education has been extremely affected by the coronavirus disease crisis, with almost all countries temporarily closing their schools in 2020. After the first stage of the pandemic, in which national governments focused on guaranteeing the academic year’s continuity, key international organizations emphasized the need to adopt structural policy reforms to face the challenges posed by the crisis. Based on international and European countries’ policy documents, this paper analyzes long-term responses articulated in the education sector. The analysis has allowed us to identify three preponderant areas of response: the digitalization of the educational system, educational inequalities, and teachers’ development. The agendas and policy instruments that international organizations have so far pushed for in relation to each of these areas do not differ substantially from the agendas and instruments they promoted in the pre-pandemic era. It is still early to assess the deepness of the transformations in course, but in most cases, prevailing responses represent the intensification of change processes initiated before the pandemic. Nonetheless, the type and intensity of country responses vary among the European Union member states. Although the pandemic represents a common thread, countries have experienced the crisis differently according to the characteristics of their educational systems and the main problems the crisis has revealed.
Through reflecting on a 10-year design-based research process involving teachers as co-designers, this paper develops a concept-driven approach for designing technology support for classroom dialogue. Specifically, we focus on four 'bridging' concepts that emerged from the research-practitioner partnerships, and on how these guided the design of Talkwall, an educational microblogging tool similar to Twitter. The four bridging concepts-a contribution, a feed, a wall, and a space for the teacher-are defined and discussed in relation to design articulations for Talkwall, the design of similar educational microblogging tools, and the role of material-dialogic spaces for classroom dialogue. A concept-driven approach fosters intermediary forms of knowledge that may be significant for design-based research. This is because designers, teachers, and researchers can extend their repertoires through synergy and exchange between the researchers' scholarly knowledge and the teachers' craft knowledge. We exemplify this by examining how a concept-driven approach enabled the exploration of new designs for material-dialogic spaces relating to Talkwall.
Purpose: The purpose of this study is to review the use of makerspaces for educational purposes by building a map that describes recent research in the field under investigation. Design/methodology/approach: The approach adopted in this research includes a systematic review of the literature, based on publications (from 2017 to 2019) through Google Scholar. The development of a coding scheme performed through the Card Sorting technique. Findings: Findings demonstrate that the use of makerspaces in educational contexts can support 21st-century skills; however, further research is sought on the application of makerspaces in formal education. Originality/value: This paper will be useful for researchers interested in constructionism educational methods in conjunction with technology. It can also help in identifying gaps in the literature of educational makerspaces by giving a clear picture of the under-investigated areas.
In this paper we discuss the potential of digital games to create meaningful educational experiences that contribute to the learning of ethics in higher education (HE) Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) degrees. We describe the design of a new digital ethics game with a focus on the challenges we encountered when applying existing theoretical frameworks for educational games and propose ways to address these challenges. We contend that existing design frameworks fail to account for the ‘wickedness’ of ethical problems – i.e. their inconclusive, complex, and sometimes inherently contradictory nature – as they are centred around consequentiality and consistent game-system feedback to players’ actions. Drawing from a Deweyan account of the ‘educative experience’ we seek to contribute to a domain-adequate theory of transformational experience and transformational play in the context of educational ethics game design.
This interview sheds light on current developments threatening the disciplinary ‘heart’ of education. Taking a starting point in the continental ‘configuration’ of the field, Gert Biesta and Stefan T Siegel argue that there are forms of theory considered distinctively educational. Based on this premise, they discuss why defining educational theories ( Erziehungswissenschaftliche Theorien) is so challenging, and why it is nevertheless a rewarding endeavour. By distinguishing between (genuinely) educational theories in a narrow sense and (educationally relevant) theories in a wider sense, Biesta and Siegel attempt to tackle the problem of educational theory and to stimulate the discourse on theorizing education.
Digital technology offers the potential to address educational challenges in resource‐poor settings. This meta‐analysis examines the impact of students' use of technology that personalises and adapts to learning level in low‐ and middle‐income countries. Following a systematic search for research between 2007 and 2020, 16 randomised controlled trials were identified in five countries. Studies involved 53,029 learners aged 6–15 years. Coding examined learning domain (mathematics and literacy); personalisation level and delivery; technology use; and intervention duration and intensity. Overall, technology‐supported personalised learning was found to have a statistically significant—if moderate—positive effect size of 0.18 on learning (p = 0.001). Meta‐regression reveals how more personalised approaches which adapt or adjust to learners' level led to significantly greater impact (an effect size of 0.35) than those only linking to learners' interests or providing personalised feedback, support, and/or assessment. Avenues for future research include investigating cost implications, optimum programme length, and teachers' role in making personalised learning with technology effective.
Practitioner notes
What is already known about this topic?
Promoting personalised learning is an established aim of educators.
Using technology to support personalised learning in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs) could play an important role in ensuring more inclusive and equitable access to education, particularly in the aftermath of COVID‐19.
There is currently no rigorous overview of evidence on the effectiveness of using technology to enable personalised learning in LMICs.
What this paper adds?
The meta‐analysis is the first to evaluate the effectiveness of technology‐supported personalised learning in improving learning outcomes for school‐aged children in LMICs.
Technology‐supported personalised learning has a statistically significant, positive effect on learning outcomes.
Interventions are similarly effective for mathematics and literacy and whether or not teachers also have an active role in the personalisation.
Personalised approaches that adapt or adjust to the learner led to significantly greater impact, although whether these warrant the additional investment likely necessary for implementation at scale needs to be investigated.
Personalised technology implementation of moderate duration and intensity had similar positive effects to that of stronger duration and intensity, although further research is needed to confirm this.
Implications for practice and/or policy:
The inclusion of more adaptive personalisation features in technology‐assisted learning environments can lead to greater learning gains.
Personalised technology approaches featuring moderate personalisation may also yield learning rewards.
While it is not known whether personalised technology can be scaled in a cost‐effective and contextually appropriate way, there are indications that this is possible.
The appropriateness of teachers integrating personalised approaches in their practice should be explored given ‘supplementary’ uses of personalised technology (ie, additional sessions involving technology outside of regular instruction) are common.
There have been growing concerns regarding the potential impact of social media on democracy and public debate. While some theorists have claimed that ICTs and social media would bring about a new independent public sphere and increase exposure to political divergence, others have warned that they would lead to polarization through the formation of echo chambers. The issue of social media echo chambers is both crucial and widely debated. This article attempts to provide a comprehensive account of the scientific literature on this issue, shedding light on the different approaches, their similarities, differences, benefits, and drawbacks, and offering a consolidated and critical perspective that can hopefully support future research in this area. Concretely, it presents the results of a systematic review of 55 studies investigating the existence of echo chambers on social media, providing a first classification of the literature and identifying patterns across the studies' foci, methods and findings. We found that conceptual and methodological choices influence the results of research on this issue. Most importantly, articles that found clear evidence of echo chambers on social media were all based on digital trace data. In contrast, those that found no evidence were all based on self-reported data. Future studies should take into account the possible biases of the different approaches and the significant potential of combining self-reported data with digital trace data.
This theoretical paper elucidates the nature of educational technology and, in the process, sheds light on a number of phenomena in educational systems, from the no-significant-difference phenomenon to the singular lack of replication in studies of educational technologies. Its central thesis is that we are not just users of technologies but coparticipants in them. Our participant roles may range from pressing power switches to designing digital learning systems to performing calculations in our heads. Some technologies may demand our participation only to enact fixed, predesigned orchestrations correctly. Other technologies leave gaps that we can or must fill with novel orchestrations, which we may perform more or less well. Most are a mix of the two, and the mix varies according to context, participant, and use. This participative orchestration is highly distributed: in educational systems, coparticipants include the learner, the teacher, and many others, from textbook authors to LMS programmers, as well as the tools and methods they use and create. From this perspective, all learners and teachers are educational technologists. The technologies of education are seen to be deeply, fundamentally, and irreducibly human, complex, situated and social in their constitution, their form, and their purpose, and as ungeneralizable in their effects as the choice of paintbrush is to the production of great art.
This paper is going to discuss, what will be called, ‘The Internet of Bodies’. Our physical and virtual worlds are blending and shifting our understanding of three key areas: (1) our identities are diversifying, as they become hyper-enhanced and multi-sensory; (2) our collaborations are co-created, immersive and connected; (3) our innovations are diverse and inclusive. It is proposed that our bodies have finally become the interface.
This paper argues against the dichotomization of pedagogy and technology represented by the widely cited dictum of putting the pedagogical horse before the technology cart. Adopting a complex systems’ perspective, it points out that technology and pedagogy are interconnected and interdependent elements of the classroom or learning environment as a system, alongside other elements, including the teacher, the students, the curriculum content, and the physical environment. Any change in one will have an impact on the other, and hence the whole system. Drawing on data from an English language teacher educator’s reflections on her journey of adopting online teaching, this paper elucidates the dynamic relationship between technology and pedagogy. It shows how her exploitation of the affordances of technology to simulate face-to-face classroom teaching has led to a re-tooling of these affordances to achieve and re-imagine pedagogical goals. The positive impact on students’ self-efficacy and her own self-efficacy in online teaching has led to the emergence of new pedagogical practices and routines which have enabled her to surpass what she could achieve in face-to-face classroom teaching. The paper concludes by highlighting the importance for teachers to embrace technology with an open mind and to understand this complex dynamic relationship for effective online teaching.
This is one of the first studies to evaluate the impact of computer-based individualized instruction in a developing country. We randomly assigned 1,528 students in grades 6–8 in 15 “model” public schools in Rajasthan, India who were using a computer-adaptive learning software to: a control group, in which they were only able to access the activities for their enrolled grade level; or a treatment group, in which they were able to access exercises appropriate for their performance level. After 9 months, computer-based individualized instruction had a null average effect on math achievement. However, treatment students with low initial performance outperformed their control counterparts by 0.22 standard deviations. Our results suggest that computer-based individualized instruction is most beneficial for low-performing students.
In contemporary societies, there is a strong push toward seeing education as an instrument for the delivery of particular societal agendas. On such a view, the only questions that remain are how effective education is at delivering such agendas and how its effectiveness can be increased. While this might be a desirable way forward for those who believe that a consensus about the agenda for education can easily be achieved, it is at odds with the idea that a democratic society is characterized by a fundamental plurality of visions about what schools are supposed to be for. Yet the democratic critique of educational instrumentalism cannot be confined to giving each and every vision its own school, as this would simply multiply educational instrumentalism rather than oppose it. A true democratic response thus needs to take education's own interest seriously as well, which, as Gert Biesta argues in this paper, amounts to a defense of the school as institution.
The role of talk in science education has long been established; an essential part of learning science is for students to engage in scientific discourse. Nonetheless, productive science discussion is still rare in the classroom. The rarity can be partly attributed to the complexity of dialogic science teaching: teachers have to respond to the dynamic flow of student talk in the moment, orchestrate different voices towards a collective understanding, support the emergence of new ideas, ensure disciplinary rigour of scientific practice, and attend to the complex social relationships in the class. The construct of contingent responsiveness (CR) describes teachers’ adaptive expertise in responding to student ideas in the moment to promote collective sense-making and classroom equity. This study used a design-based research method (DBR) to co-design a technology-enhanced professional development (PD) programme with teachers of students aged 5-12 years old in Pakistan, incorporating mixed-reality simulation technology (i.e. Mursion) over four iterations. The effectiveness of the PD programme in supporting CR was evident in the significant shift in teachers’ response patterns before and after the PD, shown by epistemic network analysis both visually and statistically. Furthermore, this study shed light on how to support teachers in developing CR using systematic conjecture mapping, tracing the path from design features to mediating processes, and then to the outcome. The conjecture map was refined over four iterations, which improved the design and learning theory over time. It was found that 1) adopting dialogic framings, 2) developing fluency with talk moves, 3) deploying flexible attention, 4) engaging in knowledge-based reasoning, and 5) experiencing metaphoric resonance could lead to CR. These processes were enabled by a combination of design features, i.e., mixed-reality simulations, talk moves, guided collaborative inquiry, case studies, and collective reflection. This study achieved the dual goals of DBR, producing usable knowledge in the form of an effective PD programme and building a preliminary learning theory of CR. Furthermore, unpacking the mechanisms of the PD allows the design to be adapted and tested in other educational and cultural contexts, thus enhancing its adaptability, sustainability, and potential for scalability.
This thesis addresses the misalignment of learning with mobiles approaches as they are applied to rural communities of adult learners in East Africa. Most models of learning with mobiles do not work well for rural adult learners: they predominantly focus on the capabilities of the technology and not the available affordances, a crucial oversight in communities where smart phone and internet access is limited. Existing models are also misaligned with dialogic indigenous traditions of learning: they tend to function as derivatives of formal classroom environments and do not account for the pedagogical needs of rural adult learners accustomed to non-formal small group dialogic education rooted in the social sphere. This misalignment frames the key research question at the foundation of this report: Can learning with mobiles approaches adapt to the technological and pedagogical needs of adult learners in rural East Africa and enhance non-formal dialogic education? I approach this question through a Design Based Research methodology involving a mixed-method research design. By utilising the subsistence farmer network of my research partner The International Small Group and Tree Planting Program, I worked with 3,216 rural adults to complete a survey and conduct semi-structured interviews to thematically frame the intersecting dimensions of technological affordances, mobile learning pedagogy, and non- formal dialogic learning. This thematic analysis guided the iterative development of a mobile learning platform used by rural learners across Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. Four iterative design cycles of this platform provided insights as to how mobile technology can support small group-based dialogic education within a rural East African context. Analyses of these insights using a pre-post survey with 136 learners, learner data from the 640 users of the mobile learning platform, and Kearney and Burden’s iPAC framework for mobile pedagogy ultimately demonstrate that it is possible to adapt a learning with mobiles approach to meet the technological and pedagogical needs of rural learners. These findings are generalised into a series of Design Principles and a corresponding Techno-Pedagogical framework which incorporates a technological affordance and pedagogical perspective on learning with mobiles for non-formal small group dialogic education. The Design Principles and accompanying framework address the identified misalignment of mobile learning platforms in rural communities of East Africa and will assist learning with mobiles researchers and practitioners operating in similar contexts throughout the Global South.
Analysing the interaction between classroom dialogue and digital technology is challenging. Studies in this area typically draw on methods developed for the analysis of spoken interactions. This article reports on a new approach for analysing the enacted affordances of digital technology in classroom dialogue. Using examples from cross-country research investigating the Talkwall microblogging platform, involving 20 teachers and over 400 learners aged 11–13 in England and Norway, it outlines a rigorous process for data categorization – and subsequent inductive and deductive analysis – that enables holistic and multi-levelled examinations of the role of technology in supporting dialogue. This framework features three cyclical phases for the analysis of teacher – and student-student interactions: (i) categorizing and organizing complex classroom data; (ii) coding spoken dialogue; (iii) analysing enacted affordances. The significance of this work lies in examining underpinning theory and illustrating a systematic new methodological approach to analysing learning and teaching in classrooms featuring dialogue and technology. This extends traditional notions of the affordances of digital technology by better taking into account the manner in which these are enacted in dialogic classrooms. Critical reflections, exemplifications and recommendations are provided.
This project identifies means by which Google Classroom, a digital learning management system (LMS), can support dialogic pedagogy; the ways in which teachers and students explore and generate ideas together through dialogue. Perceptions of convenience and the demand for remote learning solutions, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, have led to the introduction of this suite of digital tools into the lives of millions of students. It is therefore timely for educators to evaluate the potential of this disruptive technology for dialogue, in order to support, develop and potentially transform their practice. A mixed-methods approach was applied to this study, conducted within a participatory design-based research (DBR) framework. The aims were to both identify affordances of Google Classroom, and generate designs, that promote dialogue within it. Practitioners from an independent preparatory school, representing a range of curriculum subjects, were invited to participate as co-researchers in the project. Audiovisual data was collected from 18 lessons with Year 7 (11-12 year old) students between 2017 and 2020. This was analysed using the Cam-UNAM Scheme for Educational Dialogue Analysis (SEDA). 9 student and 7 teacher interviews were also conducted and thematically coded. Affordances of the LMS to support classroom dialogue in the setting included the ability to promote awareness of different perspectives between participants and to foster collaboration and community. Google Classroom also afforded dialogic practitioners the opportunity to further their students’ meta-cognition and inter-subjectivity. The project also identified new spaces within the LMS in which engagement with multiple perspectives, a characteristic of reflective dialogue, can occur. Shared digital artifacts within the LMS represent new spaces in which dialogic space-time can be accessed; their accessibility, immediacy, co-construction and provisionality were the means through which this is possible. Design principles emerged from the DBR process that describe how teachers can design tasks to leverage the digital tools of the LMS to promote a dialogic approach to learning. Whilst context specific, these have user-generalisability and could be modified and applied by practitioners with an interest in promoting dialogue in their own settings, so long as limited numbers of digital devices are available to their students. The joint planning meetings between practitioners in which these heuristics were generated represent a novel model of teacher professional development that might be applied to develop context-specific designs for dialogue within a LMS in similar settings.
With Covid-19 having caused significant disruption to the global education system, researchers are beginning to become concerned with the impact that this has had on student learning progress and, in particular, whether learning loss has been experienced. To evaluate this, the authors conducted a thorough analysis of recorded learning loss evidence documented between March 2020 and March 2021. This systematic review aims to consolidate available data and to document what has been reported in the literature. Given the novelty of the subject, eight studies were identified; seven of these found evidence of student learning loss among at least some of the participants while one of the seven also found instances of learning gains in a particular subgroup. The remaining study found increased learning gains in their participants. Additionally, four of the studies observed increases in inequality where certain demographics of students experienced learning losses more significant than others. It is determined that further research is needed to increase the quantity of studies produced, their geographical focus, and the numbers of students they observe.
Descriptions of problem-solution “co-evolution” either explicitly or implicitly draw an analogy between processes of design and processes of biological evolution. Analogies of this kind are common in research because of their potential to assist in explanation and discovery. However, reviewing the design literature reveals that the discussion of design co-evolution has become disconnected from the biological analogy on which it is founded, and from which other disciplines draw. Here, I explore the function of the co-evolution analogy, provide an illustrative example from biology, and explore the varieties of co-evolution to which design might be compared. By doing so, I propose two possible directions for expanding the design co-evolution concept: (i) examining what co-evolves in addition to, or instead of, problems and solutions, and (ii) examining the different levels at which co-evolution occurs. Both of these proposals are illustrated with a variant of the design co-evolution diagram.
How ed tech was born: Twentieth-century teaching machines—from Sidney Pressey's mechanized test-giver to B. F. Skinner's behaviorist bell-ringing box.
Contrary to popular belief, ed tech did not begin with videos on the internet. The idea of technology that would allow students to “go at their own pace” did not originate in Silicon Valley. In Teaching Machines, education writer Audrey Watters offers a lively history of predigital educational technology, from Sidney Pressey's mechanized positive-reinforcement provider to B. F. Skinner's behaviorist bell-ringing box. Watters shows that these machines and the pedagogy that accompanied them sprang from ideas—bite-sized content, individualized instruction—that had legs and were later picked up by textbook publishers and early advocates for computerized learning.
Watters pays particular attention to the role of the media—newspapers, magazines, television, and film—in shaping people's perceptions of teaching machines as well as the psychological theories underpinning them. She considers these machines in the context of education reform, the political reverberations of Sputnik, and the rise of the testing and textbook industries. She chronicles Skinner's attempts to bring his teaching machines to market, culminating in the famous behaviorist's efforts to launch Didak 101, the “pre-verbal” machine that taught spelling. (Alternate names proposed by Skinner include “Autodidak,” “Instructomat,” and “Autostructor.”) Telling these somewhat cautionary tales, Watters challenges what she calls “the teleology of ed tech”—the idea that not only is computerized education inevitable, but technological progress is the sole driver of events.
Although machines may be good at mimicking, they are not currently able, as organisms are, to act creatively. We offer an understanding of the emergent qualities of biological sign processing in terms of generalization, association, and encryption. We use slime mold as a model of minimal cognition and compare it to deep-learning video game bots, which some claim have evolved beyond their merely quantitative algorithms. We find that discrete Turing machine bots are not able to make productive, yet unanticipated, “errors”—necessary for biological learning—which, based on the physicality of signs, their relatively similar shapes, and relative physical positions spatially and temporally, lead to emergent effects and make learning and evolution possible. In organisms, stochastic resonance at the local level can be leveraged for self-organization at the global level. We contrast all this to the symbolic processing of today's machine learning, whereby each logic node and memory state is discrete. Computer codes are produced by external operators, whereas biological symbols are evolved through an internal encryption process.
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to examine how dialogic spaces were co-constituted (opened, broadened and deepened) between students engaged in divergent and convergent collaborative learning tasks, orchestrated by teachers in Finnish primary and secondary schools. The concept of dialogic space refers to a dynamic, shared resource of ideas in dialogue and has come to represent an ideal form of educational interaction, in the contexts of collaborative learning, joint creative work and shared knowledge-building.
Design/methodology/approach
A socio-cultural discourse analysis of video-observed classroom dialogue, entailing the development of a new analytic typology, was undertaken to explore the co-constitution of dialogic space. The data are derived from two qualitative studies, one examining dialogue to co-create fictive video stories in primary-school classrooms (divergent task), the other investigating collaborative knowledge building in secondary-school health education (convergent task).
Findings
Dialogic spaces were opened through group settings and by the students’ selection of topics. In the divergent task, the broadening of dialogic space derived from the heterogeneous group settings, whereas in the convergent task, from the multiple and various information sources involved. As regards the deepening of dialogic space, explicit reflective talk remained scarce; instead the norms deriving from the school-context tasks and requirements guided the group dialogue.
Originality/value
This study lays the groundwork for subsequent research regarding the orchestration of dialogic space in divergent and convergent tasks by offering a typology to operationalise dialogic space for further, more systematic, comparisons and aiding the understandings of the processes implicated in intercreating and interthinking. This in turn is of significance for the development of dialogic pedagogies.
Mobile internet, cloud computing, big data technologies, and significant breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have all transformed education. In recent years, there has been an emergence of more advanced AI-enabled learning systems, which are gaining traction due to their ability to deliver learning content and adapt to the individual needs of students. Yet, even though these contemporary learning systems are useful educational platforms that meet students’ needs, there is still a low number of implemented systems designed to address the concerns and problems faced by many students. Based on this perspective, a systematic mapping of the literature on AI-enabled adaptive learning systems was performed in this work. A total of 147 studies published between 2014 and 2020 were analysed. The major findings and contributions of this paper include the identification of the types of AI-enabled learning interventions used, a visualisation of the co-occurrences of authors associated with major research themes in AI-enabled learning systems and a review of common analytical methods and related techniques utilised in such learning systems. This mapping can serve as a guide for future studies on how to better design AI-enabled learning systems to solve specific learning problems and improve users’ learning experiences.