Papers

ACAD: Activity-Centred Analysis and Design

petergoodyearLeave a comment

What the ACAD framework offers

The most recent explanation of ACAD is in this paper from ETR&D:

Goodyear, P., Carvalho, L., & Yeoman, P. (2021). Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD): core purposes, distinctive qualities and current developments. Educational Technology Research and Development, 69(2), 445-464. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-020-09926-7

This paper provides a summary account of Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD). ACAD offers a practical approach to analysing complex learning situations, in a way that can generate knowledge that is reusable in subsequent (re)design work. ACAD has been developed over the last two decades. It has been tested and refined through collaborative analyses of a large number of complex learning situations and through research studies involving experienced and inexperienced design teams. The paper offers a definition and high level description of ACAD and goes on to explain the underlying motivation. The paper also provides an overview of two current areas of development in ACAD: the creation of explicit design rationales and the ACAD toolkit for collaborative design meetings. As well as providing some ideas that can help teachers, design teams and others discuss and agree on their working methods, ACAD has implications for some broader issues in educational technology research and development. It questions some deep assumptions about the framing of research and design thinking, in the hope that fresh ideas may be useful to people involved in leadership and advocacy roles in the field.

ACAD: the views at “learn time” and design time.

The following definition and explanation comes from p446 of the ETR&D paper.

Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD) is a meta-theoretical framework for understanding and improving local, complex, learning situations.

Explaining what this means requires some shared terminology. (Emphasis added.)

We use the term ‘activity’ to mean ‘what students are actually doing’ – mentally, physically and emotionally – during a period of time in which they are meant to be learning something (a learning episode or ‘at learn-time’). For better or worse, what students actually do may differ considerably from what their teachers think they are doing or what their teachers intend them to do (Goodyear 2000; Ellis and Goodyear 2010; Elen 2020; Koh and Kan 2020).

We use the term ‘learning situation’ to underscore the point that students’ learning activity is always situated (Lave and Wenger 1991; Yeoman and Wilson 2019). As we explain later on, we take this to mean that learning activity is (at a minimum) physically, socially and epistemically situated. The more familiar term ‘learning environment’ does not reliably evoke all aspects of what makes learning activity situated.

We use the term ‘local’ because we also see educational work as situated (Pink 2012; Simonsen et al. 2014). It is done by real teachers in concrete situations. ACAD helps a teacher or team of teachers, with or without the help of a specialist educational designer or evaluator, to understand a learning situation in which they have a stake – where they have professional responsibility for students’ learning, some power to change aspects of the design of the learning situation, a need to understand how their students’ learning activity unfolds, and why it unfolds in the way that it does. Teachers’ work is usually cyclical. Although this is not universally the case, it is common to teach a course once a year, to analyse what is working well and why, and decide what needs changing and what can be left as it is. ACAD can help with brand new designs, but it has greater power when embedded in cycles of incremental improvement (Goodyear and Dimitriadis 2013).

We use the term ‘complex’ to indicate that teachers do not need an analysis and design methodology to diagnose simple problems and prescribe simple remedies (Ellis and Goodyear 2019). ACAD has a dual focus – analysing and understanding what exists and (re) designing for the future. This means ACAD also has a dual ontology, insofar as an actual instance of a learning activity and a design for future instances of similar learning activities are not the same kinds of thing. A map is not the territory. We see ACAD as meta-theoretical in that it does not insist on any one theory of learning. Indeed, it is agnostic about the kinds of theoretical explanations that are used in analysing learning situations and the kinds of design rationales expressed in designing for future learning. However, ACAD does highlight the need for credible explanations of local phenomena and for persuasive arguments in making design decisions.

The ACAD Video

Colleagues in the Sydney Business School and Copenhagen Business School made this short (3 minute) video about ACAD.

Other papers about ACAD and its associated ideas

Here are some pdf copies of papers and chapters on design for learning etc. They are all relevant to, but may not directly name, ‘ACAD’

Teaching as design (Goodyear 2015)

In medias res: reframing design for learning (Goodyear & Dimitriadis 2013)

Forward-oriented design for learning: illustrating the approach (Dimitriadis & Goodyear 2013)

Teaching-as-design and the ecology of university learning (Ellis & Goodyear 2010)

Learning, technology and design (Goodyear & Retalis 2010)

Patterns and pattern languages in educational design (Goodyear & Yang 2009)

Educational design and networked learning: Patterns, pattern languages and design practice (Goodyear 2005)

Seeing learning as work: implications for analysis and design (Goodyear, 2000)

Pedagogical frameworks and action learning in ODL (Goodyear 1999)

Also strongly recommended:

Carvalho, L., & Goodyear, P. (Eds.). (2014). The architecture of productive learning networks. New York: Routledge.

Carvalho, L., & Yeoman, P. (2018). Framing learning entanglement in innovative learning spaces: connecting theory, design and practice. British Educational Research Journal, 44(6), 1120–1137. doi:doi:10.1002/berj.3483

Goodyear, P., & Carvalho, L. (2016). Activity centred analysis and design in the evolution of learning networks. Paper presented at the Tenth International Conference on Networked Learning, Lancaster UK. 

Goodyear, P., Carvalho, L., & Dohn, N. B. (2016). Artefacts and activities in the analysis of learning networks. In T. Ryberg, C. Sinclair, S. Bayne, & M. de Laat (Eds.), Research, Boundaries and Policy in Networked Learning (pp. 93-110). New York: Springer.

Goodyear, P., & Carvalho, L. (2019). The analysis of complex learning environments. In H. Beetham & R. Sharpe (Eds.), Rethinking pedagogy for a digital age: principles and practices of design (3rd ed., pp. 49-65). Abingdon: RoutledgeFalmer.

Goodyear, P., Carvalho, L., Yeoman, P., Castañeda, L., & Adell, J. (2020). Una herramienta tangible para facilitar procesos de diseño y análisis didáctico: Traducción y adaptación transcultural del toolkit ACAD. (A tangible tool to facilitate learning design and analysis discussions: Translation and cross-cultural adaptation of the ACAD toolkit). Revista de Medios y Educación. 

Goodyear, P., Thompson, K., Ashe, D., Pinto, A., Carvalho, L., Parisio, M., . . . Yeoman, P. (2015). Analysing the structural properties of learning networks: architectural insights into buildable forms. In B. Craft, Y. Mor, & M. Maina (Eds.), The art and science of learning design (pp. 15-29). Rotterdam: Sense.

Sun, S. Y. H., & Goodyear, P. (2019). Social co-configuration in online language learning. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 36(2), 13-26. doi:https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.5102

Yeoman, P., & Ashmore, N. (2018). Moving from pedagogical challenge to ergonomic challenge: Translating epistemology into the built environment for learning. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 34(6), 1-16. doi:10.14742/ajet.4502

Yeoman, P., & Carvalho, L. (2019). Moving between material and conceptual structure—developing a card-based method to support design for learning. Design Studies, 64, 64-89. 

Yeoman, P., & Wilson, S. (2019). Designing for situated learning: Understanding the relations between material properties, designed form and emergent learning activity. British Journal of Educational Technology, 50(5), 2090-2108. 

ACAD talks/slide decks etc

A pre-recorded 20 minute talk for the 2020 AECT conference, related to the ACAD paper in ETR&D and AECT’s Distinguished Development award to Peter Goodyear. Slides etc for the AECT talk.

ACAD tools

The ACAD cards and wireframe are described in the Yeoman & Carvalho (2019) Design Studies paper mentioned above and in the 2021 ETR&D ACAD paper.

A digital implementation (in Spanish) of the cards/wireframe is under development by Linda Castañeda & colleagues – see the Goodyear, Carvalho, Yeoman, Castañeda & Adell (2020) paper mentioned above.

ACAD Cards in use: see Goodyear, Carvalho & Yeoman (2021) ETR&D paper.

Navigating difficult waters in a digital era: technology, uncertainty and the objects of informal lifelong learning

petergoodyearLeave a comment

Goodyear, Peter (2021) Navigating difficult waters in a digital era: technology, uncertainty and the objects of informal lifelong learning. British Journal of Educational Technology, 52, 1594-1611. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13107

Abstract

This paper uses two complementary examples from an autoethnographic study of learning and sailing to explore some connections between informal lifelong learning activities, their objects (purposes) and the hybrid (digital and material) technologies on which they depend. The examples focus on an aspect of the craft of sailing and on understanding the relations between sailing, place and local history. The paper argues that close attention to activities in which people engage can help discover some less visible purposes of learning and can broaden our understandings of situated skills. The paper also argues that being able to find and configure environments suitable for learning are important capabilities for successful lifelong learners. The paper has two additional implications for thinking about research and development in educational technology. First, a technology becomes educational by virtue of its relation to emerging activity, rather than because of any intrinsic physical properties. Second, educational technologies are often assembled in complex meshworks. Understanding how they function involves analysing dynamic relations and interdependencies: listing the affordances of individual components is not enough.

Notes & Quotes

This paper is currently on open access and appears in a special issue of BJET concerned with lifelong learning in a digital era. I chose to focus on informal lifelong learning, in part to create an opportunity to write about some of the things I’d been discovering in the “Learning with M~” project (a long-term autoethnographic study of learning and learning to sail).

“Objects” in the title alludes to the purposes of learning – which are not always self-evident and sometimes have to be discovered.

From the Introduction:

“This article is one piece of an autoethnographic study of learning about learning and learning to sail. My aim is to use two contrasting parts of this larger, as yet unpublished study to explore some broader questions that arise in the relations between informal lifelong learning and educational technology. Autoethnography is not widely used in educational technology research – see Campbell (2015) and Sintonen (2020) as exceptions – though its use is growing in educational research and in the social sciences more generally. It is a powerful method for documenting and sharing insights into long-term experiences; I have been learning to sail for over 50 years and writing about learning and technology for 40 of them. In that time, my understanding of what learning and knowing entail, and what technology is and can do, have changed substantially.The next section of the paper lays out some background: ideas on informal lifelong learning and digital technologies, activity-centred analysis and design, discovering the objects of lifelong learning and research relevant to learning the craft of sailing and becoming a capable sailor. After that, I provide a brief introduction to autoethnography, including some potential strengths and weaknesses.

The main part of the paper is a ‘results and discussion’ section, in which I try to share some of the ways I currently understand what is involved in learning to sail. I use two contrasting examples. The first comes closer to most people’s preconceptions of what learning to sail involves. It focuses on measurements of speed and orientation to the wind. The second is much broader. What happens when one tries to come to terms with sailing a boat in waters that, until quite recently, were populated by indigenous saltwater people who were brutally dispossessed? How calmly can one sail on the edges of an ocean that is rising and where that rising threatens to drown the island homes of the Pacific’s pioneering seafarers?  There are no easy answers, but this is no excuse for ignoring the questions.

In the concluding section of the paper, I try to sum up what I now see as important for understanding and investigating relations between educational technologies and lifelong learning in these turbulent times. Like Steve Mentz (2015, xxvi), I think tales from the sea can be a useful source of “equipment for thinking in a world of ecological catastrophe”. (p1596)

On complex meshworks; productive and epistemic objects.

“A problem arises from the fact that the paddlewheel of the log spends much of its life in warm salty water, teeming with marine life. In [Figure 1] you can just see three of the black plastic “cups” of the paddlewheel, peeking out through accretions of algae and tiny shellfish. I can remove the paddle wheel to clean it, but within a month or so, a rich ecosystem of tiny crustaceans and their friends and admirers will have taken up home on the blades, which slow and then cease to turn. Regardless of the boat’s actual speed through the water, the digital [boat speed] display … will show a speed of zero. The networked instrument system no longer knows what speed the boat is doing through the water, so it can no longer calculate the true wind from the apparent wind. The wind display … no longer affords reliable guidance on whether to turn the boat closer to the wind, or to ease away from the wind. The assemblage or meshwork of sea, wind, hull, wheel, rudder, sails, ropes, anemometer, wind vane, analogue and digital displays, microprocessors and their connecting cables continues to act, but the crusty squatters living on the paddlewheel mean that truth and appearance can no longer be properly distinguished. 

There are workarounds, one of which is ready to hand for people who have learned to sail without instruments. One can use the boat and its sails as an epistemic device. One stops, for a moment, using the boat as a productive device – whose purpose is to move us through the water as quickly as possible, to get to our destination – and converts it into an epistemic device – whose purpose is to answer the question: where is the wind? One edges the boat up into the wind, closer to the direction from which the wind appears to blow, and watches closely for the luff of the sail to start shaking. At the point where it begins to shake (to “luff”), one eases off a little, letting the bow of the boat drop a few degrees further off the wind. Knowing the boat well, one also senses a subtle shift in speed through the water. Like other sailors, over a lifetime, I have learned to carry out this epistemic activity to the point where it can be quite automatic and embodied, meshed with proprioception, with an alternating rhythm that balances speed and knowledge.

In other words, some activities of sailing have both productive and epistemic objects: one learns to sail a boat quickly and to tweak the environment to check whether one could be sailing even more quickly. In use, the boat becomes an educational technology.” (p1603)

Figure 1: The logwheel: as bought from the chandlers and after immersion in subtropical water for some months

References (full set of references used in the chapter)

Anderson, L. (2006). Analytic autoethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35(4), 373-395. 

Beattie, A. R., & Hayes, S. (2020). Whose domain and whose ontology? Preserving human radical reflexivity over the efficiency of automatically generated feedback alone. In N. B. Dohn, P. Jandrić, T. Ryberg, & M. De Laat (Eds.), Mobility, data and learner agency in networked learning (pp. 83-99). Cham: Springer.

Billett, S. (2014). Mimetic learning at work: learning in the circumstances of practice. Heidelberg: Springer.

Billett, S. (2018). Distinguishing lifelong learning from lifelong education. Journal of Adult Learning, Knowledge and Innovation, 2(1), 1-7. 

Bochner, A. P. (2012). On first-person narrative scholarship: Autoethnography as acts of meaning. Narrative Inquiry, 22(1), 155-164. doi:https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.22.1.10boc

Bojsen-Møller, J., Larsson, B., & Aagaard, P. (2015). Physical requirements in Olympic sailing. European Journal of Sport Science, 15(3), 220-227. doi:10.1080/17461391.2014.955130

Boon, P. (2017). The Hawkesbury river: a social and natural history. Clayton South, Victoria: CSIRO.

Bradley, W. (1969). A voyage to New South Wales: the journal of Lieutenant William Bradley RN of HMS Sirius. Facsimile. Sydney: Ure Smith Pty Ltd.

Brown, M. (2017). The offshore sailor: Enskilment and identity. Leisure Studies, 36(5), 684-695. 

Brown, M., & Humberstone, B. (2016). Seascapes: shaped by the sea. London: Routledge.

Brown, M., & Peters, K. (Eds.). (2019). Living with the sea: knowledge, awareness and action. London: Routledge.

Campbell, K. (2015). The feminist instructional designer: an autoethnography. In B. Hokanson, G. Clinton, & M. W. Tracey (Eds.), The design of learning experience: creating the future of educational technology (pp. 231-268). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Carey, P. (2008). 30 days in Sydney: a wildly distorted account. London: Bloomsbury.

Carvalho, L., & Yeoman, P. (2018). Framing learning entanglement in innovative learning spaces: connecting theory, design and practice. British Educational Research Journal, 44(6), 1120–1137. doi:doi:10.1002/berj.3483

Centre nautique des Glénans. (1989). The new Glénans sailing manual. Newton Abbot: David & Charles.

Clark, A. (2017). The catch: the story of fishing in Australia. Canberra: National Library of Australia.

Cohen, M. (2010). The novel and the sea. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Conrad, J. (1913/2013). The mirror of the sea: memories and impressions. Toller Fratrum: Little Toller Books.

Dant, T., & Wheaton, B. (2007). Windsurfing: An extreme form of material and embodied interaction? Anthropology Today, 23(6), 8-12. 

Denzin, N. K. (2014). Interpretive autoethnography. Los Angeles: Sage.

Ellington, H., Percival, F., & Race, P. (1993). Handbook of educational technology (3rd ed.). London: Kogan Page.

Foley, D., & Read, P. (2020). What the colonists never knew: a history of Aboriginal Sydney. Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press.

Gale, T., & Walls, J. (2000). Development of a sailing dinghy simulator. Simulation, 74(3), 167-179. 

Goodyear, P., & Carvalho, L. (2019). The analysis of complex learning environments. In H. Beetham & R. Sharpe (Eds.), Rethinking pedagogy for a digital age: principles and practices of design (3rd ed., pp. 49-65). Abingdon: RoutledgeFalmer.

Goodyear, P., Carvalho, L., & Yeoman, P. (in press). Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD): core purposes, distinctive qualities and current developments. Educational Technology Research and Development. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-020-09926-7 

Goodyear, P., Thompson, K., Ashe, D., Pinto, A., Carvalho, L., Parisio, M., . . . Yeoman, P. (2015). Analysing the structural properties of learning networks: architectural insights into buildable forms. In B. Craft, Y. Mor, & M. Maina (Eds.), The art and science of learning design (pp. 15-29). Rotterdam: Sense.

Goold, P. (Ed.) (2012). Sailing-philosophy for everyone: catching the drift of why we sail. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.

Huff, M., & Schwan, S. (2012). The verbal facilitation effect in learning to tie nautical knots. Learning and Instruction, 22(5), 376-385. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2012.03.001

Hunkins, F. P. (1992). Sailing: Educating and celebrating self. The Educational Forum, 56(4), 443-450. 

Hunt, R. (2018). On sawing a loaf: living simply and skilfully in hut and bothy. Cultural geographies, 25(1), 71-89. doi:10.1177/1474474016673066

Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press.

Ingold, T. (2014). That’s enough about ethnography! Hau: journal of ethnographic theory, 4(1), 383-395. 

Irish, P. (2017). Hidden in plain view: the Aboriginal people of coastal Sydney. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing.

Laurier, E. (1999). That sinking feeling: elitism, working leisure and yachting. In D. Crouch (Ed.), Leisure/tourism geographies: Practices and geographical knowledge (pp. 195-213). London: Routledge.

Markauskaite, L., & Goodyear, P. (2017). Epistemic fluency and professional education: innovation, knowledgeable action and actionable knowledge. Dordrecht: Springer.

McCulloch, K., McLaughlin, P., Allison, P., Edwards, V., & Tett, L. (2010). Sail training as education: More than mere adventure. Oxford Review of Education, 36(6), 661-676. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/stable/25801422

Mentz, S. (2015). Shipwreck modernity: ecologies of globalization, 1550-1719. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Orams, M. B., & Brown, M. (2020). The dream and the reality of blue spaces: the search for freedom in offshore sailing. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 0(0), 0193723520928599. doi:10.1177/0193723520928599

Raban, J. (Ed.) (1993). The Oxford book of the sea. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rogoff, B. (2014). Learning by observing and pitching in to family and community endeavors: an orientation. Human Development, 57(2-3), 69-81. 

Sayers, R., & Searl, G. (2017). Retracing Governor Phillip’s footsteps around Pittwater: the mystery of the cove on the East side. Retrieved from http://www.pittwateronlinenews.com/Retracing-Gov-Phillips-Footsteps-around-Pittwater.php 9 Nov 2020

Schijf, M., Allison, P., & Von Wald, K. (2017). Sail training: a systematic review. Journal of Outdoor Recreation, 9(2), 167-180. 

Schwan, S., & Riempp, R. (2004). The cognitive benefits of interactive videos: learning to tie nautical knots. Learning and Instruction, 14(3), 293-305. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2004.06.005

Scott, K. W. (2006). Self-directed learners’ concept of self as learner: Congruous autonomy. International Journal of Self-Directed Learning, 3(2), 1-13. 

Sharples, M. (1991). Computer‐based tutoring of visual concepts: from novice to expert. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 7(2), 123-132. 

Sibthorp, J. (2003). Learning transferable skills through adventure education: The role of an authentic process. Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, 3(2), 145-157. doi:10.1080/14729670385200331

Sintonen, S. (2020). From an experimental paper to a playful screen: How the essence of materiality modulates the process of creation. British Journal of Educational Technology.

Sumsion, J. (2000). Reflecting on sailing; and reimagining, reinventing, and renewing life as a teacher educator. Teacher Education Quarterly, 77-87. 

Thrift, N. (2000). Afterwords. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18(2), 213-255. doi:10.1068/d214t

Wojcikiewicz, S. K., & Mural, Z. B. (2010). A Deweyian framework for youth development in experiential education: perspectives from sail training and sailing instruction. The Journal of Experiential Education, 33(2), 105. 

AECT 2020 Presentation

petergoodyearLeave a comment

The 2020 convention of the AECT – the Association for Educational Communications and Technology – moved ‘online’, like so many conferences this year. I was asked to make a presentation connected with my AECT/ETR&D Distinguished Development Award. There’s a recorded version of the presentation here on YouTube (takes about 20 minutes). Here’s a copy of the slides and notes (40 Meg.).

AECT 2020 Goodyear 01-11-2020 compactDownload

There’s an associated paper, mirroring some of the talk, currently under review with ETR&D. Here’s the abstract.

Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD): core purposes, distinctive qualities and current developments

Peter Goodyear, Lucila Carvalho & Pippa Yeoman
Abstract

This paper provides a summary account of Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD). ACAD offers a practical approach to analysing complex learning situations, in a way that can generate knowledge that is reusable in subsequent (re)design work. ACAD has been developed over the last two decades. It has been tested and refined through collaborative analyses of a large number of complex learning situations and through research studies involving experienced and inexperienced design teams. The paper outlines the motivation for ACAD and describes a number of its central features. The paper also provides an overview of two current areas of development in ACAD: the creation of explicit design rationales and the ACAD toolkit for collaborative design meetings. As well as providing some ideas that can help teachers, design teams and others discuss and agree on their working methods, ACAD has implications for some broader issues in educational technology research and development. It questions some deep assumptions about the framing of research and design thinking, in the hope that fresh ideas may be useful to people involved in leadership and advocacy roles in the field.

Our new paper on helping students prepare for the workplace

petergoodyearLeave a comment

 

TITLE: PREPARING STUDENTS FOR THE WORKPLACE THROUGH DESIGNING PRODUCTIVE ASSESSMENT TASKS: AN ACTIONABLE KNOWLEDGE PERSPECTIVE
Lina Markauskaite & Peter Goodyear
ABSTRACT

Preparing students for the workplace and assessing their readiness are often major challenges for university teachers. What kinds of concrete tasks help students develop professional capacities needed for situated knowledgeable action in a broad range of possible future workplace settings?

Our research examined assessment tasks that university teachers set for students in courses that were preparing them for work placements in five professions: nursing, pharmacy, teaching, social work, and school counselling. We combined ‘actionable knowledge’ and ‘objectual practice’ perspectives and investigated what students were asked to do, what they were expected to learn and how. Specifically, we analysed the nature of the objects that teachers selected for assessment tasks and the nature of the concrete artefacts that students were asked to produce.

Our results show some fundamental differences in teachers’ choices of objects. They ranged from basic and very specific aspects of professional work to some of the hardest and most broad-ranging challenges in the profession. The tasks also required students to engage in the production of a wide range of artefacts. We classified these as ‘cultural artefacts’, ‘conceptual artefacts’ and ‘epistemic artefacts’. Our discussion draws parallels between these three kinds of artefacts and the notions of ‘work ready’, ‘work knowledgeable’ and ‘work-capable’ graduates, respectively. We argue that teachers, through task designs, shape ways in which students learn to link action (skill) with meaning (knowledge). Our findings raise some important questions about the kinds of authentic tasks that help prepare work-capable graduates for future learning.

Keywords: Objectual practice, knowledge artefacts, assessment

The full paper is available in the HERDSA proceedings here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the underling ideas, see our book on Epistemic fluency in professional education and our Epistemic Fluency website.

Design papers

petergoodyearLeave a comment

Screen Shot 2017-07-25 at 1.41.19 pm

Here are some papers associated with the themes of my recent podcast interview with Jason Lodge and Mollie Dollinger.

Teaching as design (Goodyear 2015)

In medias res: reframing design for learning (Goodyear & Dimitriadis 2013)

Learning, technology and design (Goodyear & Retalis 2010)

Educational design and networked learning: Patterns, pattern languages and design practice (Goodyear 2005)

 

Discussion, collaborative knowledge work and epistemic fluency

petergoodyearLeave a comment

G&Z2007

I received a request for this paper earlier today. It started life as a keynote at the Networked Learning conference in Lancaster in 2006. Maria Zenios visited us in Sydney later that year, and we were able to work together and develop a more extensive treatment of the issues. We used a recent paper in BJES by Effie MacLellan as a springboard. We combined ideas from Stellan Ohlsson, Allan Collins, Dave Perkins and Carl Bereiter to introduce epistemic tasks, forms, games and fluency. Then we linked this with research on learning through discussion by Helen Askell-Williams and Michael Lawson and by Rob Ellis and myself, to distinguish between weaker and stronger forms of collaborative knowledge building. If you’re serious about helping students prepare for work in complex knowledge creating jobs, then you need the stronger form.

I hadn’t reread this paper for a while, and I think it still stands up quite well. As of today, it’s had 87 citations, not all of them by me. I’m also glad to see that research on learning through discussion in higher education has been growing in the last 10 years. The literature was quite thin in 2006/7.

In 2008, Lina Markauskaite and I wrote a grant proposal that allowed us to do some of the ‘cognitive anthropology’ hinted at in this paper. The outcomes, and a much richer understanding of matters that were only sketched in the BJES paper, can be found in our ‘magnum opus’ – Markauskaite, L., & Goodyear, P. (2017). Epistemic fluency and professional education: innovation, knowledgeable action and actionable knowledge. Dordrecht: Springer.

 

Epistemic resourcefulness and evaluative judgement

petergoodyearLeave a comment

Epistemic games

In October 2016, David Boud and colleagues at Deakin University (Melbourne) held a symposium on evaluative judgement in higher education. I gave a brief presentation connecting some of the ideas that Lina and I have been developing on epistemic games and epistemic resourcefulness to evaluative judgement. We’ve written a chapter for the “book of the symposium” which Routledge should be publishing in 2017. Here’s the abstract for that chapter:

This chapter examines the development of evaluative judgement from the perspective of professional education, with a focus on the abilities needed to deal with problems that are both complex and novel. Professional work regularly entails engaging in knowledgeable action in previously unencountered situations and formulating methods, on the fly, for making judgements about the adequacy of one’s actions. On this view, evaluative judgement is an epistemic (knowledge creating) activity. We show how developing evaluative judgement can be understood as learning to play a range of epistemic games, and how epistemic resourcefulness enables one to frame complex judgements in principled ways.

Activity centred analysis and design in the evolution of learning networks

petergoodyearLeave a comment

Screen Shot 2017-06-04 at 10.44.20 am

A talk at the 10th International Conference on Networked Learning at Lancaster University in the UK (May 2016).

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of, and rationale for, an approach to analysing complex learning networks. The approach involves a strong commitment to providing knowledge which is useful for design and it gives a prime place to the activity of those involved in networked learning. Hence the framework that we are offering is known as “Activity Centred Analysis and Design” or ACAD for short. We have used the ACAD framework in the analysis of 20 or so learning networks. These networks have varied in purpose, scale and complexity and the experience we have gained in trying to understand how these networks function has helped us improve the ACAD framework. This paper shares some of the outcomes of that experience and describes some significant new refinements to how we understand the framework. While the framework is able to deal with a very wide range of learning situations, in this paper we look more closely at some issues which are of particular importance in networked learning. For example, we discuss the distributed nature of design in networked learning – acknowledging the fact that learning networks are almost invariably co-configured by everyone who participates in them, and that this aspect of participation is often explicitly valued and encouraged. We see participation in (re)design as a challenging activity: one that benefits from some structured methods and ways of representing and unpicking the tangles of tasks, activities, tools, places and people

Here’s a pdf of the paper, which is also freely available online as part of the conference proceedings. Cite as: Goodyear, P., & Carvalho, L. (2016). Activity centred analysis and design in the evolution of learning networks. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Networked Learning, Edited by: Cranmer S, Dohn NB, de Laat M, Ryberg T & Sime, JA. Pp218-225. (ISBN 978-1-86220-324-2) http://www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/abstracts/pdf/P16.pdf

And a copy of the slides, though not all were used in the presentation.

 

Roberto presents our Design studio paper at CHI

petergoodyearLeave a comment

Screen Shot 2017-06-03 at 11.05.23 pm

May 2016: Roberto Martinez-Maldonado presented our work at the CHI conference in San Jose.

Abstract: There is a steadily growing interest in the design of spaces in which multiple interactive surfaces are present and, in turn, in understanding their role in group activity. However, authentic activities in these multi-surface spaces can be complex. Groups commonly use digital and non-digital artefacts, tools and resources, in varied ways depending on their specific social and epistemic goals. Thus, designing for collaboration in such spaces can be very challenging. Importantly, there is still a lack of agreement on how to approach the analysis of groups’ experiences in these heterogeneous spaces. This paper presents an actionable approach that aims to address the complexity of understanding multi-user multi-surface systems. We provide a structure for applying different analytical tools in terms of four closely related dimensions of user activity: the setting, the tasks, the people and the runtime co-configuration. The applicability of our approach is illustrated with six types of analysis of group activity in a multi-surface design studio.

Further information and video on the CHAI website.