The future is both an elusive, and allusive, concept. Who can predict the future, especially in t... more The future is both an elusive, and allusive, concept. Who can predict the future, especially in today’s complex and uncertain world? The last two years have illustrated this profoundly. And what of our digital education future – what will that look like, and how can we shape it? What can we learn from where we have progressed to now in terms of collaborative and participatory, design-based research, innovation and technology, at this important moment in our educational history? We are pleased to announce the publication of this first special issue of the Irish Educational Studies on the topic of digital education futures, which helps to answer these important questions, looking at technology-enhanced learning in education as we learn and teach through and beyond COVID-19. This special issue publishes a diverse selection of papers that can help us to envision the future of education and how we can design for doing education differently, post-pandemic. The papers range from virtual reality and design-based research to blended learning, MOOCs and humanoid robots, offering us creative, principled and participatory insights and perspectives on how innovative technologies can be deployed to enhance learning and teaching. But, first, back to the future. The future will likely always remain out-of-reach, an elusive notion. The philosopher Alan Watts contends that ‘the future is a concept – it doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be because time is always now/We find there is only present, only an eternal now’ (Stanford Life Design Lab 2021). The notion that the future does not exist would seem to create a paradox, and thus set us up for failure, including in a special issue of a research journal looking at digital education futures. However, even if it is ‘impossible to predict the future’, ‘designing something changes the future that is possible’ (Stanford Life Design Lab 2021). Although elusive/amorphous, the future represents a powerful orientation for us, in our thinking, in that it can provide a context to suggest positive changes, growth and advancements that are to come. As well as eludes, the future alludes – to an improved, more inclusive education for all. This better future is what we continually strive for in our teaching, educational policy, leadership and educational research. As education is fundamentally a development-oriented profession and discipline, it can be said the future is one of education’s most important ideas. Teachers are centrally concerned with pupils and learners continually developing their potential, and providing them with the skills to realise those talents over the course of a lifetime. Therefore, how do we design systematically for better educational futures for all?
Background: Many employers are clear about the skills future workers need: technical and practica... more Background: Many employers are clear about the skills future workers need: technical and practical skills, alongside transferable skills including an ability to effectively solve problems and to work creatively within a team. School-based ‘Virtual Internships’ offer potential to respond to these calls, enabling learners to engage in pedagogically-aligned challenges grounded in authentic workplace practices. Limited research has, however, investigated how schools may facilitate authentic workplace experiences virtually – through online interaction as well as role-play of workplace practices: to enable young people to develop important competencies around creative groupwork through curricular activities. Aim: In this paper we outline the development of ‘Collaborating2Create’ (C2C): a conceptual tool devised through the ‘Virtual Internships Project’ to support the teaching of group creativity, in a way that meaningfully links education to the world of work. Method: We offer a critical ...
International Association for Development of the Information Society, 2014
We report on the provisional findings of an ongoing research project investigating the pedagogica... more We report on the provisional findings of an ongoing research project investigating the pedagogical affordances of mobile learning in combination with Web 2.0 tools for the learning of English for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. Using Design Based Research (DBR) as an approach to conduct this study, this paper will first present the research that ha s completed so far, including preliminary results. We developed an initial design framework from the literature and tested and developed this through a series of iterations, each one focusing on particular affordances. The impact of each iteration was evaluated using interviews and qualitative data analysis. One of our findings is the impact of a sense of social obligation whereby participants feel under pressure from their peers to post and to participate. This social obligation effect can have both positive and negative consequences for learning. Our future research will focus on exploring ways in which pedagogical designs ...
Civitas educationis. Education, Politics, and Culture, 2017
This introduction paper provides the context for the Symposium. It begins with a brief account of... more This introduction paper provides the context for the Symposium. It begins with a brief account of the ways in which the Internet is being held responsible for poisoning democracy, then unpacks the nexus of the three main terms of the title of this Symposium: democracy, education and technology. The conceptual aspects of this nexus are inextricable from the technical aspects. That is why it is appropriate that this Symposium integrates together papers that might seem primarily conceptual and papers that are more focused on technical issues of how to design to support deeper reflection and collective intelligence. This paper ends with a justification of the need to take an expanded ‘design based research’ approach to the issue of how education and technology relate to democracy. What we need now is not so much contemplative knowledge of relationships between abstract concepts but engaged knowledge that supports collective technology design, where we, ourselves, or the nature of human ...
The future is both an elusive, and allusive, concept. Who can predict the future, especially in t... more The future is both an elusive, and allusive, concept. Who can predict the future, especially in today’s complex and uncertain world? The last two years have illustrated this profoundly. And what of our digital education future – what will that look like, and how can we shape it? What can we learn from where we have progressed to now in terms of collaborative and participatory, design-based research, innovation and technology, at this important moment in our educational history? We are pleased to announce the publication of this first special issue of the Irish Educational Studies on the topic of digital education futures, which helps to answer these important questions, looking at technology-enhanced learning in education as we learn and teach through and beyond COVID-19. This special issue publishes a diverse selection of papers that can help us to envision the future of education and how we can design for doing education differently, post-pandemic. The papers range from virtual reality and design-based research to blended learning, MOOCs and humanoid robots, offering us creative, principled and participatory insights and perspectives on how innovative technologies can be deployed to enhance learning and teaching. But, first, back to the future. The future will likely always remain out-of-reach, an elusive notion. The philosopher Alan Watts contends that ‘the future is a concept – it doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be because time is always now/We find there is only present, only an eternal now’ (Stanford Life Design Lab 2021). The notion that the future does not exist would seem to create a paradox, and thus set us up for failure, including in a special issue of a research journal looking at digital education futures. However, even if it is ‘impossible to predict the future’, ‘designing something changes the future that is possible’ (Stanford Life Design Lab 2021). Although elusive/amorphous, the future represents a powerful orientation for us, in our thinking, in that it can provide a context to suggest positive changes, growth and advancements that are to come. As well as eludes, the future alludes – to an improved, more inclusive education for all. This better future is what we continually strive for in our teaching, educational policy, leadership and educational research. As education is fundamentally a development-oriented profession and discipline, it can be said the future is one of education’s most important ideas. Teachers are centrally concerned with pupils and learners continually developing their potential, and providing them with the skills to realise those talents over the course of a lifetime. Therefore, how do we design systematically for better educational futures for all?
Background: Many employers are clear about the skills future workers need: technical and practica... more Background: Many employers are clear about the skills future workers need: technical and practical skills, alongside transferable skills including an ability to effectively solve problems and to work creatively within a team. School-based ‘Virtual Internships’ offer potential to respond to these calls, enabling learners to engage in pedagogically-aligned challenges grounded in authentic workplace practices. Limited research has, however, investigated how schools may facilitate authentic workplace experiences virtually – through online interaction as well as role-play of workplace practices: to enable young people to develop important competencies around creative groupwork through curricular activities. Aim: In this paper we outline the development of ‘Collaborating2Create’ (C2C): a conceptual tool devised through the ‘Virtual Internships Project’ to support the teaching of group creativity, in a way that meaningfully links education to the world of work. Method: We offer a critical ...
International Association for Development of the Information Society, 2014
We report on the provisional findings of an ongoing research project investigating the pedagogica... more We report on the provisional findings of an ongoing research project investigating the pedagogical affordances of mobile learning in combination with Web 2.0 tools for the learning of English for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. Using Design Based Research (DBR) as an approach to conduct this study, this paper will first present the research that ha s completed so far, including preliminary results. We developed an initial design framework from the literature and tested and developed this through a series of iterations, each one focusing on particular affordances. The impact of each iteration was evaluated using interviews and qualitative data analysis. One of our findings is the impact of a sense of social obligation whereby participants feel under pressure from their peers to post and to participate. This social obligation effect can have both positive and negative consequences for learning. Our future research will focus on exploring ways in which pedagogical designs ...
Civitas educationis. Education, Politics, and Culture, 2017
This introduction paper provides the context for the Symposium. It begins with a brief account of... more This introduction paper provides the context for the Symposium. It begins with a brief account of the ways in which the Internet is being held responsible for poisoning democracy, then unpacks the nexus of the three main terms of the title of this Symposium: democracy, education and technology. The conceptual aspects of this nexus are inextricable from the technical aspects. That is why it is appropriate that this Symposium integrates together papers that might seem primarily conceptual and papers that are more focused on technical issues of how to design to support deeper reflection and collective intelligence. This paper ends with a justification of the need to take an expanded ‘design based research’ approach to the issue of how education and technology relate to democracy. What we need now is not so much contemplative knowledge of relationships between abstract concepts but engaged knowledge that supports collective technology design, where we, ourselves, or the nature of human ...
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