Designing for Digital Learners (D4DL) Research Group overview

John Cook
UWE Bristol
Designing for Digital Learners
(D4DL) Research Group
D4DL: http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2435
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/johnnigelcook

Overview D4DL
Conduct interdisciplinary research in Technology Enhanced
Learning (TEL), investigation of the mediating power of
social media,
mobile devices, and
more generally TEL, for
Learning, innovation, creativity and social justice
Educational Design Research approach

Bad press for ‘new’ technology
People thought the
first printing press was
an instrument of the
devil that would spawn
unauthorised versions
of the bible.
David Crystal (Guardian, 2008), author
of „Txtng: the gr8db8‟ (Crystal, 2008)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press

The telephone
created fears of a
breakdown in
family life, with
people no longer
speaking directly
to one another.
http://www.solarnavigator.net/inventors/inventor_images/alexander_graham_bell_1876_speaking_into_telephone.jpg

And radio and
television
raised
concerns about
brain-washing.
http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~postr/MRT/Tour1.htm
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/mors0106/architecture/Television.jpg

Mobile phones
can damage
your health?
txt spk is
responsible for
bad spelling and
moral decay?
As always there
is more to it
than meets the
eye …

Six Principles that guide D4DL

6 Principles - Summary
1. It is a democratic right to have equity of access to cultural resources (widely
defined).
2. Mobile phones are new cultural resources that operate within an
individualised, mobile and convergent mass communication system.
3. Users are actively engaged in ‘generating’ their own content and contexts for
learning. This principle is summarised as ‘user-generated contexts’.
4. Appropriation is the key for the recognition of mobile devices (as well as the
artefacts accessed through and produced with them) as cultural resources in
and across different cultural practices of use, in particular everyday life and
formal education.
5. There is a significant potential for the use of social media and mobile devices
in informal, professional, work-based learning.
6. Social media and mobile devices can be used to design transformative,
augmented contexts for learning.

Principle 1:
It is a democratic right to have equity of access
to cultural resources (widely defined).
Cook, J., Pachler, N. and Bachmair, B. (2012).
Using Social Networked Sites and Mobile
Technology for Bridging Social Capital. In
Guglielmo Trentin and Manuela Repetto (Eds.),
Using Network and Mobile Technology to Bridge
Formal and Informal Learning. Chandos.
http://tinyurl.com/ovpe6jy

Cultural resources for learning draws on
various traditions for its interpretation
Philosophical traditions of Idealism that take account of
cultural resources
Cultural resources in the sense of the Idealism (Humboldt)
or its materialist version (Leont'ev) developed their
education function by being appropriated.
Social capital (various) & cultural capital (Bourdieu)
Social class differences in the relevance of language to
socialisation (Bernstein & Henderson, 1973; Bernstein,
1987).

Appropriation has three dynamic components:
firstly, bringing cultural resources into a person‟s
inner horizon of preferences, values, arguments
or feeling etc.,
secondly, processing e.g. the images of the
internet and,
thirdly, bringing out the results by expressions
within the context of the school, FE. HE or
workplace.

Principle 2:
Mobile phones are new cultural
resources that operate within an
individualised, mobile and
convergent mass communication
system
Pachler, N., Bachmair, B. and Cook, J.
(2010). Mobile Learning: Structures,
Agency, Practices. New York: Springer.

Google Scholar Cited by 91 – as of 05/09/12

5. There is a significant potential for the use of
social media and mobile devices in informal,
professional, work-based learning.
FP7 IP Learning Layers (£10.5 million)
Top ranked on 14.5 out of 15
Scaling up Lifelong Learning using TEL (Technology
Enhanced Learning) in large clusters of Small to Medium
Enterprises in the Health Professions and building industry
„Networked Scaffolding – Interacting with People‟
£0.5 million for UWE, others with own budget

Online People Tagging: Social (Mobile)
Network(ing) Services and Work-based
Learning, Cook & Pachler, BJET, 2012,
http://tinyurl.com/o45j5pm

6. Social media and mobile devices can
be used to design transformative,
augmented contexts for learning
Mobile Phones as Mediating Tools Within
Augmented Contexts for Development,
Cook, 2010, IJMBL
http://tinyurl.com/oc2wre9

“The information given was underlined by the
'experience' of the area and therefore given
context in both past and present.”

Landscape architecture at Cistercian abbey
(Fountains Yorkshire, North England)
Carl Smith

“The ability to be in a particular position but get a
variety of views/different visual perspective was a very
useful opportunity. The whole thing also got everyone
talking in a way I hadn't experienced on field trips to
Fountains before.”

22
Realistic scenarios various experiments in diverse subject
matters and educational levels
Patricia Santos
Barca Barca
Discovering Barcelona!
Bachelor students
explored the city observing
and interacting with the
architecture and the street
furniture with the aim of
putting in practice
urbanism and history
skills.
Assessing Botany in situ
The professor created a
route where the university
students had to answer
questions in situ observing
the Barcelona botany
garden, and finding,
touching and measuring
specific plants.
A literature adventure
A group of senior
learners (~70 years old),
members of a literature
group, created two routes
with the aim of proposing
questions about facts of
a literature novel set in a
district of Barcelona.

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