Educational Design in 2009: The
Hot Topics
Robert Fitzgerald
Faculty of Education
University of Canberra
Gaggle Meeting @ ANU, 19 May 2009

Talking about a Learning Revolution
• Revolution: “… a drastic and far-reaching change in ways
of thinking and behaving”
Source: wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
• “… age of discontinuity we have to be very much aware
of how our own lenses create a form of tunnel vision.
We must learn new strategies to overcome the tendency
to interpret the world with narrowly construed
assumptions even if they worked for us in the past”
John Seely Brown, Former Scientist of Xerox Corporation and the director of its
Palo Alto Research Center

Three interesting books
“The learning process is “We have an opportunity to “…we must develop not only the
about learning-to-be a change the way we create technical capability but also the
practitioner rather than just and exchange intellectual capacity for
learning about....” information, knowledge, and transforming tacit pedagogical
“…we need not simply more culture [and offer greater] knowledge into commonly usable
information, but people to opportunities for cultural self- and visible knowledge”
assimilate, understand, and reflection and human
make sense of it.” connection.”

Presence
• Social learning – supporting different connections
between people and knowledge (e.g. peer learning)
Digital Learning Communities Report - http://eprints.qut.edu.au/18476/
• Propinquity
nearness in place; proximity.
nearness of relation; kinship.
affinity of nature; similarity.
nearness in time.
Source: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/propinquity

Presence
• Presence updaters - Facebook/Twitter/Jaiku
• “Sweet to tweet\" (Financial Times: February 26 2009)
”extends peripheral awareness” - John Seeley Brown
Source: http://tinyurl.com/atycy7
• Relationships (Joshua Porter)
– Facebook = symmetric (Friend-Not Friend)
– Twitter = asymmetric
1. People who follow you, but you don’t follow back
2. People who don’t follow you, but you follow them
3. You both follow each other (Friends!)
4. Neither of you follow each other
Source: Joshua Porter,Relationship Symmetry in Social Networks: Why Facebook will go Fully
Asymmetrichttp://tinyurl.com/dxmjlj

Rich Design
“the most regularly taught topics in one’s subject area,the most useful forms of
representation of those ideas, the most powerful
analogies, illustrations, examples, explanations,and demonstrations - in a word, the
ways of representing and formulating the subject that make it comprehensible
toothers” (Shulman, 1986, p. 9).
Source: http://www.tpck.org/tpck/

An educational lens
Source: http://tpack.org/
Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2006). Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A new
framework for teacher knowledge. Teachers College Record. 108(6), 1017-1054.

A design lens
EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGICAL
requirements requirements
CONTENT KNOWLEDGE Focus our
requirements
attention, not
narrow our focus

Questions
Dr Robert Fitzgerald
Associate Dean Research
Faculty of Education
University of Canberra
robert.fitzgerald@canberra.edu.au
www.mashedlc.edu.au
mathetic.info
www.slideshare.net/rfitzgerald