Two case studies are described that used design research to explore how mobile devices and social media can support informal learning. The first case involved developing location-based mobile tours to support task-conscious learning about urban education and language learning. Evaluations found the tours promoted active learning. The second case involved developing a "people tagging" tool within a social network for a career guidance organization to help people find expertise within the organization. Both cases showed promise but raised issues about scaling the approaches to support learning on a larger scale.

1. Two Cases of Design Research that Explore How Mobile Devices and Social Media Mediate
‘Informal Learning’ to Drive the Debate: Can Learning Design Hack it?
John Cook
Learning Technology Research Institute
London Metropolitan University
Email: john.cook@londonmet.ac.uk
Introduction
The Learning Design Grid Theme Team vision (http://www.ld-grid.org/home) makes it clear that “Social and
mobile technologies offer learners unprecedented opportunities ... yet these are constantly shifting with
escalating complexity”. If we add to this the increasing overlap between formal, „informal‟ and work-based
learning then we truly have a world in flux. Consequently, this paper describes two small to medium sized
projects that have taken a participatory, educational design research approach to investigate how mobile devices
and social media can mediate “informal learning” in a variety of contexts. My first aim is to uncover design
principles based on these complex case studies and raise issues about possible approaches to scaling up these
techno-pedagogical designs. However, due to space limitations I can sometimes only hint at the complexities
that pervade my practice. Furthermore, The Art and Science of Learning Design workshop call (http://www.ld-
grid.org/workshops/ASLD11) states that:
“Participants will be able to use learning design support tools and methods that they may not have
engaged with before. Attendees will prepare for this by bringing along an exemplar learning design from
their own practice, which they will attempt to implement in software using one of several learning design
tools. At the same time, exemplars of learning designs will be considered from the perspective of design
methods and frameworks.” (my italics)
My second aim is to provide the workshop with exemplar „designs for learning‟ (the two cases) for design
discourse; the purpose of this is to see if the learning design tools and software available in the workshop can
implement all or perhaps aspects of these complex design-based research driven cases/scenarios that I present. I
anticipate, based on my knowledge of learning design, that the productive workshop discourse that follows will
extend into design methods and frameworks. I will use the results of this discourse to expand this paper into an
assessment of how the „Art and Science of Learning Design‟ meets my needs as a
researcher/designer/practitioner. Indeed, with over 20 years previous experience of Technology Enhanced
Learning research, which included 10 years in the start-stop-start area of AI in Education (see Cook, 2010, for a
summary) I feel obliged to pose the critical question in this paper‟s title: Can Learning Design Hack it?
The paper is structured as follows. Firstly, I briefly delineate what I mean by “informal learning”,
opting for the term „task-conscious learning‟, and outline the characteristics of educational design research. This
is followed by a succinct distillation of some key participatory perspectives and design based oriented outcomes
from two European projects that I have worked on as a partner: CONTSENS (using devices for context sensitive
and location-based vocational education and training) and MATURE (social learning in work-based knowledge
networks). The descriptions are by no means exhaustive and instead aim to provide the workshop with a
resource for design discourse (see above). I will conclude by pointing to the design implications for sustainable
approaches to developing technology enhanced approaches for mediating informal task-conscious learning.
Informal learning and design research
We are always learning from different contexts in the world. It is for this reason that Cook et al. (2008) see
formal and “informal learning” as being part of a continuum of a multi-dimensional clustering of informal and
formal learning activities, rather than positioned in an either-or relationship. Indeed, “informal learning” has
been used of late as an en vogue term by various governments who have specific agendas. Rogers (2006, p. 7)
makes the helpful distinction between „task-conscious learning‟, “where learning is not conscious but takes
place while engaged in some activity and when achievements are measured not in terms of learning but of task
completion”, and „learning-conscious learning‟, “where learning is intended and conscious and achievements
are measured in terms of learning”. The two cases below are generally in the area of „task-conscious learning‟,
but inevitably there exists overlaps with „learning-conscious learning‟.
Educational design research tends to have interventionist characteristics, is process oriented and
contributes to theory building (Plomp, 2009, p. 17). Indeed, design research (as I will henceforth call it) is
context bound in nature, which means generalizations from this type of work tend not to be context-free.
However, design researchers do strive for generalisable design principles whilst generalising to a broader theory
(Plomp, 2009, p. 33). My own approach to design research, described below, spans the last 20 years; it is user

2. centered and aims to provide a lens through which to systematically inquire into approaches that orchestrate and
empower educators, trainers, technology and social media designers/developers, users and learners as they
participate in design discourse and practices surrounding Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL).
Case 1 CONTSENS: Augmented Mobile Learning
In the CONTSENS project (http://bit.ly/oU9bj) LTRI successfully explored how the use of physical space could
be augmented using mobile devices so as to mediate task conscious activities in areas as diverse as landscape
architecture, urban planning, marketing and second-language learning (for detail see Smith et al, 2011). We
aimed to augment a variety of contexts for learning in such a way that would, we predicted, allow collaborating
learners to interact: with each other, with the mobile phones and with the physical environment in order to
generate their own context for development within a Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, 1978 / 1930).
Design research was introduced in CONTSENS with the expectation that participants would systematically
adjust various aspects of the designed context so that each adjustment could be tested and fed back into the next
iteration of the intervention. Mixed reality scenarios were used on Smartphones to allow for adaptations in the
contextual designs. Of particular interest (for the workshop) is the successful reuse of the context of one subject
(urban education) in another (language learning) through a rapid reconfiguration of the required
scripts/information within the mobile device mediated augmented space for learning.
The initial tour was developed with the aim of enabling HE students to visualise urban education
through various collective images and representations 1. A tutor had developed the original tour in North London
and was closely involved in the creation of the mobile tour. The development and production process involved
the following elements: (i) Initial field work and documentation of the site; (ii) Learning narratives/scripts for
each task episode in a GPS zone, (iii) Capture and digitisation of oral histories, Pathé news clips and local
historical stories, (iv) Capture and digitisation of material elements that detail changes in the urban form, such as
photographs depicting the evolution of school buildings and historical maps, and (v) MEDIASCAPE (location-
based mobile production to support the underlying pedagogy of the tour). Both tours (urban education, n = 22,
and each of the language tours, n = 9) use the same physical space and have been used and evaluated with
representative teachers and learners, feedback was very positive (see Smith et al, 2011, for detail). Of particular
note is the fact that in several group interviews participants commented that the mobile tour promoted “active
learning” and that students were less passive than they would have been on a tutor-led tour (some learners had
also taken the „analogue‟ tour). In one group, whilst talking about the difference between the two tours, one
student said, “I felt like I was more passive [in tutor led tour], like I was just taking in information, and with this
one I felt like I was, it was triggering my own thoughts and I was getting to think for myself about the area and
the buildings”. The tutor, who assisted in the design, was interviewed after the evaluations tours had taken place,
stated that he believed that there are lots of benefits to the Urban Education mobile tour and that it provided an
effective learning experience and opportunities to utilise new and different pedagogies. Points made by the tutor
include the observation that students move from being passive to active learners, they can take more control
over their learning, and they can be engaged in more productive pedagogical approaches, such as small group
work and investigative problem-based learning. The tutor also noted that mobile tour afforded the opportunity to
be more focused, but at the same time provides a multi-tasked and multimedia experience that allows students to
get below the surface of the tasks. He also felt that the mobile technologies employed excited and intrigued the
students, and helped them to become more engaged in the tour.
Whilst different issues have emerged from each of the iterations, one aspect that is common to both of
the studies is that our design has fostered active learning, which has occurred through a combination of factors.
As the content was pushed to the mobile devices it engaged the learners in the task, and encouraged them to
interact with the material and learning content on the devices, the physical environment and the other students in
their group. The tasks then made them think and reflect on what they were looking at and being asked to do (a
finding from Iteration 1). Another common aspect was that the whole learning experience was “more concrete”
and “real” because it took place in situ, and was directly related to the learning context. We claim that the
mobile tours appear to be acting as part of what Vygotsky calls the „more capable peer‟ and were assisting the
learners as they move through stages of development in the Zone of Proximal Development. However, further
issues about scaling up were surfaced which we return to in the conclusions.
Case 2 MATURE IP: People Tagging in Workplace Learning
The MATURE Project (http://mature-ip.eu) conceives individual workplace learning processes to be
interlinked (the output of a learning process is input to others) in a knowledge-maturing process in which
knowledge changes in nature. This knowledge can take the form of classical content in varying degrees of
maturity, but also involves people, tasks and processes or semantic structures. The goal of MATURE is to
understand this maturing process better, based on empirical studies with users, to give guidelines and to build
1
See http://www.slideshare.net/johnnigelcook/urban-planning-education-in-context-with-mobile-phones

3. tools and services to reduce maturing barriers. MATURE systematically makes use of a design research
approach that has included Use Cases that were linked to personas (developed from an ethnographically
informed study) and particular knowledge maturing activities. One important continuing aspect of the
MATURE work is the „people dimension‟ aspect of the project, which aims at improving the development of
knowledge about other‟s expertise and improved informal relationships based on a people tagging approach
(e.g. see Braun et al., 2010) developed by the FZI, the scientific coordinating partner of MATURE. This
approach has surfaced design implications for „task-conscious learning‟ in work-based social networking
settings and is consequently expanded upon below in more detail.
A tag is typically defined in online activities as a “non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece
of information (such as an Internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps
describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are generally chosen informally
and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system” 2. Social networking approaches
to workplace learning have tended to focus on describing and augmenting employee profiles from the
perspective of those profiles being used for expert finding and community formation. These platforms are
mainly based on the self-promotion paradigm whereby people can represent themselves with a profile and
indicate their connections to other users. Further, in some of these approaches, the principle of social tagging
and bookmarking is transferred to people; for instance Linkedin (http://www.linkedin.com/), Xing
(http://www.xing.com/) and Collabio3 (the latter is no longer active). „Knowing-who‟ is an essential element for
efficient knowledge maturing processes, e.g. for finding the right person to talk to solve a task oriented problem.
Many approaches like self-descriptions in employee yellow pages, or top-down competence management
approaches have largely failed to live up to their promises. This failure is often because information contained in
the directories becomes outdated quickly; or is not described in a manner relevant to potential users.
In MATURE, FZI are using a lightweight approach based on collaborative tagging as a principle to
gather the information about persons inside and outside the company (if and where relevant): individuals tag
each other according to the topics they associate with this person. FZI call this „People Tagging tool‟ and claim
it can be used to gain a collective review of existing skills and competencies. Knowledge can be shared and
awareness strengthened within the organisational context around „who knows what?‟ This tagging information
can then potentially be used to search for persons to talk to in a particular task-oriented situation. Braun et al.
(submitted), have observed that “each target context of a people tagging system will require a different
„configuration‟, which depends on cultural aspects as well as the actual goals that are associated with
introducing people tagging. An analysis of the state of the art has shown that there has been little research on
identifying design options in a systematic way so that we [FZI] have developed a framework for engineering
people tagging systems”. FZI‟s conceptual design framework is based on results and experiences with the field
experiments, expert focus group together with an analysis of the design of folksonomy-based systems in general
in the literature. The framework has five main aspects: (a) involved people, (b) control and semantics of the
vocabulary, (c) control of tag assignments, (d) visibility of tag assignments, and (e) search heuristics for flexible
search strategies. For example, in terms of who is allowed to tag (a), restrictions can range from: anyone being
allowed to tag, or a limited group of persons are allowed to define tags – limited either by organizational
structures (e.g., team colleagues) or individual relationships (e.g., friends, or approved contacts in a social
networking service) – or allowing only self-annotation. These options may be combined with each other.
The People Tagging tool was introduced to and formatively evaluated in two phases with Connexions
Northumberland (Careers Guidance service, UK, n = 18) between October 2009 and July 2010. Results
specifically showed that: the simplicity of the system was attractive and important (being perceived as a
„Facebook for work‟); although little knowledge maturing could be observed within the limited period of use in
phase 2 (i.e. one month) there were insights into related notions of sharing and building expertise, reflective
practice. Furthermore, Braun et al. (submitted) have reported that participants stated that they “also liked the
way it can give them lots more information than they currently have and the basic philosophy of democracy
which empowers the individual and where nobody is in charge but has all possibility to contribute (currently
they often feel out of control because there is no possibility to easily contribute to a shared knowledge base like
e. g. the intranet).” However, various areas of concern were also identified: (i) there should be a „use by date‟
for tags, it is important that a person tag is time-bound, so people who have this tag do not feel they are making
a completely open-ended commitment; (ii) „lazy-practice‟ issue, here some practitioners may abuse the system
where, for example, 'lazy' colleagues may resist entering details about themselves and may tag others with
expertise they may have (to deflect additional queries); and (iii) „sharing could increase workload‟. On the last
issue, Braun et al. (submitted) note that “there were concerns about sharing whole people tagging information
with other services in general because it could also increase the workload”. It can be noted that the organization
2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_%28metadata%29, accessed 19 Jul. 11
3
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/cue/collabio/, accessed 19 July 2011

4. currently continues to use the system, and FZI are collecting usage logs to study the tagging behaviour more
closely; I will pick up on this analytics in design issues for task-conscious learning in the conclusions below.
Conclusions
The CONTSENS case took a participative design research approach to developing a reusable design for
complex, location based, task-conscious mobile learning (a small- to medium-scale of task conscious learning).
Furthermore, the MATURE case has deployed design research to developed four successful „demonstrators‟,
one of which has shown that the tools and services for „People Tagging‟ can be successful when formatively
evaluated with users (a small- to medium-scale of learning). However, for these cases to become sustainable,
issues of up-scaling needs to be addressed so that a large-scale view of design for learning can be attained.
Indeed, the people tagging tool is currently being developed into a larger scale „instantiation‟ within MATURE
and as such it faces certain challenges. Although MATURE has systematically considered aspects in the
requirements engineering process of informal task-conscious learning support, its essence is arguably one
where, at most, medium groups are implicitly seen as the focus of design. Personas are a useful first step, but
can they be generalized to a population of thousands of users? Therefore, I have recently suggested with FZI
colleagues (Cook et al., 2011) that the useful „customising tools to meet cultural factors‟ methodology deployed
successfully by FZI needs extending when we attempt to design for the large-scale use of TEL that is embedded
in, or that perhaps embeds, sustainable communities and networks of practice.
As mentioned in the introduction, one of the aims of this position paper has been to provide the
workshop with exemplar „designs for learning‟ (the two cases) for design discourse at the workshop; the
purpose of this is to see if the learning design tools and software available in the workshop can implement all or
perhaps aspects of these complex design-based research driven cases/scenarios that I present above. I look
forward to debate surrounding the critical question posed in this paper‟s title: Can Learning Design Hack it?
Acknowledgements
CONTSENS was funded by the EU Leonardo Lifelong Learning Programme. MATURE is funded by FP7.
Thank you to the reviewers for their comments.
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