This document discusses technology in learning and design. It suggests that electronic reading resources should be the norm, and that content should include audio, video, and opportunities for students to upload content and do programming. It also recommends weekly updates by tutors and a range of discussion forum dynamics. Blended learning should avoid novelty for its own sake. Access issues, both physical and related to students' academic capital, must also be considered. Linkages to networks and consultation should be varied. Virtual world learning allows students to do things they cannot otherwise. The document discusses pedagogy as a creative practice of making and fashioning effective learning environments. It notes a lack of student voice in research on virtual educational opportunities and constraints. Forms of

1. Technology, Learning, Design

4. Reasonable Expectations
Module level:
VLE area – interactive, ‘hub’, open source links
Electronic reading resources as the norm
Audio, video content and uploading
Programming
WEEKLY updating by tutor
Forum discussion – range of dynamics (tutor chaired, open,
student chaired, combinations)
Blended learning – avoid novelty / tokenism
Access issues – physical
Access issues – CONDITIONS OF POSSIBILITY / academic ‘capital’
Linkage (to email / networks) – consultation / strategic / varied
Virtual world learning – do stuff you can’t do otherwise.

5. Pedagogy = making
• Creative practice is concerned with making and so is education.
Such a duality of making sees lecturers at once teaching making
and fashioning an effective learning environment for their students.
• Thus we might conceive of ‘learning makers’ as well as a ‘creative
makers’ and from this conception we see ‘the work’ through this
double-lens, or this mirroring.
• The moves a lecturer / practitioner makes in a studio - minute by
minute - as they design teaching constitute the process of
pedagogy.
• This applies to designing learning with technology but the pedagogy
of e-learning is often neglected.

11. Emerging field of virtual educational research skewed towards
opportunities and constraints at the level of the institution.
Assumes ‘student needs’ for new ways of learning?
Dominant discursive themes - student collaboration and reflection;
social constructivist pedagogy; institutional and design barriers for
teachers; learning through / in play; open, daring and ‘risky’
pedagogy; the interplay of learning and education (or edutainment);
experiential pedagogies and ‘learning by becoming’.
Lack of student voice?

12. Media Futur
10 minute assessed conference presentation ‘in world’.
Gaming research journal (online).
Most online worlds I have ever been in don’t really play to be
a ‘second life’ but instead other a completely different
universe which isn’t similar to our own. I feel Second life has
too many similarities to our real world.
Student 4, Cohort 09-10 (Source: Assessed Journal)

15. Identity
• What we do
• Who we are
• Tools we have
• Roles
• Community
• Rules
• Presence
Childs, 2010 (‘mash-up’ – his words - of Activity Theory
and Communities of Practice Model)

17. Forms of Capital
Virtual worlds such as Second
Life may not carry attendant
perceptions of the
systemworld (such as with
Virtual Learning Environments).
But there may be as much
inequality in access to these
spaces as there will be to
books.

18. Forms of Capital
For those within this group lacking cultural capital in the
orthodox mode, the ’trangressive’ benefits of the experience
fell below expectations, and this was particularly apparent for
those that can be considered as gamers.
These students found it difficult to get past the idea that
Second Life was an inferior version of their ‘passion
communities’ (gaming).
This provided a layer of prejudice that had to be surmounted
before any potential benefit could be achieved.

19. Conditions of possibility
Reflexive critical literacy rests on the compulsion for students to
take risks, , to negotiate identities and to deconstruct the ‘idea’ of
the virtual world at the same time as learning within it.
Just as we would ask students to question the traditional
curriculum (what is knowledge, what ‘counts’ as legitimate, how is
power exercised in education?) so we must afford them time and
space for such genuine enquiry in the digital world.
EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL QUESTIONS.

20. flattened
Pedagogies of surrender, inexpertise, curation.