Loughborough University Library: Open Journals
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Enduring Learning: Integrating C21st soft skills through Technology Education
Get PDFAs times change we need to continually review what our education systems offer and where priorities might lie. The Technology and Knowledge Ages of the twenty-first century have brought about new understandings, new ways of doing things, and an array of new career and workplace opportunities. Employees today are expected to bring more than an accumulation of traditional knowledge acquisition. Increasingly important today are a plethora of attitudinal skills and dispositions that enable workers to engage in much greater collaboration, communication, problem-solving, and critical thinking. What are these newly emphasised skills and dispositions and how should they be addressed within the education system? Meaningful learning of these ‘soft skills’ will occur best in authentic and integrated programmes where explicit teaching identifies the required learning. This paper will investigate the nature of the skills, consider some implications and barriers and then demonstrate connections between the nature of technological practice and ‘soft skills’. An essential consideration of this new learning focus is how it might be assessed. A new authentic assessment practice within a Technology Education tertiary education programme is introduced as an example of how knowledge and ‘soft skill’ acquisition can be combined and achieved.
What Does Design and Technology Learning Really Look Like?
Get PDFThis paper presents findings from a research study
investigating the relationship between intended learning
and actual learning in Design and Technology lessons
(Southall, 2015). The research focused upon the ‘pre
active’ phase of the teaching-learning process, that is the
teacher’s planning processes and procedures. The
planning processes and procedures used by teachers are
an essential pre-requisite to ensuring students’ progress
their learning and consequently a vital aspect of teaching.
Unfortunately however, it is an area of teaching often only
considered in the context of ‘novice’ teachers. With the
recent increasing focuses on the production of
measurable learning ‘outputs’ in education, understanding
the mechanisms behind effective planning processes that
provide appropriate learning experiences, producing a
range of learning outcomes is challenging for teachers and
schools.
The concept of being able to identify students’ learning
and consequently plan for, capture and then gather
learning, is directly related to the notion of learning
outcomes, however can learning outcomes demonstrate
the type of learning required to progress in Design and
Technology? The role and function of a learning outcome
within the teaching-learning process, the influences on
and issues involved in the application of Design and
Technology learning outcomes will be discussed.
Seventy lesson plans were analysed and the intended
learning outcome was identified and compared with the
actual learning outcome produced during the lesson. The
findings from this study reveal that the dominant,
systematic planning model used by many teachers,
provides only to a limited extent the relational framework
for the intended and actual learning that supports the
teaching-learning process. The prevailing focus on learning
outcomes identified during this research is, it is argued,
unable to fully support the multidimensionality and
multimodality integral to Design and Technology learning.
Instead it is restrictive and promotes a limited approach to
the subject in relation to both teaching and learning. The
study concludes that the planning processes and
procedures in Design and Technology need to be
developed with the clear intention of strengthening their
role within the teaching-learning process. This would
encourage the development of the underlying important
principles inherent within the subject and support
teachers’ and students’ achievement, creativity and
enjoyment in teaching and learning in the classroom
Collaborative Design Practices in Technology Mediated Learning
Get PDFThe present article examines how practices of computersupported
collaborative designing may be implemented in
an elementary classroom. We present a case study in
which 12-year-old students engaged in architectural design
under the guidance of their teacher and a professional
designer. The students were engaged in all aspects of
design processes, such as analysing the design of existing
houses, analysing the building site, determining building
volume, design facades, and floor plans; they formed
seven teams, each of which had its own house to design.
The data-analysis relied on the Knowledge Forum
database, consisting of students’ notes, pictures, sketches,
and photos. The participants’ quantitative contributions to
the database were analyzed with Analytic ToolKit which
underlies Knowledge Forum. A qualitative content analysis
was performed to the KF notes produced by the student
teams; a theory and data-driven approach for categorizing
the content of the notes was employed. The results
revealed that the student teams considered various design
constraints and familiarized themselves with their own
building site and regulations regarding their permitted
building volume. They constructed environmental models
and scale models, and made the calculations of gross floor
volume; scale drawings were inserted to KF’s
Environmental Model view as pictures and texts. The
results indicated that parallel working with conceptual
(design ideas) and material artefacts (architectural models,
prototypes of apartments, figures) supported one another.
The intent was that involving students in modeling
practices would help them build domain expertise,
epistemological understanding, and skills to create and
evaluate knowledge. Further, implications for designing
technology-mediated collaborative design processes are
discussed
Omar, D. 2017. Book Review of Prom, C.J. and Hinchliffe, L.J. (eds.) 2016. Teaching with Primary Sources. Chicago: Society of American Archivists
Get PDFInformation Literacy: Agendas for a Sustainable Future
Get PDFThis paper, somewhat an incomplete historical overview and personal perspective, outlines a number of key challenges and opportunities in relation to future directions and developments in information literacy as a field of research and professional practice. It gives attention to significant foundational (selective) scholarship in the field, identifies a number of challenges in relation to theoretical frameworks, research needs, determining outcomes and impacts, and pedagogical frameworks for information literacy instruction. It is posited that addressing these challenges can play a role in sustaining information literacy as a significant educational and social agenda.
Celebrating Undergraduate Students’ Research at York University
Get PDFThis article analyses the information literacy (IL) competencies of high-achieving undergraduate students through the lens of undergraduate research celebrations in a North American University. This article focuses on York University’s Undergraduate Research Fair, and shares findings from an analysis of students’ IL award submissions including lower-year (first and second year of university) and upper-year (third and fourth year of university) applicants. Submissions are analysed using a qualitative content analysis approach. The study’s findings point to the positive value of both IL and reference help in building high-achieving undergraduate students’ IL skills. Results indicate important future directions for IL instruction, such as the role of the flipped classroom, and the critical importance of embracing the Association of College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education to engage undergraduates with high-order IL concepts
Posing the million dollar question: What happens after graduation?
Get PDFThis paper reflects on the increase of information literacy research about the workplace and lifelong learning during the past 10 years. Librarians have long held that lifelong learning is the goal of information literacy instruction and training, but until the last decade, there has been a paucity of research about the information-seeking behaviour of students after they graduate. The origins and drivers of this shift in the research agenda are examined, drawing on US research studies by Project Information Literacy (PIL), and related research from around the world. Key takeaways from this body of work are discussed in addition to the implications findings have for academic librarians teaching and working with university students. Directions for future research are identified and discussed
Information literacy is a subversive activity: developing a research-based theory of information discernment
Get PDFThe theory of information discernment discussed here is firmly based on models, research and scholarship of information literacy coupled with theory and research in information behaviour. This paper will explore original research conducted by Walton and Hepworth and how it has developed over the last 10 years - the pilot study was reported in the very first edition of this journal in 2007. It will show that it has led to the emergence of the concept of information discernment and how Foucault’s discourse analysis theory has been used to further critically analyse its application. This paper will show how the research has been applied in a range of contexts, from enabling students in their first year of A-level study in the UK to carry out better research for their extended project qualification (EPQ), to teaching information literacy to undergraduates in various disciplines. This research will then be synthesised to create a new theory of information discernment summarised as: the ways in which social, psychological, behavioural and information source factors influence peoples’ judgements about information. I argue that information discernment should be included in future notions of information literacy and, in particular, informs the ACRL (2016) key threshold concept that authority is constructed and contextual. Attendant psychological notions of worldview, misinformation, confirmation bias, motivated reasoning and epistemic beliefs will be explored to determine how these articulate and enrich this new theory. The paper explores how this theory can be applied in practice beyond the learning environment, and argues that, ultimately, information literacy is a subversive activity which challenges received notions of the construction, communication and exchange of information and knowledge
Eileen Adams: Agent of change
No full textAuthored by Eileen Adams Agents of Change, as the title suggests, is a book that serves to explore how the author’s innovative initiatives have helped to shape government thinking, and subsequently have effected change art and design educators’ practice both in the UK and internationally.
