Children as e-designers : how do they understand learning?
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2007
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This thesis reports an investigation into children's understanding of learning, as they
engage with an e-Iearning design challenge.
It begins by making a case that children's views of learning are of crucial significance,
not only because of their position as pre-eminent learners in families and societies, but
also because their learning is at the heart of our culture's aspirations for education. Then,
it examines a selection of prior studies of learning in e-design contexts in order to gauge
the advantages of seeking the views of children about learning in an e-design context.
This consideration revealed the technological and educational potential of e-design,
suggesting that such a context would be opportune here.
Fortuitously, a large, ARC-funded Linkage Project (GENESIS - Generating e-Iearning
Systems in Schools) provided just such an e-design context. In this project, researchers
were keen to investigate whether the slowness of schools in appropriating e-Iearning
might be offset when students have a sustained opportunity to conceive, design and, as far
as possible, build an e-Iearning environment in which they and other students could
explore questions they were passionately curious about. As a case study within the
GENESIS Project, this study followed Papert's (1973) five-step process of educational
research. First, a theory of education (a biologically based generative theory) was
selected. Next, the ensuing set of conditions for the intellectual growth of children (the
e-Iearning design challenge itself) was laid out. These conditions were then implemented
within the context of The GENESIS Project: the children were equipped with the
opportunity and resources to design an e-Iearning environment to explore a science-and technology
topic of their choice (How and why do we think? How come we're not born
with the knowledge we know now?).
Of the large set of project data, six accounts were selected as representative of the
diversity and commonality of children's learning and their understanding of learning in
this study. Findings revealed that these children understand learning as generating, testing
and thereby modifying ideas, they appreciate that these events are influenced by each
learner's values and they recognise value in undertaking this knowledge gaining activity
as part of a learning community. Furthermore, these children explicitly enact opportune
learning experiences, particularly technologically, demonstrating their fluency as
technological thinkers, capable of having technological ideas about learning.
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