October 2007 Volume 10 Number 4 - Educational Technology ...

wanted to work. The same inquiry process was repeated in this phase, with about one week of inquiry of questions
before publishing articles in Skoleavisa. It was believed that focusing on scientific aspects before they turned to the
ethical aspects would increase the students’ abilities to argue on their ethical viewpoints. By the end of the project
every group had contributed and 60 articles were published in the online newspaper.
Evaluation of the use of gen-etikk
Figure 6. The Web Portal for gen-etikk
There have been a number of empirical studies carried out on the DoCTA NSS data. The design of a learning
environment needs to account for institutional, technological and pedagogical aspects at different levels. Three of the
evaluations that take an institutional perspective on learning are summarised in this section. An institutional
perspective takes student actions and activities as a staring point, not the goals in the curriculum or some scientific
template. Diversity, multiple voices, the actors’ different goal and intensions, and the institutional history are some
of the aspects that constitute a specific practice. These aspects create a basis for understanding how students act in
specific situations.
Rysjedal and Baggetun (2003) discuss issues related to infrastructure and design of learning environments. The
established infrastructure in an institution creates both constraints and affordances for how new technology can be
integrated. In the design of a learning environment that should work across institutional boundaries it is important to
take the local infrastructures into consideration. Rysjedal and Baggetun take a broad perspective on infrastructure,
and thereby make an important bridge between technological and social perspectives on how new technology can be
introduced into social systems. They discuss how the design of a learning environment needs to take technological,
organisational and pedagogical aspects into consideration.
In Arnseth, Ludvigsen, Guribye and Wasson (2002) and Arnseth (2004) describe how rhetorical aspects of human
talk and discourse become important if we want to understand how students co-construct knowledge in schools.
Their empirical analyses show very clearly that students make specific interpretation of the task to which they are
exposed and to how the institution actually works. The authors argue that knowledge building as a metaphor as used
in some of the literature seems too be too rationalistic. In a similar vein, Ludvigsen and Mørch (2003) criticize the
progressive inquiry model proposed by Mukkonenen et al. (1999) because it has a too distinct focus on the
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