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

conceptual artefacts developed by the students, and that the progressive inquiry model is privileged as the analytic
staring point.
A selection of the lessons learned from DoCTA NSS as reported in Wasson & Ludvigsen (2003) include:
• Our major finding is that too few students use higher order skills as part of their learning activities. This
confirms the findings reported in many international studies. Students and teachers have a tendency to place
more importance on solving the task than on the domain concepts to be learned. Students need to employ
higher order skills when dealing with knowledge building in complex and conceptually-oriented environments
in order to go beyond fact finding.
• The teacher is extremely important in supporting, stimulating and motivating the students to integrate previous
knowledge with the new knowledge they are learning through the gen-etikk tasks.
• We find the same tendency as shown in the PISA study (Lie et al. ) that students do not have good enough
learning strategies. When meeting new ICT-supported learning situations, students need time and training in
their integrated use before their learning strategies become effective.
• Prompting categories triggered some of the students to a more critical and analytic stance towards the learning
resources and how they reason about ethical issues in the domain of gene technology.
• The students that engage themselves in the task at a deep level show evidence of the necessary skills needed to
critically examine the relationship between information and the argumentation that is part of the problem solving
process.
• The design, which includes small group collaboration, creates increased motivation and curiosity.
• When schools work together to create a distributed environment where students solve tasks together, the
management of the time schedules of the two schools needs to adjusted – or the school needs to have a flexible
time schedule. Practical arrangements create tensions and problems with the coordination between the schools.
• Students have little problem in the practical use of ICT-tools as long as the tools and network function as they
should.
• Several types of digital resources were created to support the development of the ability to integrate information
from different resources as part of knowledge construction. This is one important aspect in designing for the
cultivation of higher order skills.
Discussion and Conclusions
This paper has attempted to illustrate the relationship between the design and use of technology enhanced learning
environments and to illustrate how this is tightly intertwined in the institutional, pedagogical and technological
aspects of a learning environment. Furthermore, the view of design and use is heavily influenced by a sociocultural
perspective on learning that views activity as central to both design and analysis. The DoCTA 1 and DoCTA NSS
scenarios have been described in a way that highlights the pedagogical, technological and institutional design aspects
and how the evaluation studies have looked at the use, or activity as it emerges. Several general observations have
been presented for each of the projects.
Having the opportunity to work with networked learning over a number of years has had its advantages. Early on we
learned that it rarely was a problem with introducing a new technology to our students, and this was true for both 15
year olds and university students. What we encountered, in both groups, however, was their desire to use the
technological tools that they already used in their daily lives in our scenarios and we tried to accommodate this when
possible. For example, in VisArt, we incorporated their own email into the scenario and adjusted our data collection
to collect this email as well. In gen-etikk we found that the teenagers wanted to use IRC for having contact between
the distributed groups, so we incorporated this as well. In later projects we found that they used their mobile phones
for coordination and collaboration.
We also learned a lot about evaluation of networked learning, the main one is that there is no recipe for how to
evaluate and carry out analysis of networked learning. In DoCTA 1 we learned that there are many ways from which
a technology enhanced learning scenario can be viewed and that only one view will not tell the story. For example, a
technology that in incorporated into a pedagogical design may prove to be the wrong tool, or may have problems due
to the institutions infrastructure. It is not as simple as saying “the technology did not support learning”. Maybe the
usability of the tool is poor, or it did not fit the task for which it was chosen. Thus human computer interaction
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