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

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Knowlton, D. S. (2007). I Design; Therefore I Research: Revealing DBR through Personal Narrative. Educational Technology & Society, 10 (4), 209-223. I Design; Therefore I Research: Revealing DBR through Personal Narrative Dave S. Knowlton Department of Educational Leadership; Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, USA // Tel: +1 618.650.3948 // Fax: +1 618.650.3808 // dknowlt@siue.edu ABSTRACT Design Based Research (DBR) is a new and still-emerging approach to research about design, learning, and allied areas. This article reports one designer’s experiences within a DBR project. Whereas most reports of DBR focus on the outcomes of the design itself, the current paper offers a hermeneutical perspective by focusing on the personal narrative of the designer. Using Edelson’s (2002) categories of learning as a basis for the discussion, the author reports the development of his own domain theories, design frameworks, and design methodology. Implications for other designers who would consider using personal narrative and hermeneutics are offered. Keywords Design-based research, Rapid prototyping, Personal narrative, Computer-mediated bulletin boards, Theory development Introduction Because design-based research (DBR) is a relatively new and still-emerging methodology that is used by learning scientists, we have much to learn about its processes and resulting products. Most scholarship about design research has focused on the outcomes, such as the ontological innovations, that emerged from a DBR experiment (cf., diSessa & Cobb, 2004). This is as it should be since one of the main points of DBR is to improve educational practice (Collins, Joseph, & Bielaczyc, 2004). Design, however, can be a valuable learning experience in its own right (Edelson, 2002; Knowlton, 2004a; Nelson, 2003; Nelson & Knowlton, 2005; Wiggins & McTighe, 2005), and even when designers are not acting as researchers, per se, their own reflections on their efforts within a design project can be useful toward a more complete understanding of design-based research as a phenomenon of engagement. Therefore, designers should examine their experiences as designers and describe the ways that they find themselves situated within design scenarios. One way for designers to illustrate their own situatedness within various scenarios is through personal narratives. Personal narratives can capture the experiences of designers within specific contexts, and thus create a shift from curriculum and pedagogical development towards DBR, a shift described and justified by Edelson (2002). But this type of DBR focuses on the interactions between a designer and a design, rather than the outcomes of design. After all, as noted by Barab and Squire (2004), the way that designers are situated within a context can impact the research itself. The purpose of this paper is to offer my personal narrative as a designer charged with prototyping strategies to support the use of a computer-mediated bulletin board among university students. In the first part of this paper, brief support for rapid prototyping as an appropriate design methodology within higher education is provided. In the second part of this paper, I describe the particular design efforts on which this paper is based. These first two parts of the paper serve as a contextual frame for supporting the third part of this paper, in which I offer a personal account of my design experiences. In the fourth part of this paper, my experiences are generalized in an effort to offer implications for other would-be designers who may find value in considering design scenarios through a personal narrative approach. In its totality, this paper is based in the exploratory research tradition (Marshall & Rossman, 1995), in that this paper serves “to investigate little understood phenomena to identify/discover important variables to generate hypotheses for further research” (p. 41). It also is framed by hermeneutics in that it "establishes context and meaning” for human action (Edelson, 1988; Patton, 1990, p. 85), and it attempts to provide an understanding of the contextualized “lived experience" (O'Grady, Righy, & Van den Hengel, 1987, p. 94) of a designer. ISSN 1436-4522 (online) and 1176-3647 (print). © International Forum of Educational Technology & Society (IFETS). The authors and the forum jointly retain the copyright of the articles. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than IFETS must be honoured. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from the editors at kinshuk@ieee.org. 209
Rapid Prototyping and Design Based Research Formal instructional design often is too expensive of a process to be viable in the higher education classroom on a day-to-day basis; and carefully-designed learning environments require such detailed planning that it is unrealistic to expect college professors to enter each semester with a solid design that fully supports an inquiry-based or exploratory environment. Sometimes, then, the best a faculty member can do is to prototype an assignment—to design “something” as a part of a new course preparation and tweak it over time through iterative cycles of implementation and revision. Reiser (2001) notes that rapid prototyping is established as a widely-used process because it allows a designer to arrive at instructional products more quickly. In this respect, rapid prototyping is also appropriate as a basis for design research in that design research is based on “progressive refinement”—“putting a first version of a design into the world to see how it works” and then revising the design “until all the bugs are worked out” (Collins, Joseph, & Bielaczyc, 2004, p. 18). Thus, rapid prototyping has dual potential in that it can serve both as a practical approach to curriculum and pedagogical development and as a basis for scholarly inquiry. In spite of this dual potential for productivity in higher education, the use of rapid prototyping in higher education is not well documented in academic literature. One explanation for this deficiency in the literature is that rapid prototyping is a process more closely associated with meeting goals that are indicative of business and industry (Stokes & Richey, 2000). Thus, higher education faculty members simply might overlook rapid prototyping as a viable design approach that is worthy of being documented. Even when those in higher education recognize rapid prototyping as a viable design approach, documentation efforts may be hindered because models of rapid prototyping are surprisingly complex (Stokes & Richey, 2000); and the sound execution of rapid prototyping often requires a support team, such as graduate assistants and experienced designers (cf., Lohr, Javeri, Mahoney, Gall, Li, & Strongin, 2003). The complexity of process and lack of available human capital to support such a process may cause faculty members to shy away from documenting their efforts. Furthermore, within most disciplines, scholarship that deals with pedagogy, curriculum development, and allied areas is not valued as highly as discipline-based research. Even where valued, reporting ideas from implementing a design like rapid prototyping requires a reconsideration of research paradigms. As Barab and Squire (2004) note, DBR has a “pragmatic philosophical,” not positivist, underpinning (p. 6). Most professors are trained in a positivist research tradition. This view seems supported by Dede (2004), who notes that scholars trained in traditional research are likely to view a DBR approach as not very promising. As I have pointed out, rapid prototyping may be a useful design approach within higher education, and rapid prototyping as a design methodology is congruent with DBR; yet, little literature documents the experiences of professors as they prototype materials and processes. This paper begins filling this void in the literature. The Design Context and Events In this section, I provide an overview of one experience where I used rapid prototyping as a methodology for developing instructional strategies in the context of higher education. My purpose here is not to offer a full treatment of the processes and products of this design, as this information has been reported elsewhere (e.g., Knowlton, 2006; Knowlton 2004b; Knowlton 2004c). Rather, my purpose is to provide a context for the personal narrative that is offered in the next section of this paper. In this section, I describe the context in which my design activities occurred, and I describe the prototyping of the assignment across three phases of implementation. Within the discussion of each phase, I describe the ways that the evolving context influenced design decisions and how each phase was evaluated. Context in which Rapid Prototyping Design Occurred Barab and Squire (2004) note the importance of considering the broader context in which a design is developed and implemented. Furthermore, Collins, Joseph, and Bielaczyc (2004) note that “setting” is a critical variable for characterization when reporting DBR efforts. In this case, the macro context in which the design was implemented played a large factor in the progression of the designs and, more to the exact point of this paper, in the ways that I found myself situated within the design process. 210
Page 1 and 2:
October 2007 Volume 10 Number 4
Page 3 and 4:
Abstracting and Indexing Educationa
Page 5 and 6:
The Relationship of Kolb Learning S
Page 7 and 8:
a question about learning together
Page 9 and 10:
affordances of networked learning s
Page 11 and 12:
included a unit on collaborative le
Page 13 and 14:
on at different times and work indi
Page 15 and 16:
• the numerous evaluation studies
Page 17 and 18:
wanted to work. The same inquiry pr
Page 19 and 20:
usability studies have a place in t
Page 21 and 22:
Milrad, M., & Jackskon, M. (2007).
Page 23 and 24:
information- and communication tech
Page 25 and 26:
Interactive Examination, the studen
Page 27 and 28:
Table 1. Criteria for grading OD st
Page 29 and 30:
content. Differences in the attitud
Page 31 and 32:
Even though further research on the
Page 33 and 34:
Olofsson, A. D. (2007). Participati
Page 35 and 36:
Etzioni (1993) points out that an i
Page 37 and 38:
programme. They are rather construc
Page 39 and 40:
to be that each individual trainee
Page 41 and 42:
Bernmark-Ottosson, A. (2005). Demok
Page 43 and 44:
The Knowledge Foundation (2005). IT
Page 45 and 46:
Figure 1. Design Theories in contex
Page 47 and 48:
attention as we frequently discuss
Page 49 and 50:
Blog Reflection This design concept
Page 51 and 52:
Narrative Structure (Form) Content
Page 53 and 54:
Löwgren, J., & Stolterman, E. (200
Page 55 and 56:
critique, neither do the single ind
Page 57 and 58:
suggested by Ljungberg (1999b) we c
Page 59 and 60:
the del.icio.us site (see figure 3)
Page 61 and 62:
Device cultures It is not only the
Page 63 and 64:
uilt using a camera-equipped PDA ru
Page 65 and 66:
Jones, C., Dirckinck-Holmfeld, L.,
Page 67 and 68:
Milrad, M., & Spikol, D. (2007). An
Page 69 and 70:
components to be able to deal with
Page 71 and 72:
compulsory throughout the project.
Page 73 and 74:
only with their existing day-today
Page 75 and 76:
As our work continues, we will try
Page 77 and 78:
cognition as well as self-regulated
Page 79 and 80:
Mobile mind map tool for stimulatin
Page 81 and 82:
the pictorial knowledge representat
Page 83 and 84:
Ericsson, K. A., & Simon, H. A. (19
Page 85 and 86:
Al-A'ali, M. (2007). Implementation
Page 87 and 88:
complex cognitive skills involve em
Page 89 and 90:
Table 1. CAT and a linear mathemati
Page 91 and 92:
It is agreed that the difficulty le
Page 93 and 94:
Figure 7. Our newly added factors i
Page 95 and 96:
question factors according to IRT;
Page 97 and 98:
Instructure 1 Login User-ID Passwor
Page 99 and 100:
Shute, V., & Towle, B. (2003). Adap
Page 101 and 102:
distinguish between partial knowled
Page 103 and 104:
esponse is identified, then the sco
Page 105 and 106:
are stored in the answer record and
Page 107 and 108:
2 (7) MNSQ = ∑WniZ ni ∑ Wni =
Page 109 and 110:
in the course. A randomized block d
Page 111 and 112:
To test whether ET can effectively
Page 113 and 114:
course, more comparison tests could
Page 115 and 116:
Fleischmann, K. R. (2007). Standard
Page 117 and 118:
educational standards in practice t
Page 119 and 120:
laboratory activities, which are bu
Page 121 and 122:
process is currently a largely top-
Page 123 and 124:
Hsu, Y.-S., Wu, H.-K., & Hwang, F.-
Page 125 and 126:
evolution with computing technology
Page 127 and 128:
Resources 0.55 0.72 e17 In my schoo
Page 129 and 130:
teachers’ instructional evolution
Page 131 and 132:
Regression models indicating relati
Page 133 and 134:
of beliefs about integrating comput
Page 135 and 136:
Sinko, M., & Lehtinen, E. (1999). T
Page 137 and 138:
concept of social support. Lastly,
Page 139 and 140:
Procedure Content analysis procedur
Page 141 and 142:
and mice are out of order. I have t
Page 143 and 144:
feature of supportive online groups
Page 145 and 146:
Anderson, J., & Lee, A. (1995). Lit
Page 147 and 148:
Schwab, R. L., Jackson, S. E., & Sc
Page 149 and 150:
Investigating the problem An extens
Page 151 and 152:
meets the anywhere, anytime require
Page 153 and 154:
minimise housekeeping tasks and fre
Page 155 and 156:
3. Join Group Discussion 4. Attend
Page 157 and 158:
Figure 4. Learning Shell showing He
Page 159 and 160:
engineering the Learning Shell so i
Page 161 and 162:
Olfos, R., & Zulantay, H. (2007). R
Page 163 and 164: portion of CourseInfo requires that
Page 165 and 166: Table 2. Assignment evaluation resp
Page 167 and 168: E-3c. Likert scale on usability: Th
Page 169 and 170: organized in four groups, namely: T
Page 171 and 172: The correlations were not high enou
Page 173 and 174: Data illustrate some reliability an
Page 175 and 176: nature, some specific core objectiv
Page 177 and 178: Frederiksen, J.R., & Collins, A. (1
Page 179 and 180: Bottino, R. M., & Robotti, E. (2007
Page 181 and 182: The Text Editor allows the editing
Page 183 and 184: Mathematical content and structure
Page 185 and 186: Consolidation exercises Solution co
Page 187 and 188: As to course components, the activi
Page 189 and 190: handle more formal representations
Page 191 and 192: Lagrange, J. B., Artigue, M., Labor
Page 193 and 194: processed information was classifie
Page 195 and 196: Method Participants The participant
Page 197 and 198: Table 5. Learning outcomes of diffe
Page 199 and 200: peers and benefited most from discu
Page 201 and 202: Kayes, D.C. (2005). Internal validi
Page 203 and 204: This paper considers the potential
Page 205 and 206: The first assumption ensures that c
Page 207 and 208: allowed to rise when external fundi
Page 209 and 210: The second option, lowering the cos
Page 211 and 212: Downes, S. (2003). Design and Reusa
Page 213: Appendix A. Good-enough approaches
Page 217 and 218: Initial Design Because the field-ba
Page 219 and 220: • reducing the number of required
Page 221 and 222: that they felt this hindrance; I fe
Page 223 and 224: goals” (Edelson, 2002, p. 114) wa
Page 225 and 226: more and more from the periphery of
Page 227 and 228: Edelson, M. (1988). The hermeneutic
Page 229 and 230: Wang, H.-Y., & Chen, S. M. (2007).
Page 231 and 232: If the universe of discourse U is a
Page 233 and 234: we can see that S( X ) − S( Y ) S
Page 235 and 236: Example 1: Let Ã and B ~ be two va
Page 237 and 238: columns shown in Table 2, where 1
Page 239 and 240: (3) Find the maximum value among th
Page 241 and 242: By applying Eq. (7), we can get the
Page 243 and 244: Q.2 carries 25 marks, Q.3 carries 2
Page 245 and 246: the proposed methods can evaluate s
Page 247 and 248: Gogoulou, A., Gouli, E., Grigoriado
Page 249 and 250: enabling learner (subject) to work
Page 251 and 252: • Self-, Peer- and Collaborative-
Page 253 and 254: (iii) Regulates the communication:
Page 255 and 256: Figure 3. A screen shot of the SCAL
Page 257 and 258: 2 nd study: Thirty-five students pa
Page 259 and 260: them characterized it as time and e
Page 261 and 262: Soller, A. (2001). Supporting Socia
Page 263 and 264: making reference to the others wher
Page 265 and 266:
Solution 2.2: Deliberately select h
Page 267 and 268:
just near a deadline, when it may b
Page 269 and 270:
assessed on an individual basis. Wi
Page 271 and 272:
- and even appreciated - by student
Page 273 and 274:
Panitz, T., & Panitz, P. (1998). En
Page 275 and 276:
Concept Mapping Concept mapping by
Page 277 and 278:
Research Questions In order to dete
Page 279 and 280:
with their teacher but rather than
Page 281 and 282:
Tukey’s HSD post hoc test reveale
Page 283 and 284:
collaboratively during study time?
Page 285 and 286:
Jegede, O.J., Alaiyemola, F.F., & O
Page 287 and 288:
esources. The use of synchronous te
Page 289 and 290:
The use of digital communication mo
Page 291 and 292:
contributed more information and en
Page 293 and 294:
3. Use the second screen for the le
Page 295 and 296:
• Use drawing to develop writing
Page 297 and 298:
student and teacher on the synchron
Page 299 and 300:
Vogel, J. J., Vogel, D. S., Cannon-
Page 301 and 302:
Cases The first set of ten case stu
Page 303 and 304:
Kılıçkaya, F. (2007). Website re
show all

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

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?