Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Representing learning designs - chapter review

"Learning Design" versus "learning design" key distinctions need to be made in chapter 7 and 8 of Beetham and Sharpe's book - " Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age". Learning Design refers to the IMS Learning Design specification which, according to Britain in Chapter 8 of the book, is an interoperability specification, an educational modelling language and a design methodology with associated tools. Learning design on the other hand refers to the instructional design generally.

Chapter 7, representing practioner experiences through learning design and patterns (McAndrew and Goodyear), looks at how we can express instructional design. It looks at the IMS LD specification at first but then looks to abstract on this using educational practice patterns.

Britain's chapter, chapter 8, goes into a bit more detail about the IMS LD specification and looks at the type of tool support it has, which is quite sparse and very much in an embryonic stage. All the tools are basically designed by the research community for the research community. The chapter does mention some more mainstream VLEs and tools will be looking to adopt IMS LD, but I am not sure this is the case - the chapter mentions that IMS LD is on the Moodle development roadmap but I have never seen that and there is no citation for this claim - perhaps someone can point me in the right direction?

This is another chicken and egg scenario in that we wont understand the potential of LD until we have good tool support but tool support for LD wont be built until the potential is understood.

Nice quote to finish the post:
Successful teaching involves a variety of strategies and techniques for engaging, motivating and energizing student over and above merely presenting them with well-designed learning materials. (Britain, 2007)