Moving between material and conceptual structure: Developing a card-based method to support design for learning
Section snippets
Designing for learning—what can we learn from educational research?
Traditional definitions of learning tend to privilege learning as acquisition (Learn, 2018) where what is being acquired is a stable body of knowledge that, once mastered, can be demonstrated through a persistent or sustained change in behaviour. This pairing of acquisition and transmission is at odds with many current theories of learning. Richer conceptualisations of learning include the collaborative creation of knowledge through sustained activities involving shared knowledge objects and
Designing for learning—what can we learn from design research?
The rapid diffusion of ‘Design Thinking’ has created a demand for clear and actionable knowledge about design methods, and in response Dorst (2011) describes the underlying logic of various forms of reasoning commonly used in problem solving (Table 1). In doing so, he highlights disciplinary differences, not in terms of absolutes, but as a necessary precursor to understanding when designerly ways of thinking ought to be brought to bear on a problem and how they might be said to work in practise.
Deriving a design-based method from an educational framework
Many card-based methods are described in the literature with examples dating back to the 1950s (for comprehensive reviews see Roy and Warren, 2019, Wölfel and Merritt, 2013). Many recent card-based tools focus on user experience or human-centred design. Examples include Envisioning Cards that encourage designers to incorporate human values into their processes (Friedman & Hendry, 2012), Tango Cards that make knowledge about designing tangible learning games accessible to a broad range of
Bringing it all together—the ACAD cards in use
This section is presented in two parts. In the first we reflect on how the material properties of the cards support collaborative sensemaking. In the second we explore the user experience based on a video recording of a workshop and an interview with a colleague who has used the ACAD framework and cards in designing and delivering academic professional development workshops.
Conclusion
The ACAD cards evolved in response to challenges we encountered communicating educational research to heterogenous teams engaged in designing for learning. This included difficulty identifying and articulating individual beliefs about learning that confounded convergence on a shared epistemology of learning, difficulty focussing on the designable and resisting premature solutions, and difficulty imagining innovative design alternatives.
This article draws on deep theoretical roots in education
Declaration of interests
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
This method draws on research carried out by both authors with the support of Professor Peter Goodyear as part of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate Fellowship (FL100100203). Pippa Yeoman's contributions to writing this paper were further supported by ARC Discovery Grant (DP150104163).
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2022, Computers and Education: Artificial IntelligenceCitation Excerpt :Yeoman (2015) suggested the use of the ACAD wireframe to map (via a grid) in a single view (Fig. 4), where the multiple designable elements from ACAD are laid out at different levels of granularity – micro, meso, and macro. Drawing on the ACAD framework, the wireframe, and design anthropology (Gunn et al., 2013), Yeoman and Carvalho (2019) created the ACAD Toolkit, which consists of a cards-based method, task scaffolds, learning scenarios, and images, which are used to facilitate theoretically informed educational design discussions. As such, the toolkit has been used to support educational design teams by scaffolding processes of knowledge sharing and knowledge integration (McDonnell, 2009), often used as conversational prompts to encourage negotiation of shared meaning, with respect to valued forms of learning activity and the designable elements that can come together in support of these (Goodyear, Carvalho, & Yeoman, 2021; Yeoman & Carvalho, 2019).
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