This week’s Eminent conference brought together most European ministries of education, ICT suppliers, academics, teachers and teacher trainers. The change management process developed in the iTEC project (which includes Edukata) was showcased in the conference, and sparked both interest and collaboration possibilities.
Edukata is a design process that takes interesting new ideas and turns them into more useful Learning Activities. Publishing and sharing these results makes them more valuable, so the question is: Where to share them?
Within iTEC, there are two alternative tools for sharing, finding and adapting Learning Activities: Composer and SDE (both in prototype phase at this point, but publicly accessible). They both allow you to find and adapt existing Learning Activities and create your own. The SDE additionally can recommend tools, people, events, and other resources to support challenging activities.
Diane Laurillard from University of London presented Learning Designer, a downloadable prototype tool for creating, sharing and adapting more detailed lesson plans. They also talk about “learning activities”, but in their tool these are smaller, more limited tasks. Challenging tasks will link to their wiki that contains advice and guidance, which resemble quite a bit the Learning Activities developed in iTEC. So some confusion regarding the terminology, but otherwise I see the Learning Designer not duplicating functionality of the Composer, but rather supporting the next step in a teacher’s workflow: doing the detailed lesson or course planning after getting the broad strokes settled with the help of Learning Activities and Composer or SDE.
Our initial collaboration negotiations with Diane looked at the possibility of complementing their wiki with the Learning Activities designed in iTEC, and seeing how the Learning Designer would support teachers’ workflows following the Edukata process.
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