Converging E-learning Technologies from Diverging Perspectives: Assistive and Educational Technology
In this cooperative inquiry, the authors examined the overlapping boundaries that are emerging between assistive technologies (AT) and instructional technologies (IT) in the context of new and ever-more powerful digital tools for learning and instruction. Similarities were revealed in disciplinary perspectives on definitions, adoption and use, research objectives, and growing emphases on human motivation and agency. Institutional barriers remain in bridging gaps, but potential processes and projects for developing new communities of practice are identified.
The development of accessibility practices in e-learning: an exploration of communities of practice
The UK’s 2001 Special Educational Needs and Disability Act has charged learning technologists with the responsibility of ensuring that electronic teaching materials can be accessed by disabled students. In an attempt to explore how learning technologists are developing practices to produce accessible electronic materials this paper will present a review of the accessibility literature and identify key issues that may influence the ‘accessibility’ practices of learning technologists. These emerging issues are interpreted using Wenger’s theory of communities of practice, with a particular emphasis on the development of accessibility practices that may be shared by a number of related communities of practices and on how the focus of accessibility practices may soon shift from the product to the process of accessibility. DOI: 10.1080/0968776042000211539
Evaluating pedagogical classification frameworks for learning objects: A case study
The use of toolkits and reference frameworks for the design and evaluation of learning activities enables the systematic application of pedagogical criteria in the elaboration of learning resources and learning designs. Pedagogical classification as described in such frameworks is a major criterion for the retrieval of learning objects, since it serves to partition the space of available learning resources depending either on the pedagogical standpoint that was used to create them, or on the interpreted pedagogical orientation of their constituent learning contents and activities. However, pedagogical classification systems need to be evaluated to assess their quality with regards to providing a degree of inter-subjective agreement on the meaning of the classification dimensions they provide. Without such evaluation, classification metadata, which is typically provided by a variety of contributors, is at risk of being fuzzy in reflecting the actual pedagogical orientations, thus hampering the effective retrieval of resources. This paper describes a case study that evaluates the general pedagogical dimensions proposed by Conole et al. to classify learning resources. Rater agreement techniques are used for the assessment, which is proposed as a general technique for the evaluation of such kind of classification schemas. The case study evaluates the degree of coherence of the pedagogical dimensions proposed by Conole et al. as an objective instrument to classify pedagogical resources. In addition, the technical details on how to integrate such classifications in learning object metadata are provided.