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.
Teacher Professional Learning in an Age of Compliance: Mind the Gap
PART I: Present, past and future. 1. Introduction: Current Problematics in Teacher Professional Learning. 2. How Did we Get Here? Historical Perspectives on Inquiry-based Professional Learning. 3. Developing courage. PART II: Professional Knowledge Building: Tenets and tools. 4. Mode 3 Knowledge: What it is and why we need it. 5. Inquiry as a framework for professional learning: Interrupting the dominant discourse. 6. Reclaiming Quality. PART III: Tensions, contradictions, competing agendas,- 7. What's at stake and what's at risk? 8. Who pays the piper? Agendas, Priorities and Accountabilities. 9. What Learning Community? A Knotty Problem. PART IV: Closing the gap,- 10. Case Study: The Higher Degree. 11. The Coalition of Knowledge Building Schools. 12. Closing the Gap - Conclusion.
The use of practitioners concepts of inclusivity to inform the planning of learning activities
The goal of this research is to design a prototype for a tool that represents a 'space' in which practitioners can become familiar with their own concepts and mental models by reflecting on the metaphors through which they express those models. Results was presented from the initial stage of the analysis of practitioner metaphors to inform the design of a planning/decision software application to aid academic staff in identifying their own support needs in order to achieve the goal of creating an accessible learning experience within their own working context.