Learning Tech 11 (English introduction)
The theme and title of this issue of Learning Tech is New Technologies – New Potentials. New challenges – new didactic designs
Preface
By Rasmus Leth Jørnø, Stig Toke Gissel, Thomas Illum Hansen, Stefan Ting Graf & Anne-Mette Nortvig
In this issue of Learning Tech, the articles address both what questions new technologies can raise in educational contexts and what answers they can contribute. The possibilities for including new technologies in education and teaching can give rise to the development of new didactic designs with consequences, advantages and disadvantages for both teachers and learners. Some of these are highlighted in this issue of Learning Tech. However, the issue does not only examine what potential new technologies can unfold; it also examines how contextual challenges and changes place demands back on the technology – with new questions as a result.
Read full preface
In the issue’s first article, Technology understandings in the professions, Thomas Kjærgaard and Anna Marie Lassen examine, based on qualitative empirical research, how students in health education are more aware of the role of technologies in their professions and perceive them as creating opportunities with significance for their understanding of the profession, while teachers and in contrast to this, the education students perceive the technologies to a greater extent as documentation tools and possible professional tools that do not have a direct impact on their understanding of the profession. In this way, the study contributes to an up-to-date and research-based view of the diversity in the importance of technology understanding for professional education.
The article Between design, didactics and discourse by Thomas Illum Hansen and Stig Toke Gissel analyzes a so-called adaptive learning tool used in primary school in the subject of mathematics. The authors approach the analysis discursively and point to discursive struggles, dilemmas and the need for critical assessments as these teaching aids are put to use. Both very concretely in relation to the design and use of the teaching aid, the need for reeducation in practice and not least in an overall societal consideration.
Camilla Finsterbach Kaup investigates in the article Digital artefacts in mathematics teaching how digital artefacts can help support students’ computational and mathematical understanding. The basis is a case with 3 classes at a school, where Kaup investigates the use of digital artefacts in didactic iterative cycles with a focus on semiotic mediation and the use of micro:bits as a digital artefact in one class.
In the article Adoption of an Adaptive Learning Technology in Nurse Education, Anne-Mette Nortvig, Rasmus Leth Jørnø and Bjarke Lindsø Andersen examine how nursing students experience and relate to this new form of teaching aids. Their qualitative pilot study shows that the students react very differently to a learning tool that they are not used to. In this way, one can say that the adaptive learning tool must not only adapt to the student, but that the student must also adapt to the built-in logics of the new learning tool.
Interactive subject didactics is written by two PhD students from UCL, Thomas Roed Heiden and Michael Peter Jensen. The article works with the question of how student teachers can transcend the binary between theory and practice in their discussions of videos from primary school Danish lessons. The purpose of the article is to investigate the creation of the didactic space through the use of the concept of intra-action.
Sanne Lisborg deals in the article Virtual laboratories – tools to think with potentials and challenges by using virtual laboratories in science teaching. The article looks at the learning practices that arise from the use of PhET Interactive Simulations and Labster, two different virtual laboratories that respectively let the user simulate isolated scientific phenomena and stage experimental work in a laboratory context.
The last article of the issue Open the ‘black boxes’ of teaching by Stine Ejsing-Duun, Laura Bøgelund Gravesen, Andreas Harboe Salskov Ager and Lone Dirckinck-Holmfeld pleads for a rethinking of teaching based on the experiences with technology in connection with an online course during the second wave of Covid-19. The students on the course “ICT, interaction and organization” were given the task of investigating and further developing the learning platform Moodle as a common boundary object in the context of problem-based learning. The authors’ analysis of three design cases identifies mutually invisible processes, so-called ‘black boxes’ in relation to the teachers’ organization of and the students’ preparation for teaching. The study contributes to a language to open up and make explicit the invisible processes through a model with four orientations for learning platforms.
We wish you a very happy reading!
The thematic editorial team
