IT AND LEARNING DESIGN (L-ILD )

General goals

To rethink learning processes through IT in the educational sector, in business and in organisations, with a particular focus on IT in primary and higher education.

The lab addresses learning and educational design in the following fields of research:

• IT and academic subjects
• Digital production
• IT, space, and body
• IT and organisation
• IT, gamification, game and play

STUDENTS OWN DIGITAL PRODUCTION

The goal is to generate knowledge of how the students' own digital production can facilitate learning processes, improve academic and interdisciplinary learning outcomes and enhance the students’ reflexive awareness of their own possibilities for developing creative and innovative processes in producing knowledge.

The intermediate goals are:

• to research the productive process and develop concepts for students' autonomous processes.
• to generate concepts for learning, play, creativity, and innovative aspects of digital productions.
• to generate concepts for intuitive interaction using touch technologies
• to generate concepts connected to specific types of interaction and multimodality in the students' digital productions.
• to develop methods which identify learning, play, creativity, and innovation as aspects of digital productions.
• to develop models for the teacher's didactic framing, for the students' didactic design of own digital productions, in connection to different subjects and interdisciplinary projects.

It, gamification, games and play

The goal is to generate knowledge of ways to research and develop the use of game and play dynamics in formal and informal learning contexts and their interconnections.

The intermediate goals are:

• to generate concepts for understanding creative game and play practices in formal and informal contexts.
• to research the  role and status of technology in games and play in a learning context
• to develop didactic models that facilitate game-based and play-based learning processes.
• to investigate and develop the integration of play dynamics (gamification) in the classroom to further learning and engagement.
• to describe different types of knowledge, player types and motivation in specific play-based learning environments such as crowdsourcing games and scientific discovery games.
• to investigate and develop the use of location-based games with a focus on experiences and recognition potential in urban spaces.
• to investigate and describe the "authenticity" of learning content in relation to game-based and play-based learning processes.

IT and organisation

The goal is to generate knowledge of learning processes in organisations, particularly in relation to knowledge of the significance of new social practices (new digital types of interaction, informal sharing of knowledge, dialogue processes) for team learning and organisatorial learning.

The intermediate goals are:

• to (further) develop concepts for skill development and for the implementation of 'theory generated' practices in organisations.
• to develop models for changing and anchoring skill development and the implementation of IT and learning in organisations.
• to develop models for organisatorial learning based on digitally mediated social practices.
• to develop didactic designs for organisatorial learning based on digitally mediated social practices.

IT and academic subjects

The goal is to generate knowledge of how IT and media can support and transform academic subjects and their teaching, particularly the subjects Danish, mathematics, languages, and natural sciences.

The intermediate goals are:

• to develop IT didacics -  connected sets of theroretically based concepts and models which can inform goal selection, the selection of learning content, and the organisation and evaluation of teaching.
• to develop concepts to understand and describe the use of IT and media within subjects and across them
• to develop concepts to understand the value and cultural aspects of using IT and media together in education
• to develop methods to improve the development of teachers' IT-didactic skills within specific subject areas.
• to develop reviews surveying recent national research projects involving the use of IT and media in the classroom – especially in Danish, mathematics, the natural sciences and the arts.
• to develop models of the interplay between IT-integrated subject practices across educational systems.
• to develop and improve selected technologies (products) so that they can be used in education.

it, space and body

The goal is to achieve insight into how learning spaces are created, sensed, and experienced in physical and digitally mediated practices, to build knowledge of how experiences of 'tele-presences' are created in physical and digitally mediated practices, and to investigate the extent to which this may be described as a participant experience of 'a third space'.

The intermediate goals are:

• to develop concepts and models of the participant experience of 'a third space' and of processes involving formal, informal, synchronous and asynchronous contexts.
• to generate concepts for the interaction between body and digitally/physically mediated time and space.
• to generate concepts connected to the various types of interaction and multimodality in video-mediated space.
• to review and further develop existing concepts of  'tele-presence', space and place research, tactility and sensuality/corporality as they relate to the overall goal.
• to develop ethnographic methods for research into the interaction between body and digitally/physically mediated space.
• to develop didactic models for use in video conferences.

Associate Professor Lars Birch Andreasen
Phone: 9940 2361
E-mail: lba@hum.aau.dk