edidaktikum: online community for scaffolding student teachers into digital culture
DESCRIPTION
Presentation at ECER 2014 in PortoTRANSCRIPT
eDidaktikum: online community for scaffolding student teachers into digital culture
Kairit Tammets, Priit Tammets, Mart Laanpere :: Tallinn University, Estonia
ECER 2014, Porto :: Network 6 :: Open Learning: Media, Cultures, Environments
Prologue
1993: e-mail courses, mailing lists for teachers
1997: Tiger Leap, national strategy for IT in schools
1999: the first teachers’ portal in Estonia
2005: 70% of all Estonian teachers trained in IT skills
2007: LeMill.net
2009: teachers’ portal Koolielu.ee, today: More than 7000 registered users (there are 14 000
teachers in Estonia) Less than 8000 Learning Objects
Problem
Teachers (both experienced and recently graduated ones) belong to different culture than their students, which is undermining the teaching & learning
Introductory courses on ICT and educational technology in ITE are like a brief walk in the Hong Kong museum of history (does not make you a “local”)
Majority of ITE staff are strangers to digital culture, some actively and publicly hostile towards “digital”
“Digital” activities have been established widely only in educational bureaucracy (campus information systems, e-gradebooks in schools)
Best practice does not “accumulate”
Scaffolding
“Scaffolding is the support given during the learning process, which is tailored to the needs of the student with the intention of helping the student achieve his/her learning goals” (Sawyer 2006)
Scaffolding is gradually fading, while student takes increasingly more responsibility for his/her learning
Scaffolding can be provided by another person or by the (software) system
Affordances of the software: Maslow’s Law of Instrument (“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail")
Design-based research
Wang & Hannafin (2005): “a systematic but flexible methodology aimed to improve educational practices through iterative analysis, design, development, and implementation, based on collaboration among researchers and practitioners in real-world settings, and leading to contextually-sensitive design principles and theories”
Researchers intervene to the process under study
Open-minded exploration of “what could be”
Multivocal, participatory process using mixed-methods approach
The concept of eDidaktikum
Controlled environment, scaffolding towards digital culture, PLE
Culture of sharing: communities for courses, ad-hoc groups, projects
Annotating learning resources, blog posts etc: taxonomies based on curriculum, ITE program, educational sciences
Competence-based assessment: connect taxonomies with learning outcomes and resources
Organisation: consortium involves all ITE providers in Estonia
Technology: CMS Drupal extended with our own plugins
Learning analytics: Learning Locker LRS (TinCan API)
Learning analytics
Exploring the potential of eDidatikum
Prototype of eDidaktikum was piloted in January – May 2014, this week the new version has been taken into use in more than 10 ITE courses
Gathering feedback from users
Sustainability strategy: software development continues even after ending the project funding
Integration with a wider “digital ecosystem”: personal blogs, SSO, SIS, CMS, teachers portal Koolielu, Finnish-Estonian Educational Cloud