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In this article, I propose a theory of pedagogical praxis. Pedagogical praxis begins with the premise that under the right conditions, computers and other information technologies can make it easier for students to become active participants in meaningful projects and practices in the life of their community and suggests that professional practices such as architecture, mediation, and journalism can provide constructive models for helping students learn from such experiences. In this vision, new technology reinvigorates Dewey’s (1915) idea of linking school with society. Technology builds a bridge that allows young people to participate in the learning practices of professionals; in the process, they develop epistemological frameworks that organize the skills, habits, and understandings they need to thrive in a complex, postindustrial society. Although further work needs to be done to explore the processes through which such learning can take place, studies suggest that this perspective may be a productive avenue for continuing research. This article presents an overview of the theories and methods that inform such work. Dewey’s collected writings remain a classic and unsurpassed elaboration of

In an article in this issue of Innovate, Jim Gee asks the question "What would a state of the art instructional video game look like? " Based on the game Full Spectrum Warrior, he concludes that one model is "to pick [a] domain of authentic professionalism well, intelligently select the skills and knowledge to be distributed, build in a related value system as integral to gameplay, and clearly relate any explicit instructions to specific contexts and situations " (2005, para. 20). That is, he describes a good instructional game as an adaptation of "authentic professionalism " in video game format. Here I would like to give a more detailed account of this idea by looking more closely at the terms "authenticity " and "professionalism. " I begin by connecting these concepts to some of the theories of learning on which they are based: ideas about communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998), reflective practice (Schon 1987), epistemic frames (Shaffer 2004a) and pedagogical praxis (Shaffer 2004b). These theories link games, simulations, and professional practices. In so doing, they provide tools and techniques to guide the development of games for learning. To show how this works, I will give an example of one such game that, while still a prototype, demonstrates how a deliberately constructed simulation of professional practice can be both an engaging activity and a compelling learning environment. Epistemic Frames and Reproductive Practices

ABSTRACT. This paper suggests that from a cognitive-evolutionary perspective, computational media are qualitatively different from many of the technologies that have promised educational change in the past and failed to deliver. Recent theories of human cognitive evolution suggest that human cognition has evolved through four distinct stages: episodic, mimetic, mythic, and theoretical. This progression was driven by three cognitive advances: the ability to “represent ” events, the development of symbolic reference, and the creation of external symbolic representations. In this paper, we suggest that we are developing a new cognitive culture: a “virtual ” culture dependent on the externalization of symbolic processing. We suggest here that the ability to externalize the manipulation of formal systems changes the very nature of cognitive activity. These changes will have important consequences for mathematics education in coming decades. In particular, we argue that mathematics education in a virtual culture should strive to give students generative fluency to learn varieties of representational systems, provide opportunities to create and modify representational forms, develop skill in making and exploring virtual environments, and emphasize mathematics as a fundamental way of making sense of the world, reserving most exact computation and formal proof for those who will need those specialized skills.

Quantitative and qualitative inquiry are sometimes portrayed as distinct and incompatible paradigms for research in education. Approaches to combining qualitative and quantitative research typically “integrate” the two methods by letting them co-exist independently within a single research study. Here we describe intra-sample statistical analysis (ISSA) as a general technique for using quantitative tools to support qualitative inquiry so as to simultaneously provide warrants from qualitative and quantitative traditions. In certain circumstances ISSA makes it possible to relax the requirement that individual participants be treated as the unit of analysis in statistical models, and thus provides justification for coding qualitative observations and drawing statistically based conclusions about observations in a qualitative context. We developed ISSA and describe it here both because it can be used as a tool for qualitative research, and because it illuminates the relationship between method and interpretation in the research traditions that it bridges. In this article, we (a) summarize key features of qualitative and quantitative research relevant to ISSA; (b) describe ISSA as an analytical technique; (c) discuss the quantitative and qualitative justification for ISSA and the nature of the conclusions that can be drawn based on it; and (d) explore the more general implications of ISSA for qualitative and quantitative inquiry.

This paper reports on a multidisciplinary collaborative project at UBC developing haptic/kinesthetic HCI for mathematics learning. It allows students to design landscapes using functions, and then to ‘ride over ’ these landscapes via a forcefeedback haptic device and, in future, with a programmed exercise bicycle. The project’s rationale comes from the following hypothesis arising from Gerofsky’s (2008) empirical research on gesture in the pedagogy of functions: That the ‘top’ (most capable and imaginative) mathematics students engage with graphs of mathematical functions in tactile/kinesthetic modes, rather than an exclusively visual mode.

In this article we examine educational assessment in the 21st century. Digital learning environments emphasize learning in action. In such environments, assessments need to focus on performance in context rather than on tests of abstracted and isolated skills and knowledge. Digital learning environments also provide the potential to assess performance in context, because digital tools make it possible to record rich streams of data about learning in progress. But what assessment methods will use this data to measure mastery of complex problem solving—the kind of thinking in action that takes place in digital learning environments? Here we argue that one way to address this challenge is through evidence-centered design 1 —a framework for developing assessments by systematically linking models of understanding, observable actions, and evaluation rubrics to provide evidence of learning. We examine how evidence-centered design can address the challenge of assessment in new media learning environments by presenting one specific theory-based approach to digital learning, known as epistemic games