Abstract

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce an instructional model for technology-enhanced learning in the framework of a design-oriented pedagogy. The model is based on the collaborative designing of learning objects representing real objects in nature and culture environments. Project-based learning, whole task approach, object-oriented learning, multiple perspectives and semantically rich objects constitute the framework for a collaborative design process to articulate, build and share knowledge constructed in a community of learners, teacher and experts with the support of social media and mobile technologies. The co-development process supported by socially shared tools will provide possibilities for working with knowledge objects related to the physical, conceptual or cultural artefacts, so that the constructed learning objects can serve as starting points for others to adapt, integrate and develop them further to represent the phenomenon in question. In the paper, the theoretical background of the pedagogy, the instructional model designed and the development of the model will be introduced. Four design experiments demonstrate the applicability of the model in different educational contexts. Keywords: pedagogical model, learning by collaborative designing, learning object, projectbased learning, design-oriented pedagogy Categories: L.0, L.2 Introduction Many contemporary researchers have emphasised that most of the learning that occurs across a person's life span occurs in various informal and non-formal environments and communities. Learning is a lifelong process (Life-long) that takes place in various situations (Life-wide) and in cultural practices in which we participate (Life-deep). Banks et al. Journal of Universal Computer To prepare all students to learn throughout their lives and in settings far beyond classrooms, learning environments should be regarded as a kind of extended school environment. In addition to traditional classrooms, they should be built around authentic activities that are situated outside the school as well as around technological tools that can function as bridges between the school and the external environments This paper focuses on design-oriented pedagogy that connects learning in formal, non-formal and informal settings. In the first part of the paper, the theoretical framework and design principles of the pedagogy as well as a description of its expected application will be presented. Then, examples of it's application and evaluation through design experiments are presented, and the future directions are discussed. The framework for a design-oriented pedagogy For most of the twentieth century, school education has been viewed as a process of transferring information from higher authority down to the students, and learning, as a series of steps to be mastered 2098 Vartiainen H., Liljestrom A., Enkenberg J.: Design-Oriented Pedagogy ... people who come from different backgrounds and possess diverse expertise (Communities of Interests, see Design is a social process and a core human activity Learning to collaborate and connect through technology is an essential skill and competence that future societies will expect from its people Learning by designing A 'design-oriented pedagogy' contains elements about learning by designing, but instead of construing artefacts, the emphasis is more on working with knowledge that is embedded or bound with physical objects and artefacts. Real-life objects, for example, in museums and natural or cultural environments that offer exceptional opportunities to pursue and develop an interest with real-world phenomena, engage in inquiry and develop digital representations. Authentic objects are potential mediators of learning, because these local objects can mediate global phenomena and make them approachable. Following Figure 1: The framework for a design-oriented pedagogy A design-oriented pedagogy is based on three pillars: participatory learning as a vital conception for learning, Internet as a technological infrastructure, and codevelopment as an instructional model and as a powerful social innovation that underlines pedagogical principles. Participatory learning places emphasis on self-learning and participation in research and development communities. Internet, as a technological environment, can enhance collaborative learning and, on the other hand, form a basis for personal learning environments. The technologies that the students own, especially mobile phones, provide tools to support learning across different contexts and to collect various empirical data. Social media provides platforms for students to share, develop and organise knowledge and to collaborate within and outside the school community. Co-development has been demonstrated as being a powerful social innovation in product and software development (co-development; see Open Source and Linux phenomenon). It can also serve as a pedagogical basis for learning institutions. Codevelopment enables participation in communities that can mediate those practices that their full members implement. It places the emphasis on the social character of learning and enables the participants to move from the periphery to the centre of the activities and gradually become full members of those communities (especially research and professional communities of practices). The students' agency will resemble those of scientists, designers and architects in authentic contexts. Referring to students as 'architects' means, for example, that they 2100 Vartiainen H., Liljestrom A., Enkenberg J.: Design-Oriented Pedagogy ... participate in collaborative designing of spaces for learning and create innovative solutions within the constraints of the situation and context. When connecting ongoing research in education, students can as part of their own studies gather relevant material for the research and development work and, at the same time, participate in the study. In this way, it is possible to create temporary research and development communities, which, through inquiry-centred activities, mediate the action and thinking models that are specific to the representatives of the expert community in question. Design-oriented pedagogy is a kind of co-development process where people learn through their interactions and participation with others, in fluid relationships that are the result of shared interest [see The design process emphasises authentic, idea-centred activities in collaboration with and between peers and teams, ideally heterogeneous and multi-aged student groups with varying expertises. Here, the students are not just learning from one another, they are learning with one another Design-oriented pedagogy encourages working with domain experts and participating in the activities of expert communities. However, the role of the external expert is not only to provide answers to what we know about the phenomenon to be studied. It is also important in mediating the thinking and action models typical of the expert and thus enable students to understand what expert knowledge is and how we get to know something. In this way, design-oriented pedagogy places the emphasis on the social character of learning and opens also possibilities to mediate the tacit knowledge of expert culture [see The role of the teacher in a design-oriented pedagogy is to act as a tutor, organiser and provider of social support, and to create an atmosphere that encourages students' collaborative activities and the design process. In this kind of learning community, the expertise and authority are dispersed rather than centralised, and members of the community have valuable expertise to share Learning objects as design tasks In the recent decade, the concept of 'learning objects' has received remarkable attention and enthusiasm in educational and e-learning communities 2101 Vartiainen H., Liljestrom A., Enkenberg J.: Design-Oriented Pedagogy ... According to activity theory, knowledge as well as learning and action are in close interaction, and learning and knowledge emerge from action. The three factors, subject, object and tool, are all essential here and constitute a system. The subject comprises the social arrangement whereby learners participate in the action [Jonassen, 2000, Roth and People, objects and tools constitute an interacting system in the co-development of learning objects, to serve as representatives for the phenomenon in question. We define learning objects as 'designed digital representations from real objects in context that are related to the phenomenon in question and to tools that mediate the process of the negotiation of meaning'. Proceeding of the co-development process of the learning object design is presented in [ The first level of the construction process is choosing the affordances, that is, identifying the phenomenon and selecting the real objects representing it. The phenomenon will be framed by choosing the domain perspective, examining reported research, selecting the tools and media, and undertaking case studies in nature or culture environments. The contextualisation of constructed learning objects involves organisation and elaboration of the design resources, technical implementation, and designing of the scaffolds for future use, such as agency, guidelines, tags, and information resources. When learning is taking place from and with constructed learning objects, the process is reversed. Social media provides new means for organise people's joint efforts for developing artefacts and practices, and is a new form of mediation [Paavola et al. in press]. In developing learning objects, one can construct different kinds representations of physical objects (e.g. video clip, audio, drawing, map, picture or textual information) by using students mobile or smart phones. The various mobile technologies provide great opportunities for the collection of empirical data and transform the ideas of students into digital representations that can be jointly shared, discussed and further developed within the community. The learning object can be shared in a chosen environment (e.g Wiki, YouTube) and may serve as an object of learning for others as well as for people outside the educational institution. However, the learning object itself is not usually open for editions, modifications or further development, like for example, the articles of Wikipedia. In Wikipedia, anyone can modify or make changes to chosen content, and what content remains usually depends on experienced editors and published reliable sources like academic and peer-reviewed publications. A single learning object is not designed to provide all the right answers or a comprehensive description of certain phenomena, but several learning objects together can offer different kinds of 2102 Vartiainen H., Liljestrom A., Enkenberg J.: Design-Oriented Pedagogy ... perspectives and interpretations about it. Therefore, the learning object combines different individual perspectives of the phenomena and can make learning whole in a new manner. Figure 2: Procedural model for learning object design An instructional model for the implementation of a design-oriented pedagogy Based on the abovementioned viewpoints, the instructional model for a designoriented pedagogy and related dimensions of learning environment are presented in [ 2103 Vartiainen H., Liljestrom A., Enkenberg J.: Design-Oriented Pedagogy ... Figure 3: A proposed instructional model for a design-oriented pedagogy In practice, the learning process is divided into four main phases, which partly take place at school, partly in the real environment and partly in the virtual environments [see 2104 Vartiainen H., Liljestrom A., Enkenberg J.: Design-Oriented Pedagogy ... When the common challenge is articulated and the phenomena are chosen, the next task is to approach the common theme from the direction of the students' own research perspectives, research objects, methods and detailed research questions. The students are expected to choose the real object in the natural or cultural environment that mediates the phenomenon and provides answers to the proposed related complex questions. Design is followed by the documentation of the learning objects and the students' travel to the natural or cultural environment to study real physical objects, interact with experts and collect different kinds of design resources by using various technologies [see In the application of the model, the following principles will be highlighted: -Anchoring the learning process on learners' ideas, thoughts, conceptions and interpretations about the research questions to be investigated (epistemological principle) -Working with objects that represent the phenomenon and applying physical and cognitive tools (ontological principle) -Developing knowledge by collaborative designing (learning principle) -Using learners' possessed technologies in collecting empirical data (technological principle) -Placing emphasis on affording learning resources, guiding and supporting the learning process (teacher's agency) -Addicting and orienting learners by driven questions and whole tasks (instructional perspective) The development, implementation and evaluation of a designoriented pedagogy Several researchers 2105 Vartiainen H., Liljestrom A., Enkenberg J.: Design-Oriented Pedagogy ... usability'. Next, the design experiments and evaluation of the model are briefly introduced. Design experiment 1: The Ice Age project The purpose of the first design experiment was to determine the possibilities and challenges that emerge when the natural or cultural environments that lie outside the school constitute the main context of learning projects [Liljeström et al. in press]. The focus of the experiment was to investigate the development of students' theoretical and conceptual understanding in authentic, project-based learning. The 'Ice Age project', was implemented in 2005 with elementary school students (N = 17, five of whom were older students and twelve who were younger). The Ice Age project was a long, authentic learning project (three months) in a small, multiage rural school, where the natural environment surrounding the school comprised the main context. The applied instructional model emphasised learning by collaborative design [see Content analysis [see One common criticism, often from teachers, is that these kind of authentic learning activities (e.g., project-based learning) are less efficient because the students may not be able to cover as much material as in a conventional, teacher-led study course. Kirschner et al. Design experiment 2: Museum objects in learning The importance of student engagement is recognised by many educators and researchers, as is the observation that far too many students are bored, unmotivated, and uninvolved, that is, disengaged from the academic and social aspects of school life 2107 Vartiainen H., Liljestrom A., Enkenberg J.: Design-Oriented Pedagogy ... engagement. Emotional engagement is connected to feelings, values and interests and engagement to communal activities. Cognitive engagement includes higher-level thinking skills and learning strategies, while behavioural engagement can be regarded as commitment to carrying out the task or conform to the rules. However, behavioural, cognitive and emotional engagements are not isolated from each other, but are in a dynamic interaction. [Fredricks et al. 2004.] Since the results of the first experiment brought up the need to re-model the learning process, we designed two models for learning to be evaluated in the second design experiment. The designing of the instructional models was based on learning by collaborative designing, semantically rich objects as the anchor of learning, and learning objects representing these objects. The learning projects differed from each other by the learning task and the instructional model; Model 1 focused on the construction of the learning objects, and Model 2 concentrated on the use of existing learning objects [see In spring 2008, second-year student teacher (N=34) implemented two learning projects to a Finnish forest museum in addition to the lecture course. As the Ice Age project had demonstrated us the possibilities of enhancing cognitive processes in design-oriented activities, the focus of the second design The results of the study indicate that both projects emphasised communal activities in which the students were, in their opinion, engaged and that the learning projects were generally perceived as interesting. However, the non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis test showed that the groups differed statistically almost significantly, in emotional experience and cognitive processing. It seems that the construction of learning objects emphasised deeper cognitive processing, but partly at the cost of the emotions The model for constructing the learning objects was new for the students; hence, they faced difficulties in perceiving the learning task and experienced some anxiety in the course of the project. Design experiment 3: The Winter Fishing project Based on the results of the previous design experiments, a more articulated procedural model for the learning object design [ The Winter Fishing project was implemented in spring 2009 with multiage (6-12 year old) rural school students (N = 32). The students received an open-ended learning task to 'design and implement study of winter fishing in small groups' (see attachment Learning process in Winter Fishing project). The groups produced seven different learning objects, and video served as main technological tool in the construction process. An example of the learning object 'How deep do the fish swim in the winter?' can be found on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=gVKeTflC5Qg). This learning object shows the development of process of science learning and how the children worked with their own ideas, interacted with experts and used different technologies to exercise choice, collaboration and reflection. Social network analysis [see The findings indicated that a design-oriented pedagogy provides novel possibilities for a heterogeneous learning community to exploit the existing knowledge and skills of its members. In contrast to traditional school lessons based on facts and isolated skills, the transparency of expertise became a cohesive force and provided possibilities to organise and develop collaborative practices. A designoriented pedagogical model offers students the opportunity to choose topics and methods of learning based on their own interests, abilities and individual and community's learning needs [see Wenger, 1998] and enables them to move to the zone of proximal development 2110 Vartiainen H., Liljestrom A., Enkenberg J.: Design-Oriented Pedagogy ... Design experiment 4: Case Forest project Implementing a new educational innovation in schools poses great demands on teachers The fourth iteration of the study was carried out in the 'Case Forest -pedagogic towards sustainable development' (Comenius) project, in which the model was implemented in eight different countries; Finland (FI), Sweden (SE), Estonia (EE), Latvia (LV), Lithuania (LT), the Czech Republic (CZ), Slovakia (SK) and Bulgaria (BG) In spring 2009, the project participants and two teachers from each country attended a workshop in Finland where participants implemented their own learning projects by designing learning objects from samples selected from the collections of the Finnish Forest Museum. In the model course, the participants brought their own cameras, laptops and mobile phones for data collection, and wiki served as the integrating environment. After the model course, a similar course was arranged in every country, and the project members and teachers attending the model course were responsible for it's implementation in each country. The teachers were encouraged to define and recommend personal and social technologies that were available in their own country. Project members were also required to write a report on their own teacher course and give an oral presentation about their experiences, in the final meeting held in Bulgaria in summer 2010. Further, lack of technology or teachers' insufficient skills in using technology were often discussed as a challenge, while no other countries besides Lithuania mentioned the tools that the students already expertly use in informal settings. According to Contextual problems Lack of financial resources X X X X Lack of time X X X X X Curriculum X X Political regulation of education X X (*) Note that according to the report from Bulgaria, there were no problems using the methodology. In the presentation they mentioned "obligatory problems", but did not explain them further. Many teachers participating in the project also emphasised the possibilities that the design-oriented pedagogy creates for learning by making it interesting, meaningful and engaging for the students. The teachers also saw the pedagogy as one way to change the school practices and current models of education to meet future needs. However, it seems that current school culture (e.g. epistemological beliefs, attitudes, curriculum, classroom activities and assessment) and resources (e.g. financial resources, technological resources and time) are creating challenges and limitations for implementing the design-oriented pedagogy in schools, in collaboration with external organisations and experts. The preliminary results of the study reflect Zhang's Conclusions and discussion The development of a design-oriented pedagogy through several design experiments has shown us the possibilities that the pedagogy creates for learning and also indicates challenges that future research might address. The first experiment demonstrated that a design-oriented pedagogy with open learning tasks encourages students to develop explanations and a theoretical understanding about the phenomena in question and this can lead to deep cognitive processing [Liljeström et al. in press]. Traditional education emphasises knowledge that is well defined and reduced into smaller subtasks and subskills. Usually, learning results are assessed at the end of the course, with the aim of evaluating if the goals have been achieved. A design-oriented pedagogy is not an orderly step-by-step process, but instead moves from teaching separate knowledge and skills towards making the learning whole. However, the knowledge and abilities to transfer knowledge and strategies to novel problems tend to emerge afterwards. Further research is required to establish how students at various ages achieve a deep understanding of domain knowledge and apply it in a given domain as well as in everyday activities once they leave the classroom [see The second experiment indicated that students find the construction of learning objects more engaging than the more traditional way of using learning objects that experts and teachers have produced. It appears that constructing learning objects challenges the students to work at the edge of their competence, but it can be demanding emotionally. As Bandura The initial results of the third experiment suggested that a design-oriented pedagogy is suitable for heterogeneous learning communities, because it offers the possibility of appreciating the existing strengths of all students and developing them further. Learning by collaborative designing of a learning object is a continuous transfer from one space to another and at the same time connects something global, local and personal. As technology blurs the line between in-and out-of-school contexts, knowledge becomes a social product situated in the open world 2113 Vartiainen H., Liljestrom A., Enkenberg J.: Design-Oriented Pedagogy ... better understand the existing social relationships that affect the community's work In the fourth design experiment, the participating teachers coming from different educational backgrounds saw many learning possibilities, several possible future uses for the pedagogy, from kindergarten to university, and programs outside of formal education. On the other hand, the design-oriented pedagogy can be challenging for teachers, as it requires re-thinking of the teacher's agency. Moreover, the learning cultures and resources are different in these European countries, thus creating varying challenges for the teachers to implement and sustain a design-oriented pedagogy. When considering the lack of technology in schools, our experience encourages us to make more use of the technology that students already possess and know. To facilitate the development of twenty-first-century skills, schools should make technologies available to all children (compare textbooks), especially to those who do not have access to it. However, the effects of technology depend not only on the equipment, but above all, on the pedagogy, which in many cases is more important than the technical features of the applied technology In conclusion, based on our findings, we argue that a learning process that combines design thinking with project-based learning can be one effective approach to facilitating the development of twenty-first-century skills in students.