Education Commons^™

What Spaces? Designing Authentic, Sustainable Online Learning Spaces For Children With Diabetes, Shirley Agostinho, Richard Sprod, Barry Harper

Faculty of Education - Papers (Archive)

This paper presents a work-in-progress of how social networking, Web 2.0 and emerging communication technologies might be successfully used to support authentic self-management education for children aged 11-13 years who are living with Type 1 diabetes. The study employs a mixed-method approach that has been adopted within a Design Based Research framework. This paper explains the research problem, the theoretical framework that will underpin the study and the overall research design.

"Authentic" Learning Experiences: What Does This Mean And Where Is The Literacy Learning?, Jessica Mantei, Lisa K. Kervin

Faculty of Education - Papers (Archive)

Teachers are challenged to adopt practices that facilitate the development of “necessary” skills and strategies for learners. For many, however, what is required in policy and curricula is increasingly obscured and even confusing as teachers are bombarded with jargon prescribing seemingly similar (yet apparently different) approaches such as “rich tasks”, “big questions” and “fertile questions” that are to be “relevant”, “authentic” and “engaging” for the learner. Barton and Hamilton (2000) argue that literacy learning should take the learner beyond the transmission of technical skills in the classroom to an understanding of its role within a community’s cultural practices. These literacy …

Authentic Field Experiences: The Design Of Complex Web-Based Tasks, Janice A. Herrington, Gwyn J. Brickell

Faculty of Education - Papers (Archive)

For students in todays society the learning environment has been extended to provide a range of educational opportunities from excursion venues such as museums to outdoor settings such as field study centres, often supported with the use of information and communication technologies. Such contexts encourage students to engage and participate in the learning process in developing a range of skills, often associated with problem-based learning, that look at the complex relationship between evidence, ideas and the impacts on society in a range of situations. In this paper we describe the development of a web-based educational program that incorporates current knowledge …

Adult Educators' Authentic Use Of Smartphones To Create Digital Teaching Resources, Anthony J. Herrington

Faculty of Education - Papers (Archive)

The development of digital resources set in authentic contexts using mobile technologies is reflected in this study. The research involved adult educators creating teaching episodes or digital narratives using smartphones, as part of a postgraduate subject designed to introduce these learners to technological applications in adult education. The study involved interviewing students to determine the affordances of the technology in this context and the pedagogical strategies suited to such an approach.

Developing Quality Teaching Through Authentic Assessment And School-University Partnerships, Philip J. Pearson, Paul I. Webb, Gregory J. Forrest

Faculty of Education - Papers (Archive)

This paper examines the development of authentic assessment tasks focusing on the dimensions of quality teaching for pre-service teachers. Assessment tasks designed for students to continually put teaching skills into practice are essential to develop quality teachers. The process involved student and teacher consultation and the establishment of additional school-university partnerships. The purpose of the research was to review the school-university partnerships and to determine whether these links have been beneficial to the students and the schools involved. Forty physical and health education students in their final year of pre-service training were surveyed (questionnaire and interviews) along with personnel from …

What Is An Authentic Learning Environment?, Anthony J. Herrington, Janice A. Herrington

Faculty of Education - Papers (Archive)

Recent research and learning theory provides a wealth of thought, ideas and strategies to inform the design and implementation of learner-centered, realistic and effective learning environments. This chapter proposes guidelines for designing authentic learning environments for higher education that can be applied across a range of disciplines and in a variety of modes.

Implementing Authentic Tasks In Web-Based Learning Environments, Younghee Woo, Janice A. Herrington, Shirley Agostinho, Thomas C. Reeves

Faculty of Education - Papers (Archive)

The instructor’s inclusion of authentic activities improves the quality of student interaction and learning in online classrooms.

Representing Authentic Learning Designs Supporting The Development Of Online Communities Of Learners, Ron Oliver, Anthony J. Herrington, Janice A. Herrington, Thomas C. Reeves

Faculty of Education - Papers (Archive)

Authentic learning designs have been explored for some time now and have frequently been shown to provide learning settings that provide many meaningful contexts for learning. These meaningful contexts provide not only encouragement for students to learn but also a raft of learning enhancements including higher-order learning and forms of learning support. The establishment of a sense of community among learners creates support mechanisms that can readily enhance learning outcomes. This paper describes several technology-facilitated authentic learning designs that involve the development and support of learning communities. The learning designs are represented in several forms to provide an overview of …

Identifying Authentic Mobile Learning In Teacher Education: A Design-Based Approach, Anthony J. Herrington, Janice A. Herrington

Faculty of Education - Papers (Archive)

The adoption of mobile technologies in higher education has been variable and inconsistent across the sector. Little is known about how people learn best from mobile devices such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants and portable digital audio players, and yet these are the technologies of choice of a generation of young adults who are proficient and competent in their use. This paper describes a project to explore, implement and document pedagogies that go beyond the use of mobile technologies for information delivery and communication. It describes a design-based approach to researching the use of mobile devices as cognitive tools …

Authentic Conditions For Authentic Assessment: Aligning Task And Assessment, Janice A. Herrington, Anthony J. Herrington

Faculty of Education - Papers (Archive)

Despite major discussion and consideration of authentic assessment through the 1990s, little progress appears to have been made towards its widespread adoption in higher education. Universities often serve to limit the use of authentic approaches in learning tasks and assessment, through restrictive policies. In this paper, we briefly review the literature and summarise the characteristic elements of authentic assessment, and argue that task, assessment and university policies must be aligned for truly effective use of authentic assessment to occur in higher education.

Scaffolding Learners In Authentic, Problem-Based E-Learning Environments: The Geography Challenge, Janice A. Herrington, Gwyn J. Brickell

Faculty of Education - Papers (Archive)

The affordances of online learning technologies have enabled more widespread development of learning environments that facilitate the exploration and solving of complex and realistic problems. In this paper, we describe the design of a real world geography problem, embedded within a web environment that is facilitated by an onsite excursion for data collection. The learning environment has been designed to deliberately address known problems associated with the problem solving approach, specifically in regard to three issues, and uses scaffolding prompts and supports embedded within the environment to facilitate student learning. The paper describes the theoretical foundations for the approach, the …

Authentic Tasks In E-Learning Designs, Janice A. Herrington

Faculty of Education - Papers (Archive)

Constructivist approaches to learning design, while gaining increased acceptance in the higher education community, are the exception rather than the rule in the majority of web-based courses currently offered by universities throughout the world. The adoption of university quality standards and the widespread use of course management programs have inadvertently constrained more authentic and innovative approaches to online learning. Contemporary trends in e-learning designs are highlighting the value of authentic approaches to learning. This paper argues that authentic tasks that guide complex and sustained learning endeavours can be adopted in web-based courses, and provides guidelines for implementation, together with examples …

Integrating Problem-Solving Strategies And Fieldwork Into An Authentic Online Learning Environment, Gwyn J. Brickell, Janice A. Herrington, Barry M. Harper

Faculty of Education - Papers (Archive)

In this project, a technology-supported learning challenge has been developed to replace a conventional visitation program at Sydney Olympic Park. The educational approach taken is based on a general social constructivist model of learning, challenging learners with a problem based perspective directly linked to specific syllabus outcomes. Students engage in work on the web, in class, in the field and in technology ‘pods’ with an emphasis on student-centred tasks and field activities that will require them to explore data and information, construct and test hypotheses, and present conclusions and solutions in the form of artefacts. This paper describes the learning …

Operationalizing Nine Design Elements Of Authentic Learning Environments In A Classroom-Based On-Line Simulation, Brian Ferry, Lisa K. Kervin, John Hedberg, Janice B. Turbill, Brian L. Cambourne, David H. Jonassen

Faculty of Education - Papers (Archive)

Herrington, Oliver and Reeves (2003) assert that many researchers and teachers now accept that well designed multimedia environments provide an alternative to real-life settings without sacrificing the authentic context. Further, researchers report that recent educational software advances have demonstrated that it is feasible to create a motivational simulation that supports pre-service teachers by providing them with tools that allow them to view the effects of their decisions within a virtual classroom context (Aldrich, 2004) However, limited research has been reported on the use of authentic simulations in pre-service teacher education.

This paper describes the on-line simulation that we developed to …

Online Support For Collaborative Authentic Activities, Susan J. Bennett

Faculty of Education - Papers (Archive)

No abstract provided.