Marked Dissonance

  This first week of my PhD I've been exploring ideas around the tangible and intangible nature of designs for learning/education.  I examined two papers:   Explicating Affordances:  A conceptual framework for understanding affordances in Communication Research (2017)  by Sandra Evans and I attempt to get a clear definition of epistemic cognition from the Handbook of Epistemic Cognition (2016) , edited by Greene, Sandoval and Bråten.   I've decided to use the approach, initially at least, to iteratively develop an annotated bibliography to: a) define epistemic cognition b) explore the design concept of affordances instrumental in designing environments for engaging students with epistemic cognition The handbook's introduction is readable and begins with the observation that we need to know why knowledge as opposed to what knowledge and I immediately think, well you can't have the why without the what.  This might seem obvious, but as a learni...

Being a third space professional does your head in on some days. Working as I do in education I've been attempting to reconcile a bunch of different ideas around student experience, teacher experience and manager experience. As learning design is such a fluid space in the higher education sector, by fluid, I mean one needs to adapt to shifting circumstances and take into account a multitude of views and ideas. There are so many concepts to throw into the pot that it can be easy to become bogged in a morass.  Here are some of the placeholder tags that have been bubbling in my cauldron of late: trust (and cheating), shadow education, active social learning, authentic assessment, narrative identity, authenticity of assessment by supervisors on placement in work integrated learning, agreed values, ethics, academic honesty, feed forward and what does that mean anyway and how is that different from formative feedback?  Add to this action research, what is its purpose if the research...