w8: the Larnaca declaration

[Yishay Mor]

The Larnaca declaration is a summary of work on learning design and a recommitment to some of the aims and values in working on design of learning experiences. 

• Download the Larnaca declaration and look at the structure. You may want to read it all but for this activity it will be enough understand its aims and conclusions.
• Listen to the podcast by James Dalziel (you can download the mp3 file at the bottom of this page).

What are the key messages that you take from the Larnaca declaration? Which of those do you agree with, and which don't you? What questions does it raise?

[Will Pollard]

On the podcast there is reference to institutions, about 7 minutes in, but not much in the document that I can find ( I need to read more but also the week is slipping by) . If these methods are adopted there will be changes in the way universities and other places are organised. What is the budget for building libraries, renting web space , soforth. If this aspect is covered please suggest page to start.

[Simon Walker]

Dear Will, you raise an interesting issue here which the Larnaca Declaration attempts to deal with at a conceptual rather than operational level. The interesting point for me about the Declaration is that it conceptualises how learning design, which has previously tended to focus on the design and delivery of learning events themselves, takes into account the bigger picture (linking a conceptual map with a framework), to include the wider curriculum and institutional factors. It also accepts that the activity of ld is developmental i.e influences, and is influenced... by wider issues of design faced by teachers and institutions.  In the western world (there is a strong attempt in the declaration to recognise the difficulty of achieving cultural neutrality) this may include factors that impact upon design such as the development of attributes, which demand a different teaching and learning environment and pedagogy. 

In my experience budgets tend to be driven by key priorities that are identified by strategies, that either remain disconnected or react to issues (for example, the recruitment of students in the UK has resulted in massive diversion for most UK institutions to marketing depts). What learning design may be able to do, if embedded into institutions,  is to provide an additional strategic lever over the way in which budgets are realigned to teaching and institutional directions. These would include decision-making about learning environment, OERs. social media, etc.

Simon

On Wednesday, 27 February 2013 00:34:17 UTC, Yishay Mor wrote:

[Will Pollard]

Simon, thanks for this. 

I have done a blog post to explain some other interests I am working on

http://will789gb.posterous.com/design-science-as-a-link-mtw3-mosocoop-oldsmo

It may not be part of learning design as currently scoped, but I think the MOOC is very disruptive for universities and other organisations. These aspects will surface at some point in time. It may as well be during this course.

Will

[pmi...@liv.ac.uk]

I'm not entirely convinced by the constant reference to musical notation. It's superficially a nice allusion but it's a one-way street -- it doesn't seem to bring anything new to the LD party. I kept wanting to ask "in what ways does an LD sequence differ from musical notation" but that didn't strike me as a useful question either except maybe when you start to think about orchestration and parts for individual instruments when the whole thing seems to gently fall apart?

[Yishay Mor]

Hi Peter,

The analogy to music is something we discussed at the ASLD workshop - http://youtu.be/7LSZhQ-ruZ0?t=5m6s

and in the paper that summarised it - http://oro.open.ac.uk/33910/

I agree that we need to be careful not to overplay the analogy. But I think there's an interesting parallel. On one hand, if I come up with a good musical design, I can encode it in musical notation so that any other player can repeat it. On the other hand, when someone else will play my music - there's always an element of interpretation. 

We don't (yet) have such a canonical representation for learning design. The question is: is such a representation viable? Would it be able to record all possible learning designs? What is the relationship between the "composer" and the "performer" of a learning design?

Yishay

[Will Pollard]

Peter, Yishay

Is there more of an analogy with sampling, putting clips together? The DJ may appear to be doing less than a jazz musician but there is some judgement involved. Also it can be live performance with some response to an audience but I'm not sure that all the requests are spontaneous.

Here's another YouTube clip about the "science DJ" . Not many views so far which surprises me. I think the idea is worth a look.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mqsGfs0FQU

Of course on YouTube you can add a comment, edit another video etc.

Will

On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 5:29 PM, <pmi...@liv.ac.uk> wrote:

I still think the musical analogy is potentially the conceptual equivalent of an ear-worm. :-)

Your idea that it encapsulates the notion of "interpretation" sounds akin to the difference between a specification and an implementation, no more.

I'm concerned that performance-based metaphors encourage us to think of the audience as a passive recipient and neglect issues such as synchronization?

Are visual notations/representations necessarily the way forward? How would you get, say, Siri to help with a learning design?

If the problem is really as difficult as the Larnaca Declaration makes out, will there be any way of encapsulating the solution so that the average teacher (or student) would derive some benefit from its use?

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[pmi...@liv.ac.uk]

A lot of authoring tools do that, Will, and that most definitely has its place but I'm still concerned about the implied asymmetry in any performance analogy. In some ways it's a trivial observation but the pervasive nature of the musical metaphor is unhelpful in that regard.

On Wednesday, February 27, 2013 12:34:17 AM UTC, Yishay Mor wrote:

[Thomas C. Reeves]

I read this document with bemusement as it seems to ignore (surely unintentionally) previous attempts to build systems for documenting and systematizing the design of learning. In 1974, when I first entered the Instructional Technology program as a Masters student at Syracuse University (a graduate program that changed its name in 1979 to the Division of Instructional Design, Development and Evaluation), one of my first tasks was to review a system developed by the U.S. Army to create a visual language for representing the design and implementation of training. I wish I still had some of those materials because visually they were not all that different from what is shown in Figure 2 of the Larnaca Declaration. The materials I reviewed in 1974 consisted of reams and reams of printed sheets that utilized a modified form of flow-charting procedure to represent the design of training.  Plastic template guides were included in the binders full of these sheets so that instructors and designers could draw what a lesson or program would look like and share it with others. Throughout the 1980s, the US Department of Defense as well as large corporations such as IBM and AT&T spent millions and millions of dollars building systems that would purportedly automate the process of designing learning events (more often referred to as instructional or training events), often with goal of putting the design of learning in the hands of subject matter experts and teachers, and thereby limiting the need for professional instructional designers. As personal computers became more prevalent, these types of efforts morphed into developing computer programs that would support the design of learning events. In the late 1980, I worked with Kent Gustafson and some folks at Apple Computer to build such as system using HyperCard called IDioM (Gustafson, K. L., & Reeves, T. C. (1988). IDioM: Instructional development model. Electronic performance support system for Training Support, Apple Computer, Inc., Cupertino, CA.). Later in the early 1990s, I helped folks at NCR develop a more sophisticated system for representing instructional designs (Jury, T., Gustafson, K. L., & Reeves, T. C. (1993). Quality information product process performance support system (QIPP-PSS). Electronic performance support system for Information Products Division of NCR Corporation: Dayton, OH.) that was awarded a US Patent.

None of this is to say that the Learning Design movement isn’t important. It is. (In fact, I was a member of the International Reference Group for the AUTC Learning Designs project: http://www.learningdesigns.uow.edu.au/project/index.htm ). But it strikes me as unproductive to see this as a new field. And even if designating Learning Design as a new field has merit, it certainly originated long before 1999. For example, the Journal of the Learning Sciences was first published in 1991. Edited by Janet Kolodner (then at Georgia Tech), the first issue included papers such as: 

Schank, R. C., & Jona, M. Y. (1991). Empowering the student: New perspectives on the design of teaching systems. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 1(1), 7-35.

Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (1991). Higher levels of agency for children in knowledge building: A challenge for the design of new knowledge media. The Journal of the learning sciences, 1(1), 37-68.

Surely the authors of these papers were engaged then in learning design. In addition, the roots of design-based research (or better educational design research) can be traced back to the 1980s and early 90s. Well, that is enough about history for now. And it is worth noting that the Larnaca Declaration includes this statement: “There is a need for a deeper exploration of how Learning Design relates to Instructional Design, and we hope that research on descriptive frameworks together with the LD-CM can assist in describing connections and differences between Learning Design and Instructional Design – there is much work yet to be done. Ultimately, we believe that Instructional Design is one subset of the possibilities covered by Learning Design, although it is also worth noting that Instructional Design has a more developed set of theory and practices than Learning Design at the current time.“

What I really hope to do in Week 8 of the OLDS MOOC is spark a debate about some of the fundamental assumptions underlying the Larnaca Declaration. Whenever I read something like this, I usually annotate it with comments right in the documents. Here are my notes from the first paragraph in the Declaration:

Education faces many challenges in the changing modern world. Learners are changing in their approaches to education – they use digital technologies (but their technical skills are shallow at best), they multi-task (little evidence that this is effective), they collaborate (reluctantly in most academic contexts) and they are becoming less patient with teacher-centric styles of education (but they expect to earn high marks without effort).

Basically, I see this Declaration as buying into the myth of the Millennial Learner about which I have written elsewhere (cf. Oh, E, & Reeves, T. C. (in press). Generational differences and the integration of technology in learning, instruction and performance. In J. M. Spector, M. D. Merrill, J. Elen, & M. J. Bishop (Eds.), Handbook of research on educational communications and technology (4th ed.). New York, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Taylor & Francis Group. and Reeves, T. C., & Oh, E. (2007). Generation differences and educational technology research. In J. M. Spector, M. D. Merrill, J. J. G. van Merriënboer, & M. Driscoll. (Eds.) Handbook of research on educational communications and technology (pp. 295-303). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.) So here is a question for the discussion: “What should we expect from learners when we engage in Learning Design?”

[pmi...@liv.ac.uk]

Fascinating historical perspective, Tom. I guess having the Grail re-discovered periodically does no harm -- I just wish it did more good!

[James Dalziel]

Hi Tom,

Many thanks for the detailed comments and history. The big issue, in my view, is how a representation approach handles collaborative activities, and in particular, a sequence of (different types of) collaboratie learning activities. If a representational system of this kind exists in the literature that you know, please let us know. Over the past decade I've had many colleagues from the ID world tell me that LD is not new, and that flowcharts have been around for a long time (which is true), but when I've pressed them to give me examples of sequencing of collaborative learning, I've yet to find a representation system which is similar to the work in Learning Design like EML, IMS LD, AUTC Learning Design, LAMS, etc. This is why we chose the role play example in the Declaration, as it draws attention to a sequence of collaborative learning activities where collaboration is at the heart of this pedagogy (a similar example was the crucial use case of the IMS Learning Design best practice guide - the Versailles role play). While I've seen "higher level" theoretical ideas in the ID world that would be applicable to collaborative learning or individual learning, the concrete representational systems I've seen (like SCORM) are single-learner only. So please let us know if we've missed something important, or if not, then I think the field of Learning Design has something unique to offer.

There are other differences between ID and LD in implementation practices and assumptions - Grainne may like to make her case for this (as she does in her recent book). I'll leave other issues (like Millenials) aside for now, as I think the representation of sequences of collaborative learning activities is the crucial question.

Best wishes,

James

[Jane Nkosi]

Hi all,

Good afternoon

Hi all

 

I read the paper and listened to the presentation on the declation. It is clear that the declaration presents a conceptual framework for representing teaching and learning in the 21^st century and suggests that a common language can be used to express one goes on during the teaching and learning process. This framework is an illustration of how educators can instil 21^st century knowledge and skills among learners.

While I’m not so familiar with music notational system what seems to come through for me in this paper is that is that the declaration is an idea or script which the actor interprets and gives meaning to.  The approach to thinking about teaching and learning is said to be pedagogically “neutral. However I thought it combines pedagogies. Wouldn’t that be a new pedagogy?

Jane Nkosi

[Yishay Mor]

Hi James, Tom,

Thanks for a fascinating discussion!

The issue of ID vs. LD came up briefly in yesterday's convergence session, when we discussed the Larnaca Declaration.

James - your response seems to run in contrast to the Larnaca declaration's claim that Learning Design is "pedagogically neutral" (or did I misunderstand?). I think Gráinne also made a distinction in one of her papers, and we make a similar claim in http://oro.open.ac.uk/33910/, arguing that ID is rooted in a behaviourist / positivist tradition, while LD stems from a constructivist one. That's not to say that you can't find examples of collaborative instructional designs, but historically, and intellectually, those are the trends. Would you agree?

Yishay

____________________
Dr. Yishay Mor
Senior Lecturer, Educational Technology
http://iet.open.ac.uk/people/yishay.mor
+44 1908 6 59373

 

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[Will Pollard]

If learning design is neutral then maybe it can include  ID as "a behaviourist / positivist tradition" if that's what it is. I find there is sometimes a way to describe something already existing that is part of a claim that something new is on offer. A while ago I did an online course at UMIST which they based on a book "Designing Web-Based Training" by William Horton (Wiley, 2000) It has a lot of step-by-step and bullet points but I found it really useful.

"Web-based" is interesting also. A lot of change in education can be traced to the Web. (capital W, style guide from OhmyNews)

I assume ID can cover various media, not just online. But the current background seems to be interest in the MOOC and possible disruption. I would still like to hear more on the context in which LD is gaining attention.

[Emil Badilescu-Buga]

Hi Tom,

I would suggest that one distinct aspect of the Larnaca Declaration is sharing. The musical notation is just an analogy used to demonstrate the idea that if we have a widely accepted notation system we are better equipped to communicate complex plans of learning design that are shared and re-used by many teachers around the world.

Larnaca Declaration emphasises the importance of sharing as a way of spreading ideas and learning design experiences as fast, as accurate, and as effective as possible. The idea of sharing has an operational aspect to it. In the context of Learning Design, sharing is a transaction between teachers from anywhere around the world who share similar pedagogical formation and who don't necessarily know each other. While numerous representation systems have been proposed in the past, many of which have inspired those who produced the Larnaca Declaration, this concept proposes a framework that encompasses both the encapsulation of the design experience and the sharing of the designs. 

The other difference that ensues from this is that there is no top down approach to spreading design ideas. The sharing of experiences is social. The implicit emphasis is not on providing tools aimed at a smaller community of professionals specialised on Learning Design, but to create an environment where many participants, including teachers, educational institutions and specialised professionals, experiment with design, publish them and share their thoughts in ways in which the best designs are promoted through transparent feedback that comes from practice. 

 

Regards,

 

Emil

[Thomas C. Reeves]

Hi James,

It would be weird for me if I end up defending instructional design (in the traditional Instructional Systems Design mode) as I suspect I have been long associated with those in the field who have criticized traditional ID and the type of “direct instruction” that all too often emerges from its application. For example, in 1992, I gave a talk called “The future of instructional design: Looking at 2001” at the National Society for Performance Instruction Conference in Miami, Florida in which I predicted that ID (as we knew it then) would be replaced by “eclectic-mixed methods-pragmatic paradigm” approach that emphasized formative evaluation. Although traditional ID persists in many contexts (and often with beneficial outcomes), there has been a slow, but steady update of other approaches (including Learning Design). Educational Design Research is my preferred approach to the development of educational innovations that solve real world problems as I described in Issue 4 of the Educational Designer journal (http://www.educationaldesigner.org/ ) as well as in a recent book with Dr. Susan McKenney from the Open University of The Netherlands (McKenney, S. E, & Reeves, T. C. (2012). Conducting educational design research. New York: Routledge.)

 A much more cogent critic of traditional instructional design was my dear friend, Professor Dave Jonassen,” who passed away in December. I am actually at the Atlanta airport now getting ready to travel to the University of Missouri where I will give a talk tomorrow that I have dedicated to Dave. Dave wrote or edited 37 books such as “Duffy, T. M., & Jonassen, D. H. (Eds.). (1992). Constructivism and the technology of instruction: A conversation. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.” Although he began his career as a stalwart advocate of ISD, he led the way in questioning its capacity to develop learning environments grounded in alternative learning theories. He recognized that much of the instruction developed under the auspices of traditional ID emphasized learning “from” technology using a instructivist model rather than “with” technology as a cognitive tool for constructing knowledge. (It is no coincidence that my talk tomorrow is titled “iTeacher: The Challenge of Learning From, With and About Media and Technology.”)

Well, I must run to catch my plane. More later.  Thank you for the engagement, James. And Yishay et al. 

- Tom Reeves

[Thomas C. Reeves]

Hi Emil,

Yes, I totally agree. This sharing aspect is a very appealing component of the Learning Design movement as described in the Larnaca Declaration. As I suspect you know, one of the major proponents of this type of opening sharing of educational resources is Dave Wiley from BYU. We are very fortunate to have Dave coming to the University of Georgia later this month to speak: http://www.ctl.uga.edu/ctl_speaker_series_wiley  If anyone is not familiar with Dave's work, please see: http://davidwiley.org/

All the best.
Tom Reeves

[Yishay Mor]

Hi Tom,

Thanks again for sharing your incredible wealth of knowledge. I think a historical perspective always enriches out understanding, and your notes contribute a lot in that sense, among others. Which is something they have in common with the Larnaca Declaration, which includes an interesting and informative attempt to plot a timeline of Learning Design, as a field of study and a field of action.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand that one of the dimensions on which you criticise Instructional Design is it's determinism: first, in terms of its claim to predict the learning effects of a teaching action. Second, in the strict prescription of instructional sequences. This leads me to a second theme from yesterday's convergence session, which was the tension between "composition" and "performance" (to borrow the music metaphor), or between designed activity and classroom improvisation. In scientific words - what Pierre Dillenbourg calls "Orchestration" (http://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/2c1c1b8778a177d0b42a2a8dc4942d8b6). Perhaps this is yet another difference between ID and LD: whereas the first may assume that the designer holds the key to effective learning, and the teacher is an executor of predefined design, the later acknowledges the agency and the expertise of the teacher. In this view, design and orchestration are complementary pieces of a good learning experience.

Finally, you mention design research. Definitely close to my heart. But I think it would be unrealistic to expect practitioners to engage in full-scale research, which is why I prefer to talk about design inquiry of learning - "inquiry" being the modest, pragmatic sister of research.

Good luck with your talk!

Yishay

____________________
Dr. Yishay Mor
Senior Lecturer, Educational Technology
http://iet.open.ac.uk/people/yishay.mor
+44 1908 6 59373

[James Dalziel]

Hi Tom,

Thanks again for these thoughts. For argument's sake let's consider me an outsider to the ID world - one of the problems I find is that there seems to be two ID worlds - first, the traditional ISD mode you mention, and the second a sort of internal critique of the limitations of this first mode that seeks a wider pedagogy beyond direct instruction. So one challenge for an outsider is that when you offer an alternative to ID, or a critique, this "multi-personality" issue for ID can complicate discussion.

But even assuming the more charitable, broader view that you suggest (all of which I would agree with), I still think Learning Design is something different again. Rob Koper's foundational insight for Learning Design, captured in the phrase "pedagogical metamodel", was that instead of debating the benefits of one learning theory (say, direct instruction) against another (say, constructivism), we instead take a step backwards and try to describe the structure and sequence of actual teaching and learning activities in *any* example of education - whatever the underlying learning theory.

This is why the music notation analogy is powerful - it allows for different styles of music (baroque, classical, romantic, etc) as well music of different levels of quality (beautiful/mediocre/awful), and any given example of music can be described on both these dimensions using a single notational format. So at the core of Learning Design is a different approach to the fights over pedagogical approaches - it attempts to step back and describe many different examples of teaching and learning (based on many different underlying pedagogical theories) using a common descriptive framework. (I hasten to add that the field hasn't yet agreed on a single descriptive framework, but the examples in the Larnaca Declaration give some indications of how this might look in the future).

So this is one example of how Learning Design has come at the wider educational challenge differently to even "improved" ID. This doesn't mean that underlying learning theories aren't relevant to Learning Design (they are), but the field has always had a strong focus on trying to find ways to describe many pedagogical approaches under a common framework, and leaving "pedagogical value judgements" to a later stage of the analysis process.

The reason I asked about representation frameworks for collaborative learning activities is that this is the "pointy end" of the weaknesses of traditional ID (in which collaboration is often completely absent from the model, and software), whereas collaborative activities have tended to be a strength of LD systems - which embody not just constructivist possibilities, but direct instruction and many other pedagogical approaches within a single software system. The flexibility of LD software to represent different pedagogical approaches is an outworking of the conceptual flexibility of the idea of a pedagogical metamodel.

I look forward to more discussion - there is plenty more to explore here!

Best wishes,

James

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[Eva Dobozy]

Dear all,

Thank you very much for the interesting discussion.  I tend to agree that there is much confusion within and outside of our ID and/or LD communities concerning LD/ID conceptualisations, conceptual/pedagogical similarities, differences, benefits and challenges. One of my doctoral students has in his literature review discussed LD, but referenced ID papers. I told him that he cannot do this and he looked at me with bewilderment. Irrespective of our epistemological heritage and (dis)agreements, the fact that we engage in dialogue and debate will enhance our individual and collective understanding and progress our work. In a recent paper (Dobozy (in press) Learning Design research: advancing pedagogies in the digital age. Educational Media International ) I provide a table of recent LD conceptualisations, making explicit current struggles to understand what LD is or is not.

Author	Definition
Agostinho (2006)	A learning design is a representation of teaching and learning practice documented in some notational form so that it can serve as a model or template adaptable by a teacher to suit his/her context.
Conole (2008)	The range of activities associated with creating a learning activity and crucially provides a means of describing learning activities.
Conole (2013)	A methodology for enabling teachers/designers to make more informed decisions in how they go about designing learning activities and interventions, which is pedagogically informed and makes effective use of appropriate resources and technologies. This includes the design of resources and individual learning activities right up to curriculum-level design. A key principle is to help make the design process more explicit and shareable. Learning design as an area of research and development includes both gathering empirical evidence to understand the design process, as well as the development of a range of learning design resource, tools and activities.
Dalziel (2008)	A framework to describe a sequence of educational activities in an online environment.
Dobozy (2012)	A way of making explicit epistemological and technological integration attempts by the designer of a particular learning sequence or series of learning sequences.
Ioannis & Papadakis (2011)	The creation of sequences of learning activities, which involve groups or learners interacting within a structured set of collaborative environments.
Koper (2006)	The description of the teaching-learning process that takes place in a unit of learning. The key principle in learning design is that it represents the learning activities and the support activities that are performed by different persons (learners, teachers) in the context of a unit of learning. These activities can refer to different learning objects that are used during the performance of the activities (e.g. books, articles, software programmes, pictures), and it can refer to services (e.g. forums, chats, wiki's) that are used to collaborate and to communicate in the teaching-learning process.
LarnacaDeclaration.org (2012)	The concept of a framework for describing teaching and learning activities (based on many different pedagogical approaches) that we have earlier defined as ‘Learning Design’ can now be given a more precise phrasing as a Learning Design Framework (LD-F). The Learning Design Conceptual Map (LD-CM) provides the link between the core concept of the LD-F (together with guidance and sharing) and the wider educational landscape. The day-to-day practices of teachers as they design for learning, and increasingly use the evolving Learning Design Frameworks and the Learning Design Conceptual Map to guide them, can be called Learning Design Practice (LD-P).

 

Although there seem to be clear conceptual differences, what all of these definitions illustrate is LD’s focus on pedagogy rather than technology. “To this effect, Ljubojevic & Laurillard (2010) note: ‘the driving force behind any learning design should be the pedagogy, the how and why of learning, and thereafter the mechanisms and resources for realising that pedagogy should be considered (p. 71).”’ In my review of Learning Design Research (LDR), I discovered that:

… so many of the reported empirical studies failed to provide a clear definition of LD and instead included elaborate pedagogical explanations pertaining to the application of student-centric pedagogies that were grounded in a constructivist learning theory. Not only was this finding seen as surprising, but it was also identified as somewhat problematic. LDR will need to find a common language and conceptual framework that is, although broad enough to enable exploration and experimentation, but also specific enough to be bound into a clear framework. A clear and explicitly stated definitional construct in any LDR will establish important boundaries to develop and advance the field’s understanding and impact. The work of the LarnacaDeclaration.org (and others) is designed to work towards providing such a structure.

 

It is clear that our work is challenging and will spark much disagreement, but I see it as a positive development. The construction of a pedagogical meta-model that is built on the idea of paradigmatic plurality is ambitious indeed. Is it possible and/or desirable in an educational world that seems to accept constructivist/connectivist pedagogical designs as ‘the norm’?  I certainly welcome the idea of pedagogic plurality, but my question is: How much tolerance do I need to demonstrate/have for what I see as out-dated, unsound pedagogical practices (e.g. ‘the banking model of education’ or transmission-pedagogies)? What the Larnaca Declaration is offering is a way forward in illustrating our conceptual struggles on the way to some form of conceptual clarity. What we are illustrating is a realisation that we need is to stop calling everything LD and instead be much more specific, even if we move and shift positions as we grapple with new ideas.  The current delineation of LD-F, LD-M and LD-P offered in the Larnaca Declaration paper works for me, at least for the moment, although it is somewhat removed from my earlier conceptualisation of LD as different types (Type 1 – LD as concept, Type 2 – LD as process, Type 3 – LD as product). I look greatly forward to more discussion and debate on the issue J

Best wishes

Eva

[Itana Maria Gimenes]

Hi,

I think Larnaca declaration is an excellent document for those who entering the field and want to have a global view of the concepts and projects. The framework is useful if we want to see which kind of areas we can contribute to research in LD. 

I fully agree with Tom Reeves in his arguments. I think it is essencial that LD makes a clear relationship with other fields. I am currently applying LD to design software engineering courses. It is nice, because I didn't have to make a huge effort to learn how to do it, because the representation and resources are very similar. The Larnaca declaration actually mentions UML. When I write papers to software engineering education conferences, they can't see where is the novelty. The impression is that we are justing using business process principles. I've done several researches in business process (or workflow - if we don't take differences hard) and tend to say that this area has notation, tools, simulation and analysis resources that can well fulfill the needs of LD, except for customization needed. CompendiumLD, for instance, can be seen as customized workflow tool for LD. I think that if we analyse "software" versus "learning", they are obviously different targets, but the resources in terms of processes and representations are the same. 

Another concern I have is with the fact that LD is pedagogy independent. Nice, I like that because I can start designing without being an expert in the famous educator's approaches. However, it is also very easy to forget the pedagogical principles in our design. 

Itana Gimenes