Technology Design for Education

source: opensourceway

Technology and educational design is a perfect candidate for an Agile approach to development.  Agile is a development methodology that encourages rapid iteration, design adaptation to a real world environment, and the user (teacher and student) taking front stage in driving the vision for the product rather than the programmer.

One of the largest mistakes in any software endeavor is to allow preconceived notions, no matter how well researched, to cloud the vision and the direction of the product goals.  This means that designers need to respond to classroom use long before the final product is ready for distribution.  In this case, it is ultimately the goal to have working software that the customer(s) find valuable.  The product vision and ownership needs to come from the students and the teachers, as they are ultimately the ones that will either use, misuse, or not use the technologically enhanced experience.

An even bigger challenge for educational software is the funding model of private and closed source versus open-source (free) software development model.   I believe that this goes hand in hand with Agile, in the fact that schools are large scale endeavors that span large cultural and geopolitical geographies.  The private model will be challenged to deliver software that can be adapted to an array of different uses – or even willing to open itself up to this endeavor.

The open source model where technologists around the world can access, alter, improve, share and customize for their own purposes technological enhanced learning software, in my opinion, is the one that will create the quickest, most robust and field proven results.  The open source model encourages wide distribution across multiple platforms.  If there is a successful solution on the iPad and the software is open, someone will take it across to the Android, PC, and Macintosh.  There is greater chance of supporting multiple devices where the software is accessible and ultimately portable.

After years of software development experience (and a little educational experience), my focus is more on the process than the challenge.  Most projects fail, based on their process’ and not on the problem they were trying to originally solve.  Problems that could be looked at in a technological rich environment in the science and math classroom are:

1. Quicker and more relevant assessment on learning.
2. Expert systems that can scaffold student learning and pace difficulty accordingly.
3. Create a more collaborative environment that encourages a social construction of  meaning (Kozma, 2003 , p.9).
4. Tracking student progress and showing instructors what learning challenges a specific class has versus other classes around the world.

References

Kozma, R.  (2003). Technology, innovation, and educational change: A global perspective, (A report of the Second Information Technology in Education Study, Module 2).  Eugene, OR: International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, ISTE Publications.