Infrastructuring Educators' Connected Learning: A Design Narrative About the Marginal Syllabus

• In Event: 66.070 - Connected Learning in Teacher Education

Abstract

This poster concerns the equity-oriented design of educators’ connected learning online. The motivation for this study is two-fold. First, trends in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) are increasingly attentive to the ways in which learning technologies can, under certain circumstances, be co-designed to mediate more accessible and equitable learning (Smith et al., 2017), particularly for educators (i.e. Kali et al., 2015). Second, advances in open education have catalyzed conversation about more socially just forms of learning (i.e. Biswas-Diener & Jhangiani, 2017; DeRosa, 2017), including the role that educators can play in positioning open learning to address “power relations and inequality” (Cronin, 2017, p. 16). Together, a need persists to better articulate and demonstrate the conditions under which both CSCL and open educational initiatives meaningfully contribute to equity-oriented learning designs and opportunities for educators. This study asks: What new sociotechnical designs might foster more participatory, agentic, and connected learning for educators?

Conceptually, this design narrative draws upon Björgvinsson and colleagues’ (2012) approach to design as “infrastructuring,” or a relational approach to socio-material design that spans time, engages both professional designers and participants as co-designers, is ongoing, and embraces the unexpected and emergent. This study also embraces Svihla and Reeve’s (2016) suggestion for more “designerly work” in the learning sciences. Together, these theoretical and methodological commitments help to explain how, for the past two years, I have helped shepherd a design-based research (DBR) effort investigating educators’ connected learning in an open CSCL initiative. This poster adopts DBR methods of design narrative (Bell et al., 2004) and the “worked example” (Barab et al., 2009) to describe the design of the Marginal Syllabus, an open CSCL environment that has supported educators’ collaborative and connected learning about equity topics. The poster reports upon the Marginal Syllabus’ design context, details how project activities have changed over time, and highlights design principles, data, and processes relevant to educators’ connected learning.

Insights from this design narrative concern how our design team has infrastructured the Marginal Syllabus by leveraging the open web, fostering multi-stakeholder partnerships, working with open content, and engaging professional learning as an open practice. First, educators can leverage the open web, including the use of open-source software, as a means of advancing their connected learning. Second, as the Marginal Syllabus has matured over time, the growth of our design team, project scope, and participant community has come to reflect a broader commitment to fostering educator connected learning through networked and collaborative partnerships. Third, designing an open CSCL initiative has meant provisioning educators with the know-how and support to both contribute and work with open content. Fourth, educators who voluntarily participate in the Marginal Syllabus’ public annotation conversations have chosen to practice new forms of interest-driven professional learning across openly-networked online spaces. In summary, this poster suggests the equity-oriented design of educators’ connected learning should redress who has the power to inform decision-making and shared activity, what forms of learner agency contribute to and produce new knowledge, and how digital technologies may be leveraged to support connected learning.

Authors

• Francisco Perez, University of Colorado - Denver

• Jeremiah Holden Kalir, University of Colorado - Denver