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Rethinking Teaching for theKnowledge Society
Diana Laurillard
For over a decade now, universities have been aware ofthe
pressures to expand access to higher education.1 Theknowledge
society needs more graduates, and those graduateswill keep
returning to study as lifelong learning takes its placein both work
and leisure time. These are the positive pressuresfor expansion.
But the knowledge society, fueled by the ex-panding higher
education sector, is in turn generating moreknowledge industries,
producing additional, competitive pres-sures for traditional
institutions of higher education. Those in-volved in university
teaching in this digital age must cope withthe fact that the
knowledge industries are creating the meansby which individuals can
acquire the immediate skills andknowledge those industries need. As
a result, many individualsare questioning the true benefit of a
university education,given its cost.
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Copyright 2002 Diana Laurillard. Reprinted by permission of the
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Universities wishing to respond to these new demands needto
answer two difficult questions:
How should the curriculum balance expert knowledge
andpractitioner knowledge? Universities are comfortableteaching
specialist knowledge produced by experts, butpractitioner knowledge
and the skill to develop it, whichis what the knowledge industry
needs, is not a naturalpart of university curricula. Should
universities move intothis area at the undergraduate level, as
Michael Gibbonsand others suggest,2 or should they leave it to the
post-graduate, post-experience programs within the
privatesector?
To what extent is a degree course a long-term grounding foran
individual? A degree certifies the knowledge thatgraduates have
developed when they leave a university,but most graduates use very
little of this knowledge intheir subsequent careers. The more
enduring qualitiesgained are the skills, attitudes, and ways of
thinkingderived from courses. But degrees and syllabuses are
stilldefined in terms of subject knowledge, rather thangeneric
skills. Should universities focus courses andteaching more on the
practice of high-level skills, orshould they leave this to
individuals to develop throughsubsequent work in the knowledge
industries?
To answer these questions, we must be able to define
whatdistinguishes a university education from the knowledge in-
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dustries offerings in the form of corporate and
for-profitinstitutions.
In 1997, Lord Dearings National Committee of Inquiry intoHigher
Education reviewed the role of higher education in alearning
society3 and defined it as having four main purposes:
1. Inspiring and enabling individuals to develop
theircapabilities to the highest levels
2. Increasing knowledge and understanding3. Serving the needs of
the economy4. Shaping a democratic and civilized society
The first purpose testifies to the universitys commitment tothe
long-term personal development of the individual, in con-trast with
the focus on the short-term employment needs in-evitably driving
other forms of post-school education, such ascorporate training
programs. The second purpose links thetwin activities of research
and teaching in the development anddissemination of knowledge. The
third expresses the economicvalue of this research and teaching,
and the fourth emphasizesthe cultural value to the society it
serves. For the individual,therefore, universities bring together
research and teaching,and a focus on long-term needs, to offer a
clear competitive ad-vantage over what the knowledge industry can
provide.
The Committee defined the unique role of the university
insociety, embracing these four purposes, as being to enable
so-ciety to maintain an independent understanding of itself andits
world.4 Each word in that definition was carefully chosen.
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Society does not confine the universitys role to serviceof the
nation-state. This is one of the key changes now inthe way that
universities relate to their context: once anorgan of the
nation-state, a university now crossesnational boundaries in
teaching, in the way it has alwaysdone in research. Society also
implies that theunderstanding is widely owned, fully disseminated,
notlocated with some elite but with society itself, therebyenabling
it to become, in the fullest sense, a learningsociety.
Maintain suggests a continuing responsibility, but onethat is
responsive to change because of what is beingmaintained: an
understanding of society itself, incontinual flux, and of its
world, for which our theories arein continual development.
Independent refers to the unique position ofuniversities as
creators of understanding. There will bemany claimants for the role
of understanding our societyand its world in the new knowledge
society, but most ofthemthe media, industrial research units,
corporateuniversitiescannot claim independence from politicaland
commercial interest. The individualistic anddisinterested nature of
university research and teachingremains unique.
Understanding expresses the epistemology of auniversity as
knowledge acquired with a sense ofresponsibility for how it comes
to be known and with thepurpose of enabling enhanced action.
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Of itself and its world is inclusive of the full range ofthe
natural, human, and social worlds as objects ofunderstanding.
This portmanteau definition helps to clarify the unique roleof
universities for society as a whole. They are distinguishedfrom
plausible competitors in the knowledge industries bytheir
universality of scope, by their independence of inquiry,and by the
nature of their epistemology. Therefore, I concludethis section
with the following proposition:
Proposition 1: Universities will maintain their competitiveedge
against the knowledge industries through themaintenance of their
core valuesincluding research-based teaching and a curriculum that
provides for thelong-term cognitive needs of individuals.
Does University Teaching Measure Up to Its Role?
The rhetoric is good, but saying doesnt make it so.
Wheneversenior academics are rattled by the pretensions of the
privateupstarts in the corporate education business, they incline
to theview that the degree-awarding powers of universities protect
theuniqueness of their institutions. At present, this is perhaps
true,but governments have the ability to change that power if
uni-versities are not seen to provide something valued and
some-thing distinctive from the increasing offers of the private
sector.
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For some time now, academics have been arguing for a radi-cal
shift from the standard transmission model of universityteaching.
Donald A. Schn, for example, demonstrated theneed for a reflective
practicum in universities, where stu-dents can prepare for their
future careers when existing profes-sional knowledge will not fit
every case. Practitioners have tomake sense of uncertain, unique,
or conflicted situations ofpractice through reflection-in-action,
and they need to beable to go beyond the rulesdevising new methods
of reason-ing, strategies of action, and ways of framing problems.
Thispresupposes a very different kind of university teaching:
Designing, in the broader sense in which all
professionalpractice is design-like, must be learned by doing. A
design-like practice is learnable, but is not teachable by
classroommethods . . . the interventions most useful to students
aremore like coaching than teaching, as in a reflectivepracticum. .
. . The reflective practicum demands intensityand duration far
beyond the normal requirements of acourse. . . . A studio, a
supervision, an apprenticeship. . . .Students do not so much attend
these events as live in them.And the work takes time . . . time to
live through the learn-ing cycles involved in any design-like task;
and time to shiftrepeatedly back and forth between reflection on
and inaction.5
Similarly, Etienne Wengers account of a learning commu-nity
emphasizes the importance of individual and community
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engagement in several ways.6 For the acquisition of
knowledge,the community must provide three kinds of engagement:
Give newcomers access to competence Invite a personal experience
of engagement Enable incorporation of competence within
participation
For the creation of knowledge, four further types of engage-ment
are required:
Radically new insights Mutual engagement around joint enterprise
Strong bond of communal competence Deep respect for particularity
of experience
Wengers account does not privilege universities with
uniqueaccess to such characteristics; the knowledge industries
arelikely to develop these traits as well, if they are to succeed.
Butuniversities will need graduates capable of contributing to
themore fluid kind of knowledge creation that is needed by
theprofessional practitioner, who is not confined to the
well-trod-den paths of expert consensus knowledge of the
traditionaluniversity curriculum. Students long-term cognitive
needs gowell beyond the acquisition of consensus knowledge.
There are significant opposing pressures on
universitiestodemonstrate research success on the one hand and to
providefor wider participation in higher education on the other.
Thetwo pressures oppose because research and teaching are seen
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to be in competition with each other, at the institutional
leveland at the individual level. In the United Kingdom,
significantfunding follows high research ratings, whereas funding
forteaching is not related to quality ratings, so institutions
rewardgood research more than good teaching. Academics have to
di-vide their time between the two activities: the one in whichthey
are professionally qualified and judged by their peers; theother in
which they are neither qualified nor judged. In-evitably, research
wins. There have been attempts to ignite ac-ademics interest in the
professional accreditation of teach-ingfor example, by setting up
the Institute for Learning andTeaching in the United Kingdombut
interest is minimal; weare not yet on a transformational path.
Proposition 2: Universities are not maintaining aprofessional
teaching approach that parallels theirprofessional research
approach, and the curriculum is not sufficiently oriented toward
long-term high-levelcognitive skills.
What Are the Challenges to University Teaching?
Our teaching methods have not evolved sufficiently to keeppace
with what is needed. The dominant model is still thetransmission
model, with the dominant learning technologiesstill being those it
has spawned: the lecture, the book, themarked assignment. Academics
have been under such pressure
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to meet research demands and teach larger numbers of stu-dents
that they have been unable to go beyond the traditionalforms of
academic teaching. We have begun at last to play withdigital
technologies as a way of meeting the demands of thedigital age, but
with an approach still born of the transmissionmodel. The academic
community has not redefined whatcounts as higher learning and
therefore cannot draft thespecification for how the new technology
should do anythingother than what learning technology has always
done: transmitthe academics knowledge to the student. The academic
worldhas called each new technological deviceword
processing,interactive video, hypertext, multimedia, the Web into
theservice of the transmission model of learning. The potential
ofthe technology to serve a different kind of learning cannot
beexploited by an academic community that clings only to what
itknows. The academy, with respect to the professional practiceof
teaching, is not a reflective practicum. There is no
progress,therefore, in how we teach, despite what might be
possiblewith the new technology.
What is the difference between a curriculum that teacheswhat is
known and one that teaches how to come to know?Knowledge, even
academic knowledge, is not adequately repre-sented as propositional
statements but has a historicity that in-corporates individuals
previous experiences, their perceptionsof the immediate situation,
their intentions, and their experi-ences of discovery, of
recognized tensions, of uncertainties, ofambiguities still
unresolved. This is not situated learning only,nor discovery
learning, nor meta-learning. It comes closer to
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scholarship as learning. It requires a reflective practicum
forthe learning process. But for that to be possible,
universityteachers have to renew and develop their model of the
learningprocess well beyond the traditional transmission model. It
re-quires a teaching approach that turns academics themselvesinto
reflective practitioners with respect to their teaching. Inthe
context of research, of course, they would certainly de-scribe
themselves as reflective practitioners. As researchers,they are
consummate professionals who are
1. fully trained through an apprenticeship program, givingthem
access to competence and personal engagementwith the skills of
scholarship in their field;
2. highly knowledgeable in some specialist area;3. licensed to
practice as both practitioner and mentor to
others in the field;4. building on the work of others in their
field whenever
they begin new work;5. conducting practical work using the
agreed-upon
protocols and standards of evidence of their field;6. working in
collaborative teams of respected peers;7. seeking new insights and
ways of rethinking their field;
and8. disseminating findings for peer review and use by
others.
In the context of research, academics measure up well toSchns
and Wengers ideals. Now run through the above listagain and
consider the characteristics in the context of univer-
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sity teaching. How many of those eight characteristics of
thereflective practitioner contributing to a learning
communitytypically apply to the academic as teacher of his or her
subject?None, not even number 2, since in this context we should
referto a specialism in the pedagogy of the subject, not relying
sim-ply on academic knowledge. It is tough for academics who
areunder pressure to address this as an aspect of their
profession-alism, but if there is to be innovation and change in
universityteachingas the new technology requires, as the
knowledgeindustry requires, and as students demandthen it
followsthat academics must become researchers in teaching.
Proposition 3: University teaching must aspire to arealignment
of research and teaching and to teachingmethods that support
students in the generic skills ofscholarship, not the mere
acquisition of knowledge.
What Is Possible?
I have argued elsewhere that a Conversational Frameworkfor
learning offers a more progressive model than the transmis-sion
model and is more compatible with the requirements ofthe reflective
practicum to which we must aspire.7 It fits theideal of university
education, which is what academics cer-tainly aspire to, for all
that they do not practice it. And it pro-vides a framework against
which we can specify what the digi-tal technologies should be doing
to support this more elaborate
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model. It captures the essence of university teaching as an
iter-ative dialogue between teacher and student(s), operating ontwo
levels: (1) the discursive, theoretical, conceptual level and(2)
the active, practical, experiential levelthe two levelsbridged by
each participant engaging in the processes of adap-tation (practice
in relation to theory) and reflection (theory inthe light of
practice).
The iterative dialogue of the Conversational Framework
isexpressed as a diagram in Figure 1, against which we can test
arange of different kinds of learning technology.
The Conversational Framework describes the irreducibleminimum
for academic learning. The interplay between theoryand practice is
essential for making the abstract concrete, asMitchel Resnick put
it.8 And the continually iterative dialoguebetween teacher and
students is essential if the students are to
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be sure that they have understood the teachers concept.
Thetransmission modelthe expression of the teachers conceptis just
one part of a much more complex model for learning asshared
understanding.
Taking these dialogic activities as the criteria for the
reflec-tive practicum and the learning community, we can test
howwell some of the more ambitious uses of the technology meas-ure
up to these requirements. To what extent can a particularICT
(Information and Communication Technologies) formatsupport the full
Conversational Framework? We can immedi-ately see that many of the
more ubiquitous forms offer nomore than the traditional print and
lecture presentational me-dia, which serve only the transmission
activity. Lecture noteson the Web and CD-based digital resources
are two examples.However, if we exploit the communicative and
adaptive capa-bilities of new technologies in carefully integrated
combina-tions, they can meet the requirements of most of the
activitiesin the Conversational Framework. Then they can
transformthe learning experience into one that fits better with the
re-quirements of the digital age.
Different learning technology models cover different
combi-nations of activities within the Framework. When
sufficientdesign time is given to challenging the technology to
meetthese more progressive academic ideals, something more
thanlecture notes on the Web is possible. Design has to be
gener-ated from the learning objectives and the aspirations of
thecourse, rather than from the capability of the
technology.Courses at the Open University have provided several
opportu-
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nities for exploiting the technology in the service of
specifictypes of learning activity in which students need to
engage. Ex-amples are shown in Figures 2 to 6. In each case, the
commu-nicative, interactive, and adaptive capabilities of the
technol-ogy facilitate different kinds of iterative dialogue
betweenteachers and students. The practical exercises of
investigatingand analyzing resources and running simulations are
com-bined with theoretical and conceptual discussions within
thecommunity, either synchronously or asynchronously.
Figure 2 shows a complex environment of reservoirsthrough which
a carbon atom moves via a transformationalprocess such as
burningfrom land plants to atmosphere orabsorptionfrom atmosphere
to sea. The task goal is tomove the atom through all twelve
reservoirs in the environ-ment. The action is to select a suitable
next reservoir and itsappropriate process. There is feedback in the
form of success-ful transition, video clips of each process in
action, and arecord of reservoirs as yet unvisited. In its generic
form, theobjective being met here isto learn the sequence
andtransformational pro-cesses within a cyclicalsystem. The same
peda-gogic form could be usedfor quite different content,such as
the osmosis cycleor the development of anindividual.
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Figure 3 shows the beginning of an environment for
investi-gating relationships between literary resources from
theHomeric poems and artifacts from archaeological sites of
an-cient Greece. Each week of work defines a set of
investigationactivities, such as compare the mortal characters in
the Iliadand the Odyssey and investigate the kind of society in
Myce-nae. Students use searchfacilities through the digi-tized
resources, guided byadvice on what to look forand how much material
touse. They use a notepadfacility to take notes onwhat they find,
and oncesufficient notes have beencollected, they can con-sult
model answers. Usingthese, they may then continue their search or
refine theirnotes. Again, this pedagogic form could be applied to
any otherdigitized content, with the teacher supplying some
appropriateinvestigation activities and matching model answers.
Figure 4 shows the form of an online asynchronous readinggroup.
Students can read the article supplied and may com-ment on it using
a comment button to link to a discussionthreaded around the
structure of the article and around somekey questions defined by
the tutor. The teacher must supplythe text, define the key
questions, and contribute to thediscussion.
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Figure 5 shows the same environment adapted to discussionof a
runnable simulation. This format combines both the com-municative
and the adaptive capabilities of learning technol-ogy. The teacher
supplies the simulation model and the taskgoalfor example, find the
optimal parameters for these con-ditionsand the interactive model
provides the feedback to
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the student. The student can use the comment button to linkto a
discussion threaded around the structure of the simula-tion or the
task. The format here allows iterative dialogue atthe conceptual
level and interactive experimentation at thepractical level.
Figure 6 shows a synchronous discussion environmentaround a
shared visual space. Students use a headset, and bothaudio and data
are transmitted via a single modem, using au-dio on the Web.
Students or tutors may submit anything, in-cluding a text, diagram,
or picture (in this case, a Web site), tothe shared space and may
use the tools on offer for collabora-tive designfor example, a
concept-mapping tool. The teachermay specify the form of the group,
the task, and the visuals.
The practice of high-level cognitive skills can be
supportedthrough these more radical design formats for learning
tech-nologies. Each of these addresses most of the activities in
theConversational Framework and therefore supports a more
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complex learning experience than print, or lectures, or
simpleWeb pages. We need to be able to offer this more
elaboratekind of learning experience on a mass basis. Technology is
ca-pable of doing that, since it is essentially a mass-oriented
de-vice. But it cannot do so unless academics find a way to usethis
new tool more effectively.
Proposition 4: Learning technologies can support studentsin the
learning forms that contribute to the high-levelcognitive skills of
scholarship and the practitioner-basedskills and knowledge of
design-like practice.
How Might This Change Be Realized?
Designing learning technology models that are innovative
andeffective, that exploit the new technology, and that address
theexpectations of the knowledge industry is an additional
burdenfor academics. How can this be done?
The problem is that teaching does not invent its tools; ituses
those invented by others. The academy had language butdidnt invent
writingtraders did that. It had writing but didntinvent
booksadministrators did that. It didnt invent comput-ersengineers
did that. It didnt invent the Internetthe mili-tary did that. It
did invent the Web, but not for teaching pur-poses. All those
technologies have been adopted by theteaching professions but only
in the service of the transmissionmodel of learning. We have to
conclude that it is not a natural
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part of the process of teaching for its practitioners to
inventtools for the improvement of practice.
There is an alternative approach to the individual strugglingto
discover how best to use a complex technology. All technolo-gies
create communities that invent a range of formats withinwhich
practitioners can craft a variety of contents: differenttypes of
books, television programs, PC applications. We needthe same
formats for learning technologies. But these devicesgrow
organically. They are not designed in the abstract, aswere, say,
authoring systems. They begin life in the excitementof creativity
and the intention of doing something different.That is how new
teaching designs should begin, and that ishow all the above
examples began. But the new designs shouldnot stay rooted in the
particularity of the original design. Thebeauty of computer
programs is that they can endure as aform, as a tool for others to
design by. So the program that be-gan as a way of enlivening the
study of Homer could be gener-alized to become a tool for enabling
students to undertakeguided investigations of a range of resource
materials in orderto develop their own analyses of each
investigation. And as adesign tool, it then becomes usable by
academics in the sameway that a book format or a small-group format
can be. Simi-larly, the program that began as a way of challenging
studentsto drive a carbon atom through its stages of transition
betweendifferent reservoirs could become a tool that other
academicscustomize for quite different content, while preserving
theform of identifying appropriate transition processes in a
dy-namic system. The form of the learning activity, already
tested
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and proven, remains the same. The content may cover a widerange
of different topics.
There will be many such formspossibly hundreds acrossthe full
range of the university curricula. These could beadapted to a
generic form to provide design tools for academicsto use in their
teaching much as they currently use PowerPointfor presentations. As
we have seen, each of the programs inFigures 2 to 5 could offer a
generic learning activity model:
An exercise on identifying the process changes that anobject
must go through in moving from one context toanother
A guided investigation and analysis of the relationsbetween
digitized source materials, with model answers as feedback
A digital-document discussion environment for any text or
article, offering discussion around the structure of thearticle and
defined general topics
A digital-document discussion environment for arunnable
simulation, offering discussion around thestructure of the
simulation and defined general topics
A synchronous discussion environment for a small grouptalking
around a set of shared resources
In each case, teachers must provide the content and
ideasappropriate for the particular learning activities that they
wantto design, as they do for the generic form of a book, a
lecture,or a PowerPoint presentation for less active forms of
learning.
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They need relatively little programmer support. The pedagogi-cal
design is already embedded in the generic form. It is theteachers
design task to customize the content. In such a way,we should also
be able to capture the generic forms that facili-tate the culture
of inquiry and professional practice.
The proposal that academics could become professionals inthe
sense of being reflective practitioners in the pedagogy oftheir
subject is now more feasible. A generic learning activitymodel
(GLAM)9 embodies good pedagogic practice from theoriginal design
and evaluation process, enabling professionalsto share ideas and
build on each others work. This is the be-ginning of the kind of
collective R&D program we will need togenerate innovative and
effective teaching. If the OKI (OpenKnowledge Initiative) led by
MIT can function as a knowledge-building community, defining the
design standards of goodpedagogy in the use of learning
technologies, then we will re-ally have a reflective practicum for
teaching.
Proposition 5: Academics need a collective R&D programthat
builds design tools, or generic learning activitymodels (GLAMs),
for supporting students in learning the skills of scholarship.
Would academics accept such a program? Perhaps. Acade-mics, like
all other professionals, work to the system in whichthey find
themselves. If universities facilitated and rewarded ahighly
professional approach to teaching, academics would re-spond.
Without such facilitation and reward, they will respond
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to what the system does reward, namely a professional ap-proach
to research only.
Proposition 6: Universities must support a professionalteaching
approach that mirrors the approach for research.
A New Approach to University Teaching?
If adopted, Propositions 5 and 6 would constitute a new
ap-proach to university teaching. The technology can do only
somuch. On its own, it cannot offer academics what they need
toadapt their teaching to the needs of the digital age. With
thisnew approach, however, they would be able to do more. Forthis
approach to be successful, there has to be a common un-derstanding
of the nature of learning at the university level, anacceptance
that teachers must become reflective practitioners,and an intention
by university management to create the con-ditions that foster and
reward this rather different approach.Without a change in approach,
new technology will not serveuniversities in meeting the challenge
of mass higher educationand lifelong learning for the knowledge
society. The digital agewill find its own ways of managing without
us.
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acknowledgments
This article was developed from a presentation delivered at
theannual symposium of the Forum for the Future of Higher
Edu-cation, held in Aspen, Colorado, in September 2001.
notes
1. The word university is used generically here to refer to
colleges,universities, and other traditional, nonprofit forms of
higher educa-tion.
2. Michael Gibbons et al., The New Production of Knowledge:
TheDynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies
(Lon-don: Sage Publications, 1994).
3. Higher Education in the Learning Society: Report of the
Na-tional Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (Great
Britain:National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education,
1997).
4. Ibid., 72.5. Donald A. Schn, Educating the Reflective
Practitioner: Toward
a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions (San
Fran-cisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987), 157, 311.
6. Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning,
Meaning,and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998).
7. Diana Laurillard, Rethinking University Teaching: A
Conversa-tional Framework for the Effective Use of Learning
Technologies, 2nded. (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002).
8. Mitchel Resnick, Lifelong Kindergarten, presentation
deliv-
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ered at the annual symposium of the Forum for the Future of
HigherEducation, Aspen, Colorado, September 2001.
9. GLAM is not an attractive acronym. Using the word design
in-stead of model forms the acronym GLAD, which is no better.
Substi-tuting customizable for generic gives CLAM, which has all
the wrongconnotations. There must be a better way of putting
this.
Diana Laurillard is a professor of educational technology and
pro-vice chancellor at the Open University in the United
Kingdom.
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