Design-Based Research: A New Research Paradigm.

What Is Design-Based Research?

Design-based research (DBR) is a relatively new methodological strategy for studying a wide range of designs, including technology-based instructional designs. Collins, Joseph, and Bielaczyc (2004) defined DBR thus:
“Design experiments bring together two critical pieces in order to guide us to better educational refinement: a design focus and assessment of critical design elements. Ethnography provides qualitative methods for looking carefully at how a design plays out in practice, and how social and contextual variables interact with cognitive variables. Large-scale studies provide quantitative methods for evaluating the effects of independent variables on the dependent variables. Design experiments are contextualized in educational settings, but with a focus on generalizing from those settings to guide the design process. They fill a niche in the array of experimental methods that is needed to improve educational practices”.
According to Collins et al. (2004), Design-based Research intends to address several needs and issues central to the study of learning, including the following:
• The need to address theoretical questions about the nature of learning in context
• The need for approaches to the study of learning phenomena in the real world situations rather than the laboratory
• The need to go beyond narrow measures of learning.
• The need to derive research findings from formative evaluation.
Characteristics of design-based research experiments include:
• addressing complex problems in real, authentic contexts in collaboration with practitioners
• applying integrating known and hypothetical design principles to render plausible solutions
• conducting rigorous and reflective inquiry to test and refine innovative learning environments
• intertwined goals of (1) designing learning environments and (2) developing theories of learning
• research and development through continuous cycles of design, enactment, analysis, and redesign
• research on designs that must lead to sharable theories that help communicate relevant implications to practitioners and other educational designers
• research must account for how designs function in authentic settings
Definition:
While there is an ongoing debate about what constitutes design-based research, the definition of design-based research proposed by Wang and Hannafin (2005) captures its critical characteristics:
“a systematic but flexible methodology aimed to improve educational practices through iterative analysis, design, development, and implementation, based on collaboration among researchers and practitioners in real-world settings, and leading to contextually-sensitive design principles and theories” (p. 6).
Main characteristics of design-based research:
Drawing on the literature, Wang and Hannafin (2005) proposed five basic characteristics of design-based research: “Pragmatic, Grounded, Interactive, iterative and flexible, Integrative, and Contextual” (p. 7).
First, design-based research is pragmatic because its goals are solving current real-world problems by designing and enacting interventions as well as extending theories and refining design principles.
Second, design based research is grounded in both theory and the real-world context (Wang & Hannafin, 2005).
Third, in terms of research process, design-based research is interactive, iterative and flexible.
Fourth, design-based research is integrative because researchers need to integrate a variety of research methods and approaches from both qualitative and quantitative research paradigms, depending on the needs of the research.
Fifth, design research is contextualized because research results are “connected with both the design process through which results are generated and the setting where the research is conducted” (Wang & Hannafin, 2005, p. 11).
However, the purpose of creating design-based research methodology was to move educational research from laboratories into classrooms in order to gain insight into how, when, and why innovations work in practice (The design-based research collective, 2003). Yet the focus of DBR is not on specific designs and curricula, but on how the strengths and limits of a design inform theories of learning. DBR combines quantitative and qualitative methods to view how designs work in the crucible of practice and to gain insights into how students learn in typical school contexts. The DBR Collective has identified 5 key characteristics of good design-based research:
• Goals of designing learning environments and developing theories of learning are intertwined.
• Development and research take place through continuous cycles of design, enactment, analysis, and redesign.
• Research leads to theories that communicate relevant implications to practitioners and other designers.
• Research accounts for how designs function in authentic settings, not only documenting success or failure, but also focusing on interactions that refine our understanding of the learning issues involved.
• Research relies on methods that can document and connect process of enactment to outcomes of interest.

In conclusion, accourding to the scholars of education there are four areas where design-based research methods provide the most promise: (a) exploring the possibilities for creating novel learning and teaching environments, (b) developing theories for learning and instruction that are contextually based, (c) advancing and consolidating design knowledge, and (d) increasing our capability for education innovation.



By: Abdul

Collaborative tagging as distributed cognition.

Reference: Steels, L. (2006). Collaborative tagging as distributed cognition. Pragmatics & Cognition, 14 (2), 287-292.

This article discusses recent developments in the web technologies based on the impact of collaborative tagging on the distributed cognition. How this communication technology (tagging) will effect on the distributed cognition.
In the beginning I believe we to understand what is collaborative tagging?
Collaborative tagging is a form of social software that has recently attracted a huge number of users. Web sites like Flicker, del.icio.us, and 2collab.com, encourage users to share photos, videos, blogs, article references, and music. These data objects are associated with tags, common words freely chosen by the user. They describe a data item in a subjective and often associative way. It is an effective method to organize and retrieve data. Tags are used to organize personal data, and are made public so that other users can access and browse them.
Beginning in 2004 and quickly becoming a standard on websites, collaborative tagging allows users to upload or select materials (pictures, music files, videos, texts and so on) and associate tags with these materials. Tags can be chosen freely, and are similar to keywords. Other users can then browse through tags; a click on a tag connects a user to similarly tagged materials. Tags furthermore enable tag clouds which graphically represent the popularity of tags, demonstrating co-occurrence relations between tags and thus jump from one tag to another. Collaborative tagging on the web is one of the most recent developments in technological support for distributed cognition.
According to this study, tagging is an alternative to the current URL hyperlinks used on the web. A hyperlink introduces a direct link to another site, and a user can simply click on a piece of text or on a picture and be transported to another site. Tagging also has some advantages because the relation between a tag and the address of the resources to which it may point is centrally managed and so new materials can become associated with tags in a distributed fashion. Another advantage of tags is that they introduce a kind of taxonomy of keywords or classifiers which aid users in browsing by providing meta-data about the contents of uploaded material.

The relationship between Distributed Cognition theory and collaborative tagging:
Distributed cognition as a theory of learning has been widely applied in the field of e-Learning, especially in relation to Compuer Collaborative Learning (CCL) and other computer-supported learning tools. Distributed cognition illustrates the process of interaction between people and technologies in order to determine how to best represent, store and provide access to digital resources and other artifacts.
Distributed cognition can also be seen through cultures and communities. Learning certain habits or following certain traditions is seen as cognition distributed over a group of people. Exploring distributed cognition through community and culture is one way to understand how it may work.
With the new research that is emerging in this field, the overarching concept of distributed cognition enhances the understanding of interactions between humans, machines and environments.
In his conclusion, Steels believe that this relationship between distributed cognition and collaborative tagging may help us to understand how humans introduce symbols to organize their information spaces, and especially how their personal choices are influenced by the choices of others.

By: Abdul

Internet and education.

Today, my topic will be about the relationship between Internet and learning. You will find here two articles about the impact of internet on learning and education.

Article Review:

Krikwood, A. (2007). Getting it from the Web: why and how online resources are used by independent undergraduate learners. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 24, 372-382.


This article was about the use of the Internet in education first and how the undergraduate students using the Internet for different purposes in general. The main question was to investigate why and how independent learners use resources on the web while undertaking their normal coursework. The investigation was concerned not only with the academic context of courses being studied, but also any personal, domestic and employment-related experiences and circumstances that were pertinent.

Method:
Semi-structured interviews by telephone were used to investigate each student’s prior familiarity with and experience of locating and using electronic resources via the Web. Their approaches to using Web resources in relation to specific learning activities and tasks were also explored. Factors that encourage or discourage students’ use of Internet resources during their study of OU modules were investigated.
The interviews sought to contextualize students’ learning in relation to any relevant experiences. These included both personal circumstances and educational experience.

Procedure:
The five male and five female volunteers selected to participate represented a reasonable geographical distribution, with some living in remote locations.
A sample of adult undergraduate students was drawn for interviewing, using the following criteria:
They were studying one of four specified second level course modules (two modules from science and two from health and social care);
They had completed at least 1 year of study with the UK OU before commencing their current module.

Findings:
The findings suggest that it is not communication technologies by itself, but a wide range of contextual factors (personal as well as educational), that are important in determining whether and how students use Web resources in their learning. Most adult independent learners will use the Internet for personal, domestic, social and employment purposes, as well as for educational goals.








Article Review:

Mitra, A., Willyard, J., Platt, C., and Parsons, M. (2005). Exploring web usage and selection criteria among male and female students. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(3), article 10. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue3/mitra.html

This study addresses three questions related to the evaluative criteria used by men and women to make judgments about Web pages:
1: What are some of the major criteria used by students to evaluate Web sites? 2: What are some of the different kinds of Web sites used by students? 3: Is there a difference in Web site preference and use based on gender?

Participants:
The participants for the study were recruited from the undergraduate students at the university. The participants were offered a small monetary incentive to participate in the completion of a short Web-based task. The participants were asked to bring their laptop computer to a large classroom where they were instructed to locate what they considered the best Web site about women from Afghanistan. The participants were then asked to list that Web site and answer the questionnaire developed for the study.

Method:
For this study, it was decided to develop an instrument for the study by beginning with a set of focus group discussions so as to gain an in-depth understanding of the criteria used by students as they decide on using specific Web sites. They used focus groups with students at a small liberal arts university. The students were recruited from across the campus and were offered a small incentive for participating in the focus groups. The protocol for the focus groups included questions about the participants’ level of Internet use; the categories of Web information sought; the participants’ feelings about the usefulness of the Web. Also, the focus group discussions were followed by the development of a survey instrument to answer the exploratory research questions raised here.

Findings:
Questions 1: The results suggest that the fit of the information on the Web site is considered to be the most important criterion for evaluating the value of a Web site. Those sites that seem to have appropriate textual content are considered to be most valuable.

Question 2: The data suggest that other than search engines, the Web sites that are used most frequently need to have some direct relevance for the students’ work-either class work or their special interest.

Question 3: In general, there was little difference between men and women with respect to the different kinds of sites they visited.


Discussion:
This finding could potentially inform the ways in which the Web could be used in pedagogy. The students reported less use of special interest sites, and greater use of sites that are of practical interest to them. It is thus important to be able to evaluate some of the predispositions of the students, as well as to consider the specific use of a Web site before it is used in teaching.

By: Abdul