Practitioner-Focused Design and Evaluation

In keeping with the requirement for a practitioner-focused tool, we are seeking to involve lecturers, tutors and teachers from across the spectrum of post-compulsory learning in all stages of the project. Specifically, they are fulfilling three roles:

• Acting as practitioner-informants in the design process
• Working as partners in our embedding activities, when we will test the tool in initial teacher-training (ITT) and staff development/continuing professional development (CPD) settings
• "Critical friends", taking part in our evaluation of the prototype tool and its underlying concept

Some individuals may fulfil more than one role: e.g. two of our PIs are also embedding partners.

Practitioner Informants

"Practitioner-informants" are carefully selected individuals whom we have asked to provide input into the design of Phoebe and to act as sounding boards for our own ideas. The term "informant" comes from the framework of "informant design" put forward by Yvonne Rogers and the late Mike Scaife at the University of Sussex in the late 1990s. Although they developed the framework primarily for working with children as design partners (see their  chapter in Alison Druin's edited 1999 book The Design of Children's Technology), an early version did acknowledge such a role for adults. In our conceptualisation, informant design involves the input of various representatives of the e-learning community at the specific stages of the project where their contribution will be of the most value. In the Practitioner Informants section of the wiki we plan and document our work with Phoebe's practitioner-informants (PIs).

Embedding Activities

In this section of the wiki we plan and document the embedding phase.

Embedding Plan

Evaluation

In this section of the wiki we plan and document our evaluation of Phoebe.

Evaluation plan

Consultation Activity with JISC Pedagogy Experts

On 26th October we ran a consultation activity at the JISC Pedagogy Experts' meeting in Birmingham. The activity was intended to validate some of the work we had done so far, and to explore three key questions in the design of Phoebe:

1. What components do teachers take into consideration when planning a lesson in a technology-rich environment?
2. How do teachers identify these components? Do they recognise a given set of terms, or do they have alternative individual vocabularies?
3. How do teachers move among these components when planning a particular lesson, and how do they characterise the relationships between components and/or clusters of components?

Report on the consultation activity

Pedagogic Planner Review Meeting

This meeting was held on 23rd January, 2007, to elicit the perspectives of fellow members of the Design for Learning programme on the future course of both the Phoebe and 'London Knowledge Lab' pedagogic planner projects. After a short overview to the whole meeting, each project then demonstrated their tool to roughly half of the participants, who asked questions and filled in review forms supplied by Glenaffric. Glenaffric then collated responses and forwarded them to us in this summary document.