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Shaping Spaces - Peter Goodyear ALTC 2017 Keynote#

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Quote from the following taken from the slides.

Abstract#

This talk is about new learning spaces in universities and the scope for learning technologists to help shape better learning spaces. I will focus on design knowledge: knowledge that is useful in (educational) design work. Two ideas are core to my argument. The first is that the analysis and design of complex learning spaces – and learning situations more generally – must pay close attention to students’ activity: what it is they are actually doing. The second is that we need a shared set of actionable concepts that can connect human activity to the physical world (material/digital/hybrid), recognising that activity can be influenced, but is rarely determined, by features of its setting. Without such connecting concepts, it becomes very difficult to design, or to explain the rationale for a new design, or to understand how an existing set of learning arrangements actually works. The title of the talk captures the idea that ‘we shape our spaces and then our spaces shape us’. When learning spaces work well, students also learn how to shape the spaces they need.

Interesting points#

Exaggerate the power of articulated knowledge and understimate physicality#

Active learning and learning to change the world are (usually) entangled with complex (re)arrangements of the material, digital, social, epistemic ... we tend to exaggerate the power of articulated knowledge and talk in HE and to underestimate the (often subtle) power of the brute physicality of the world

Links to quotes from Chruchill, McLuhan and Dewey.

What design knowledge includes#

I’m using ‘design knowledge’ quite broadly, to include such things as design methods, design tools, design principles, reusable design templates, design patterns, etc. It also includes ‘actionable concepts’ that can be used in reasoning about/in design work. For example, concepts that help designers think about relations between things that can be designed and likely human/student responses to what is designed for them.

e.g. casa and casa-design-principles

Lots of design knowledge and not much sharing#

I'd want to say that there is a huge amount of design knowledge of course embedded in the everyday practice of us in our roles as designers as educational development education of technologists. We solve some enormously complicated problems in our everyday work and partly I want to talk about that but a lot of that knowledge and experience remains tacit it remains local it remains locked up in local practices it's not often articulated and it's actually rather hard to share so moving out beyond islands of local practice is difficult for a number of reasons it's not just that in some sense or in silos or on separate islands but actually finding language and concepts to make the concrete and the local more general and shareable.

Centrality of known what our students are doing#

knowing what our students are actually doing and learning is core is fundamental is expensive is difficult often involves intrusive work but if our knowledge of what they're actually doing and learning is flaky insubstantial we can have very little confidence in the nature of the enterprise

Heterogeneity#

but the point here really is that design knowledge has to be seen as something that is heterogeneous in form it gets created in all sorts of ways through practice through study through theorization and so on it operates well in some spaces and not so well in others

being able to recognize what kinds of knowledge are most likely to be useful in what kinds of space I think that capability is fundamental both to the success of our students but also to the success of our own work as educators and designers knowing how knowledge works where it works best is fundamental capability and that's it I'm going to stop there I want to do a little bit of credit

Transcript - From YouTube#

Slide 2#

I want you to use this title for a couple of reasons one is because in talking about new learning spaces in universities and let me say most of my focus is on universities but I hope the message spreads more widely in talking about new learning spaces in higher education we can think about the action that gets taken to create those spaces in a variety of ways but I like this notion of shaping that there's something creative craft like a non-deterministic about it but also there's that double meaning to it that the spaces we shape are also spaces that are meant to shape others and early in the morning to get to recursive but of course one of the things that we're hoping our students will learn to do through their experiences in the learning spaces that we create is learn to shape their own spaces

It's probably a neglected aspect of becoming a lifelong learner or engaging in lifetime inquiry that pulling together the tools resources and people that you need in order to do that is part of the deal so some of their activities ideally should help them learn to shape spaces for their own individual and collective projects going into the future.

Slide 3#

I'll I'll come back to that right at the end now when I get asked what I do for a living these days one of the things that I say it makes a little bit of sense to me as I engage in design research which is that I'm interested in design knowledge which i think of as being actionable knowledge for design practice so in our field that's designed for learning educational design instructional design call it what you will but I'm interested in the many forms of knowledge that make design possible and easier more efficient more effective design research I see as an intellectual enterprise and a practical enterprise that doesn't just create design knowledge but finds curate's it and so on and so forth and it feels to me that that conception of an intellectual academic activity that's intimately connected to design and suppress or to sit somewhere near the heartland of learning technology and its work both in the world of learning and teaching and also in the world of research again we might come back to that connecting this to a couple of the conference key ideas in the conference

I'd want to say that there is a huge amount of design knowledge of course embedded in the everyday practice of us in our roles as designers as educational development education of technologists we solve some enormously complicated problems in our everyday work and partly I want to talk about that but a lot of that knowledge and experience remains tacit it remains local it remains locked up in local practices it's not often articulated and it's actually rather hard to share so moving out beyond islands of local practice is difficult for a number of reasons it's not just that in some sense or in silos or on separate islands but actually finding language and concepts to make the concrete and the local more general and shareable it's problematic it's difficult.

I want to talk about now a little bit also and there are a number of reasons for this but I think one of the corollaries of that difficulty of articulating the deep knowledge that we've got about how to improve learning environments one of the things that flows from that is that public discourse and I think I'd include a lot of high level organizational discourse fails to reflect the subtleties of that and some of how learning technology spaces and so on get talked about in the broad discussion this brought public discussions about higher education I think is the weaker and actually the more damaging because of that lack

So that's part of my framing I want to focus particularly on design knowledge to say something about some key elements of design knowledge that I think are particularly appropriate or applicable in relation to learning spaces and if there's time I'll say something about academic fluency and design.

Slide 4 and 5 - Touching on epistemic-fluency?#

now the last bit of prologue really seems to me sometimes when we're working in complex organizations like universities it feels like we're having to play multi-dimensional chess that the games that we're playing are often at many different levels or at least we need to find ways of relating what we're doing at one level to another level so I'm just in a very crude way picture this is a kind of layered set of spaces and that when we're thinking about learning when we're thinking about what can be done in education when they're critiquing education or reading insightful critiques of current practice or how things are going seems to be part of the challenge is knowing what then can I do what can I do in my day job is an educational designer developer technologist what can I do as a citizen through engaging in in politics or digital resistance or whatever it might be and there is a knack to working out not only what levels one can be working out but how those things connect

One of the claims I want to make is that actually there are different mixes of different kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing involved in those different layers and levels a lot of what I talked about today and generally is going to be quite micro but I think part of the challenge is is then to make those connections through to more macro or broader social and political issues and if this time I'll come back to that too

Slide 4 includes following examples of epistemic & productive spaces

  • National/political - voting, participation in political parties, movements, campaigning organisations etc
  • Sectoral - shaping policy for HE
  • Institutional - shaping own university's mission, policies, strategies etc
  • Broad curriculum - (re)shaping courses, curricula, assessment regimes etc
  • Specific/local (re)design work on tools/paces; tasks etc

Slides 6 and 7#

Appears to have been just music

Slide 8 and 9#

so you can get some initiative of the university that it should be possible to teach students from different courses together at the same time in the same laboratory students in different years and for them to engage in using laboratory instruments setups and engage in processes that were as like what they would encounter in a lab post-graduation as possible so it's part of inducting them into ways of being a scientist in a lab space of this kind where you're not only mixing with people from other disciplinary backgrounds and with greater levels or less levels of experiences yourself but where part of the point is to be able to develop new ideas some of that interaction close up a bit so you have 240 workstations in here each of them with the apparatus you need to do the biology biochemistry or whatever it is you might be doing so the case in itself it's reasonably complicated

but then you have integrated with that if you like an instructional or educational system such that computer monitors each workstation are able to deliver guidance about what to do next in this particular experiment there are also some what to me seem rather fancy audio capabilities such that an instructor who needs to be able to talk to all the people in biology 101 but not disturb the people in biochemistry 101 can do a targeted audio broadcast to them and it just goes to the groups of students in the lab who need to hear that

Slide 10 and 11#

so again I have the schema that you're building up here is of a complex interweaving of digital and material elements in a new learning space this one is from mothers work she's a prosthodontist academic teaches students how to make making implants interest and so on she's doing a PhD with us and she's researching in a way that is meant to inform the improvement of a simulation lab at Massey Hall University in Bangkok where she works and this again has numerous work stations in which students are learning a bunch of things about how to work with implants and dentures and so on and they do that in simulated circumstances with a mannequin where the simulation system is giving them feedback on aspects of the it's giving them feedback on a haptic and also a visual basis

so it's monitoring aspects of what they do and checking on things like auditioning of hand positioning of body in relation to the patient and so on and it's I believe at the time it was built anyway it was the largest dancing simulation lab in the world it's a sizeable thing substantial investment

you're not working as well as they wanted it to for a variety of reasons and so not be spending time hanging out in this space observing closely how the students and instructors are doing what they're doing and coming forward with some recommendations about incremental improvements to the design there and like many of these spaces it's got to be organized in a way that both allows a lot of individual work but also can be switched over to group mode when an instructor needs to do a demonstration and also instructors need to be able to move around between the work stations in order to do some human supervision to to complement what's happening through the automated supervision system

Slide 12#

Then the last example I want to give you is from Amy Anson's PhD work Anna works in our Health Sciences faculty at Sydney and she's developed a gaming environment that is meant to support medical students in revising their knowledge of human anatomy she's done that in a way and there are two special aspects to this really she's done that in a way that uses spatial metaphor for both the knowledge and the competition that's involved in this game so two groups of Anatomy students compete in real time against each other over a period of an hour or two they do this by answering questions about the draw on their anatomical knowledge each time they answer a question they gain control of a piece of territory and deny control to the opposition so that game aside element is meant to give them a bit of extra motivation to do revision in order to do well in this competition.

but the other special element is then okay and this came as a bit of an afterthought for Anna hellbender we organized the students themselves in the bottom image we see four students in a team playing this game they're playing against another team who are in a separate room and these four students are organized in a way that makes it possible for them to share answers to questions knowledge and also engage in tactical decision making as part of strategizing in the game and they can do that in a way where they're not over by the rifle team and that turns that out to have I think as soon as I say don't you think yeah well of course that would have dramatic effects on how you would play the game wouldn't it

Slide 14#

but it can sometimes be hard to think through exactly how these spatial arrangements are going to need to work now of course LT has a seek on new learning spaces and I think that means I don't have to make a song and dance of the argument why on earth is it we're talking about learning spaces are learning tech conference and I think there are a number of approaches to this but I'll keep it short because I suspect that many people are convinced by the argument but it seems to me within learning Tech over the years if certainly if I go back over the period I've been working in it we've not always paid a lot of attention to the physical setting within which digital tools are being used we've been very focused in on digital worlds and digital environments

I think quite often we've missed a lot about student experience of learning by having that slightly blinkered view so I'd want to make the claim that we can very rarely do a good job of designing managing or evaluating physical learning spaces these days without some reference to digital technology or to understanding digital technologies without referring to sites of use and I want to just go a bit further and say if we accept that then I think we have to recognize that within the learning tech community is a capability that's actually much needed within higher education at least as I discern it through conversations with people who are working on new learning spaces and

it's pretty much like this that within our field we have some ideas that can be used to connect valued learning activities things that we want students to be doing to the physical digital material to reason about those relationships think about them when we are needing to participate in design and evaluation and that that kind of knowledge those modes of thinking and not yet widespread amongst architects campus infrastructure planners and managers and so on so there's a real contribution for us to be making there and I suspect many of you are being called upon in order to to do that and it seems to me a very right and proper thing to be doing and from our expertise space there's more expansive notion of what learning technology is about I think that if we if we follow Bill Mitchell and say well you know the modern world is is one in which the digital and material are interpenetrating each other in ever accelerating ways such that it becomes more and more problematic to separate the two if we think about ideas on digital materiality x' unadapted sensory environments and so on

if we think about some of that literature and ideas some of which we've seen coming throughout the conference this time around about understanding learning as taking place within complex networks of people ideas tools resources and so on and if also we give some credence to notions about the extended mind and distributed cognition and begin to think a lot of cognition leaks out of the skull out of the brain box if we need to understand how people are doing complex things we need to give due account to relationships with other people to share problem-solving and so on all of those I think are conjuring up an intellectual landscape that is encouraging us to think more broadly about the fundamental enterprise of learning technology

Slide 16#

so I now want to focus in on the nature of design knowledge and talk a bit about some of our work that's come out of the last few years researcher Sydney that my colleagues and I have been doing and I've been running quite a bit about the nature of design and design knowledge within educational technology there's a few papers you can download that are open access on that but what we've been doing I think needs to be understood as a mixture of both empirical research and normative work by which I mean that we've been doing studies of how people design for other people's learning in the educational design research that you do and in many other places in looking at how that actually gets done because that gives you a reality check you can then think as you develop new normative models suggesting here's how you might go about design here are some ways of thinking about design problems you can then say okay well how do we need to formulate that knowledge so it fits with what we know about design practice so what I'm going to say over the next few minutes emerges from both empirical work and that kind of normative conceptual development

a point to make right here is that those I think rather complex learning spaces that we were looking at with their hybridity of the digital and material with the complex activities that are going on within them in a way it is a remarkable achievement there that people who were designing those spaces were for sure tackling very complex problems they didn't find them easy but they did it they were able to do it and for me this is a bit like they'll think about bumblebees can't fly no they can fly in practice but they can't fly in theory

Slide 17#

because if you look at normative models of instructional design educational design they would really struggle to equip you to design what goes on in those spaces materially socially and otherwise so people in doing that work actually fall back on a number of heuristics often unconscious or tacit that actually enable them to get the job done and you know as I say this we probably all recognise it as something we do but it's not properly reflected I think in the literature about how to do design for learning one thing they do is and they may not talk about this a lot

but they take learner activity as foundational that's where the imagination is it's always what are these students going to be doing physically mentally emotionally socially and so on that's there all the time and that is really helpful so the focus is not on what the teacher is going to be doing it's not on content of syllabus coverage it's what are the students actually going to be doing in these spaces and then how do we organize the tools the infrastructure the spatial configuration of things around them so that in those imagined activities that we the things they need come to hand at the moment they need them so that the activity unfolds smoothly and

that really is the essence of it so I now want to say a few things very quickly about design knowledge and thinking about some of the relationships between what can be designed and the valued activities that we want our students to engage in and I think it's important to say first this can never be a deterministic form of reasoning and this is one of those points about how the difficulty we have articulating some of these ideas bleeds into the poverty of discourse generally about such things as the likely effects of new learning spaces because that discourse is often rather deterministic

the assumption is we'll create this new space and students were behaving this way I also want to say that in thinking about design and thinking about the relationships between what can be designed and what students then do I think we need to push ourselves to actually understand the reality of what happens at learn time now I've not got enough time to really make this point properly so I'll make it in properly and you can come back at me if you want to but it seems to me too often in our practice in educational technology in education more generally

Slide 2020#

we rely on correlational studies we say there's this thing we're interested in these these things that may correlate with that if we find some statistical relationship okay that's that's a publishable story or that forms knowledge that ought to be useful for subsequent design or education work and pretty often I think what correlational studies will do at best is alert you to something that might be interesting but they very rarely come anywhere near explaining what actually happens because very often they depend upon abstract theoretical notions that are not realized

if you want to get me started one of those would be engagement all right it's a term that hides a multitude of actual activities and relationships so I want to say and this may seem ontologically naive I want to say we need to understand how things actually work we need to get close to the action and understand how they actually work this study about professors banning laptops is another case in point this is a study out of West Point College in their academy in the States and if you read the paper on which this is based the study looked at correlations between whether or not students had their laptops in lectures and their end of course grade okay nothing about what they were doing with the laptops nothing that distinguished students who were looking at Facebook from students who were making copious notes that they would use for a revision later on ignoring the activity that is the reality of what happens in learning situations and this happens time and time again

Slide 22#

so I guess the the core of the message that I keep banging on about is that what students actually do is what matters in a way it's the only thing that matters it's the only thing that's real it's the only thing that has an effect upon their learning it's the only thing but it's not design about all right unless we're in those very rare situations in which we can grab students by the shoulder and smack them around the head or more seriously if we're in high-risk high-cost trading areas you might think of some areas of surgery or training pilots whatever it might be less we're in those kind of areas typically we want students to exercise agency to customize learning environments and tasks to suit them better there will be a gap between what

we asked them to do and what they actually do but it's what they actually do that affect what they learn what we can do from a design standpoint is create what you might call structuring resources that include tools that come to hand as students are engaging in valuable activities but also which guide them okay so and just to make this point clearer I want to say that for most students the vast majority of the activities they engage in in which through which they learn are not well supervised they're either not supervised at all or they're likely or theories who provides depart ly because of staff student ratios resources so a lot of what they do has to make sense to them as they're doing it without much external moment-by-moment guidance we know that when students are engaging in active learning they've got to be focused on that which they're supposed to be learning what they're supposed to be getting out of this but a whole bunch of other task management stuff what do I do next

am I supposed to work with this person is that idea good is this going to be up to speed with this am i moving quickly often so in active learning which we value very highly there dangers of cognitive overload or just getting lost in the mechanics of the task and so part of the point of designing things that are in the environment at learn time configured in spaces material or virtual is to help structure that activities to take off some of that cognitive load so that it can be focused where it should be

the salt saw about web design don't make me think yeah now design for me is not about that it's saying help me think about the central matters but don't make me think about all the stuff that I need in order to navigate my way to the place the situation or the point in the task where I can really focus my thinking on what I need to learn are you doing your dance yet or are we still a couple of minutes off we're 12 minutes off you sure which well minutes off from when I should shut up this is not an acceptable substitute for a dance

Slide 23#

you're on we had some disco lights running earlier so now apologies for this slide sorry I did take a look at this from the back of the hole earlier and I'll have to talk you through it unless you've got a copy of it in front of you and it features in quite a bit of the writing that Pepe yeomen vasila Carvalho and myself do around a camp the activity centers analysis and design framework so you can look at it more closely there but I'm just going to pick out a couple of main points from it

what its centered learner activity centered analysis and design so the focus needs to be on learner activity what they are actually doing it happens at and often in higher education we want students to be creative in their customization of the tasks that we set them it's a situated activity so the social situation and the physical situation material and digital image the activities set those are consequential alright the tools that come to hand have effects upon the nature of the activity as often as not most of the point if the right tools the right resources are not there at the time the activity unfolds it's unlikely to be very successful I'm going to temporize that notified out a little bit

to get away from the deterministic language but I hope you know what I mean so we can't design the activity but we can design we can do set design we can design the physical the material the digital tools artifacts spaces and so on within which activity unfolds and we can do some social design work that is we can do things like make recommendations about working together

in pairs or in groups of five or you know think of yourselves as a learning community what actually unfolds may well be different from that as we all know with studies of how students actually do group work rolling on how we recommend they do group work but the point is design needs to focus on those kinds of structuring resources key among them being tasks suggestions we may have good things to do that become resources for activities that students then engage in and one of the key distinctions I want to make is between that notion of tasks what we are students to do and activity what they actually do the tasks not being something that determines what they do but a resource that they use in shaping what they do so when we think about design knowledge

Slide 24#

we're thinking about something sets of actionable concepts that help with reasoning about relationships and I'm going to focus on relationships between humans and things so if you think about it when we're engaged in what we call set design you're thinking about the way physical digital other resources fit together you're thinking about relationships between things and other things it's the sort of thinking that engineers do quite commonly

when you're thinking about relationships between people and how they collaborate human human relationships all sorts of other ideas come into play about intentionality and emotion and so on but I want to focus in on the HT relationships the relationships between people and things where things is understood as that whole cornucopia of physical material all digital configured spatially so HT and what I want to say at this point is that I think those relationships between students in activity and the things the tools and resources and environment that they need in order to make a success of that activity relationships are essentially economic relationships they're just like the relationships that people study in workplaces when they're configuring workplaces and workflow and and so on they are not essentially pedagogical relationships and

I think this is a bit of a heretic or point within education and learning technology more specifically it seems to me that pedagogy has a role to play in thinking about relationships between desirable learning outcomes and tasks and activities thinking through what it is we might get students to do why they might be regarded as valuable practices and so on but the notion that relationships between a laptop a piece of software or virtual learning environment and the activity of the students engaging in the notion that that's essentially a pedagogical relationship

I think really Beth scrutiny and I think there's an important point for us because I think some of those arguments that are essentially economic arguments are easier to make in conversations with architects and builders campus infrastructure people as soon as you say what students are gonna be doing this kind of work and for that they need these kinds of tools and resources and they needed space that allows them to do that that's understandable if you start wrapping it up in wooly stuff about pedagogy that they know they've got no background in it is much harder to get them to take the argument seriously and you will find those kinds of things slip out of building developments over time they don't have traction in the way that economic argument subtraction now we are running tight on time I just want to very briefly talk about a couple of ideas on connecting concepts so these are the HT relationships that I was talking about a moment ago on that slide

so if you think about how do we do design work how do we think about relationships between what somebody's going to be doing what students are going to be doing when they're engaging in a task an activity that flows from that task the relationships between that and the physical material digital resources configured in space around them how do we think about that what kind of ideas allow us to make deductions about what's needed and within the literature of learning technology about the only idea that ever comes up is affordance

yeah you with me do you agree you're stunned so Martin Oliver who whose work have got a great deal of respect for has analyzed the use of the term affordance within the learning tackle it returned and came to this conclusion a few years ago that the concept has drifted so far from its origins that is now too ambiguous to be unwittingly useful what else have we got what other ideas do we have in our toolkit if you like that allow us to connect things that are designed through to activity

Howie Collins coming from another area sociology of science retton's that affordances are lazy term your papers over the cracks for him he thinks the reason it's not such useful term is that people have an extraordinary interpretive capability that we're not going to just look at something and say oh it must be used for such-and-such because we can think about how we might use that thing how we might relate to it and so on and

Lucilla Carvalho and I did a bit of work on this not so long ago drawing on down Carmen's ideas about fast and slow thinking that if you think about again I'm packing too much in too few words but you think about your brain working in two moments fast and slow system one system too as he called it but a lot of what we do happens automatically virtually automatically little voluntary control and so on and every now and then we run into a problem we stop and think okay I had no idea what going on here I bet I think about this more more carefully but system 2 is expensive yeah we can't do everything using system 2 so we only call it up or it only get called up when it's needed and so one of the ways you can rescue affordance as a term is by saying actually it operates in that system one space it operates automatically semi-automatics me and it takes very little ads very difficult of loads to the doing of the tasks

if you can help a student move their activity in a certain kind of way through affordance that's great because you're not going to add much to their burden every now and then something happens where they have to really think through what's going on what do I do next how do i navigate this space sound do I find the next thing to do in this task that's going to be high cognitive load but that might be just the thing you want them to be focused on at that point

so I think we can rescue affordance I can I think we can find a slot for it I think there's a more general version of this notion and people have done a bit of work on structuration we didn't learn in technology to try and again get a bit of a grip on these relationships between what can be designed the physical world digital spaces and so on and what people then do knowing that structures what exists in the world can be influential but there is also human agency and often in education we want that agency to grow stronger rather than weaker over time

so a way of thinking about relationships between structures that are desirable and agency that we want to see exercised and grow stronger is in these terms comes from Mary archers were more broadly but we can think of there being such things as structures that are objective and out there in the world that both constrain and enable various kinds of activity and there's agency which is personal subjective

but he's also crucial for those structures to have any kind of effect yeah so it's only if I know how to interpret such and such or how to do such and such that thing can have an effect upon what I do so there's if you like a two-way relationship between structure and agency but I don't think he's often surfaced in when these ideas education and and educational technology and you can broaden that out and and think with structures we're not just talking about spatial structures and their influence upon us all material structures and their influence upon us but activity is actually unfolding in multi dimensional landscapes child escapes and so on and the agency works out in different ways within those complex spaces so there's a point which I think will have occurred to a lot of you that my examples at the beginning were not representative of work across the whole of higher education

they come mainly from stem and I picked them partly because they make visible some aspects of student activity and if the resources the students are drawing on and how those are configured in in material spaces but I think I also want to make the claim that although the practices and some of the supportive tools are less visible in other areas of academic work they are there or should be there and are just as necessary so these approaches that are essentially apprentice based or approaches to learning that are about participation in valuing practices that I exemplified early on in laboratories in CT scanning operations and so on they play through into history sociology business studies in other kinds of areas that we know there are very powerful pedagogical arguments behind thinking about learning as learning to parties in value social practices so the theme then becomes well how do we think about the right sets of cognitive tools and other kinds of tools that enable that activity when it's situated real time physical material digital space and so on and

I think the last point I want to make and this connects in a subtle sort of way with some of the things that Donnie and Jean was saying on earlier days is that in doing this I think our work is much more powerful and we can enable higher education to be much more powerful if we think about that apprenticeship for our students as at least including things like learning to enquire learning to do the core of academic work learning to require learning to design inquiry in new spaces that don't have established methods for creating knowledge learning to use knowledge and learning to work with others in order to do good in the world

in order to make changes in the world it seems to me we need to make those connections to some of the core and distinctive purposes of higher education if we're going to stand any chance of joining up that micro level work that we do remember my the lowest space on that diagram if we're going to connect that up to the broader purposes of higher education to the role that universities can play in a very troubled world then we need to be able to think about apprenticeships in these kinds of consequential knowledge where and I think that's about it I think if I had some closing points there'd be these and things to take away

that design I think can be well understood as being about reasoning relation between reasoning about relationships between valued outcomes valued activities and mix complex mix often if tasks - or spaces divisions of labor required to structure and scaffold task completion and the growth of agency central point here knowing what our students are actually doing and learning is core is fundamental is expensive is difficult often involves intrusive work but if our knowledge of what they're actually doing and learning is flaky insubstantial we can have very little confidence in the nature of the enterprise we can we can have very little confidence that what we're doing is good and I don't think that the data that you get from keystroke trails actually tells you much about what students are really doing thinking feeling and so on and

I haven't said much about epistemic fluency there's more in the notes and I've written more about it elsewhere but the point here really is that design knowledge has to be seen as something that is heterogeneous in form it gets created in all sorts of ways through practice through study through theorization and so on it operates well in some spaces and not surveilling others and being able to recognize what kinds of knowledge are most likely to be useful in what kinds of space I think that capability is fundamental both to the success of our students but also to the success of our own work as educators and designers knowing how knowledge works where it works best is fundamental capability and that's it I'm going to stop there I want to do a little bit of credit