Niall explains how researchers and practitioners are brought together to look at the process of developing technology enhanced learning environments. He tells us that the project aims ‘to capture practices at the interface between designing, developing and deploying mathematical games’. He talks about how the project is achieving this by ‘looking at our previous experience of working as a community, to focus on building solutions to common problems both at a social and technical level.  These solutions are then made available in the form of learning patterns.’ He goes on to explain how other researchers could use the patterns as a design tool in their own contexts.

The results are already serving to demonstrate clearly how Kaleidoscope has enabled academic researchers in technology enhanced learning to develop tools for European researchers to build upon previous work. ‘Through the Kaleidoscope network’, Niall reported after the interview, 'we can make open TEL resources widely available and communicate our efforts to the people that matter: other researchers, policy makers, and perhaps most importantly, the end users’.

Download interview with Dr Niall Winters

Interview transcript

Intro:

“Welcome to the first Kaleidoscope podcast (audio) interview. My name is Beate Kleessen and I am from the Kaleidoscope dissemination team. I met Dr. Niall Winters at the Kaleidoscope workshop during the EDEN Annual conference in Vienna last week.

Niall is an Academic fellow at the London Knowledge Lab , Institute of Education. Currently he is involved in a Kaleidoscope research project called “Learning patterns for the design and deployment of mathematical games ” and with Yishay Mor, is running a workshop at the 1st World Conference for Fun ‘n Games . We wanted to know more about this project.”

Beate: “Niall, what is the Learning patterns project about?”

Niall: “The Learning patterns project is about bringing researchers and practitioners together to look at the process of developing technology enhanced learning environments. Particularly we are interested in mathematical games and we are focusing on the relationship between design, development and real world use – that usually means in the classroom.”

Beate: “How do you do this?”

Niall: ”Mainly we look at our previous experiences and as a community together, think about interesting instances of either, problems we have come across and how we resolved them or practices that we found particularly interesting. This means really communicating between researchers and end-users, who  in our case are teachers. E. g. previous tools may have been developed from research perspective and they may not have fitted with what a teacher really wanted. Other tools may have taken into account a teacher perspective, using participatory approaches. So we are looking at these processes and capturing by using a design patterns approach. This is basically a text based solution to a problem, or highlights a good feature that we think should be put in a game, in our case for mathematics learning.

In more detail then, a pattern states a problem, specifies the context where it came up and the motivation for why it needs to be resolved. Then it outlines how it is resolved and it links that pattern, that solution to other patterns which are either more specific or more abstract. So we build up a network of patterns. This is  usually called a pattern language. You build up a collection of solutions to very common or key problems that need to be addressed when you are developing a technology enhanced learning tool.”

Beate: “This was a one year project. Can you tell us something about the output of the project or about your plans to make the outcome available to other researchers?”

Niall: “Sure, at the moment we are six months into the project and we have a web site where we have literature available about how people used the patterns before and we have, what we think, are the key design and deployment issues that need to be addressed and when you are thinking about constructing patterns themselves. So those key issues related to what we call design knowledge. In our case for mathematical games, mathematical content is very important, as are the educational context, the learning theories and software development process you use.  This is captured and available in a typology, in a set that can be looked at, searched and browsed and updated. We have just begun to add the patterns that we have developed. This is an open process to which people can also contribute patterns. They are all also browsable and searchable on the website.”

Beate: “How do you hope this will impact on real users?”

Niall: “We hope that by the end of the project, this collection of patterns will be used as a resource and as a design tool by multi-disciplinary teams involved in the development of TEL resources. The patterns should enable people to address some of the problems they are having in their own design and deployment cycles or contexts. For example, a teacher might ask what games should I use or which tool can be of particular interest for me to teach trigonometry? There would probably be a pattern to go to, to see what tools other teachers have used already.

Thinking about further outcomes then, we would like to look at the process of using our patterns in design and deployment of new TEL environments and analyse this in depth. That would hopefully be the next phase.”

Beate: “So is this the next project then?”

Niall: (chuckling) “Hopefully, yes, that would be great!”

Beate: “Thank you very much, Niall.”

Niall: “Thank you.”