The teacher as action researcher: using technology to capture pedagogic form

Abstract

The article argues that we make best use of learning technologies if we begin with an understanding of educational problems, and use this analysis to target the solutions we should be demanding from technology. The focus is to address the issue from the perspective of teachers and lecturers (the ‘teaching community’), and to consider how they could become the experimental innovators and reflective practitioners who will use technology well. Teachers could become ‘action researchers’, collaborating to produce their own development of knowledge about teaching with technology. For this to be possible, they must be able to share that knowledge, and the article proposes the use of an online learning activity management system as a way of capturing and sharing the pedagogic forms teachers design. An action research approach, like all research, needs a theoretical framework from which to challenge practice, and the article shows how teachers could use the conversational framework to design and test an optimally effective learning experience. Examples of ‘generic’ learning designs illustrate how such an approach can help the teaching community rethink their teaching, collectively, and embrace the best of conventional and digital methods. In this way they will be more likely to harness technology to the needs of education, rather than simply search for the problems to which the latest technology is a solution.