Topic groups

We have defined four topic groups:

1. curriculum design

2. designing professional development

3. assessment design

4. educational software

Participants are invited to contribute to one of these topic groups by sending a short description of their contribution, using the registration form. In March the participants will get guidelines for the preparation of their contribution. This procedure will give the chairs of the topic groups the opportunity to raise specific questions to contributors, and thereby increase coherence in the working groups.

To give participants the opportunity to share their work in advance and thereby prepare for the discussions, they are invited to write a short paper about their contribution. These papers will be published on the website from May 15th, 2008.

In the topic group sessions the emphasis will be on discussion and exchange of knowledge, not on individual presentations. The key questions for each topic group – see below – are formulated, so to say, on a meta level. Participants are invited to translate these questions to their own field of expertise and offer concrete examples.

Time schedule

• Before March 1, 2008: Let us know you want to attend the conference by filling in the registration form
  In this form you are asked to choose a topic group and to write a short description of what you would like to contribute to a topic group.
• March 2008: The chairs of the topic groups send prospective participants an account of how they want to organize their topic group. They give feedback on the short descriptions that were provided, and give detailed instructions about the preparation of these contributions for the workshop.
• May 15: Papers will be published on the conference website.

Topic group 1: curriculum design

This topic group will discuss features of curriculum design. Curriculum design may refer to all possible aspects of learning trajectories, materials, and environments, from designing a short series of lessons to designing a whole textbook series, and from designing books to designing a workshop for mathematical experiments. Issues more specifically related to the design of software, will be discussed in a separate topic group.

Key questions:

• How can researchers and designers optimize their cooperation?
• How does one design for education that builds on the ideas and concepts of learners, instead of imposing concepts?
• How can the design of educational materials become a joint effort of designers and teachers, with teachers feeling free to use the materials in a creative way and designers profiting from practical experience.
• How can designers anticipate on implementation problems?
• What are appropriate methods of formative evaluation of draft curricular designs?
  

Topic group 2: designing professional development

This topic group will focus on the design of professional development of teachers and teacher educators.

Key questions:

• What designs are effective for different kinds of professional development? Professional development can take different forms: training courses, sharing experiences, collaborative practices - but also learning communities (for instance web communities), coaching on the job, collaboration between teachers through e.g. team teaching, action research, collaborative research, and combinations of all of these.
• To what extent do teachers have to be curriculum designers? How do we prepare teachers for this role?
• To what extent do research results affect the format and content of professional development?
• How do we assess professional development?
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Topic group 3: assessment design

Assessment is a topic that is discussed at all levels. There are several frameworks for assessment published that describe assessment principles. These frameworks may be a foundation for (the design of) assessments for teachers, educators, publishers and researchers who are involved in assessment and assessment design.

This topic group will focus on the design of assessment and the relation to research.

Key questions:

• What are the design principles for (the different forms of) assessment?
• What is a good assessment design? What would an ideal test do for someone?
• What makes assessment design difficult?
• What is the relation between theory and practice in assessment design and research?

Topic group 4: designing educational software

This topic group will focus on the challenges and difficulties of educational software design. We hope to address a large variety of software designs and applications, from small content-specific visualizations and micro worlds, to more general learning environments for supporting the learning and teaching processes.

Key questions:

• How can software support existing educational practices and learning goals? How can it change and improve these goals and practices?
• What special role can software play in connecting informal knowledge with the concepts we want to teach?
• Often ICT-tools are used in additionto paper designs. In digital learning environments the computer can become the new overall medium to work in, with new possibilities, but also with limitations. What new design challenges do emerge to make this new medium mature.
• To what extent can educational software designers use design principles for computer games?