Mod4L Project

Effective Representations of Practice

Several enquires have explored the use of representations by practitioners to communicate and improve understanding of practice. The challenges raised in developing and using representations that are meaningful to practitioners include:

Ownership of representations of practice. To be effective representations need to be 'owned' by, and meaningful within, each particular practitioner community. In addition, they should be the focus of active collaboration and interaction and should be richly contextualised, at least in the early stages of practice change as suggested by Sharpe et. al. and confirmed by our experience on the JISC LADIE project

Different forms of representation are effective for different communities of practitioners. In Mod4L we aim to build on our experience of bridging the gaps in representation between different practitioner communities. Making representations meaningful is complicated by the wide range of different practitioner communities that exist. These communities are characterised by factors such as role (eg. teaching professionals, curriculum teams, designers, developers), type of institution, and discipline. McAndrew, et. al. emphasise the need for representations at various levels and forms, supplementing learning designs with less formal 'patterns' of activity, to meet various user needs, The Mod4L project will liaise closely with TESEP who are gathering and representing learning activities from practitioner communities and build on research at Goldsmiths College and Oxford University which has evaluated the use of a number of learning design tools within Virtual Learning Environments and identified problems for practitioners in reusing representations.

Representations may be difficult to construct. Diverse types of representation are meaningful to different practitioner communities. For example, the richly contextualised case studies customary among teachers do not lend themselves to easy sharing and reuse in an online or blended environment.

(view Representations of Effective Practice)