Context: Sustainability is among major societal goals in our days. Education is acknowledged as an essential strategy for attaining sustainability by activating the creative potential within young people to understand sustainability, bring forth changes in their everyday life, and collectively envision a more sustainable future. Problem: However, teaching and learning about sustainability and sustainability-related issues is not an easy task due to the inherent complexity, ambiguity, and context-specificity of the concept. We are in need of innovative pedagogical approaches and tools that will allow us to design learning activities in which learners will be empowered to develop new, alternative interpretations of sustainability in personally and collectively meaningful ways. Method: We argue that a constructionist perspective involving the use of expressive media for digital storytelling offers an appropriate frame for designing learning activities fostering collaborative creativity in thinking and learning about urban sustainability. Our study is based on the design of a learning activity following this rationale. We adopted a qualitative approach in the collection and analysis of different sources of data with the aim to explore collaborative creativity as a learning process based on the students’ collective processes and resulting in the co-construction of new ideas and insights about sustainability, and new tangible artefacts (the digital stories) encompassing them. Results: Our analysis of the collaborative creativity exemplified in the three digital stories produced identified important creative elements with regards to the three components of a digital story (script, technical characteristics, and ideas of urban sustainability) and how they were embodied in each digital story produced as a result of the students’ joint constructionist activity. Implications: Our study provides some preliminary evidence that collaborative creativity from a constructionist perspective can stand as an appropriate framework for designing learning activities addressing the difficult concept of sustainability. There are several implications for both theory and educational practice in environmental education and education for sustainable development, constructionism, and digital storytelling in education. Moreover, our study opens up new fields for research and theory in creativity.

Key words: Sustainability, urban sustainability, collaborative creativity, constructionism, digital storytelling, learning design.

Over the past five years, the number of individuals engaging in online learning as well as the number of online course offering has grown exponentially. At the same time, outcome research on online learning design is sparse. This paper describes the development of a constructivist learning environment scorecard and explores its usefulness in characterizing and comparing online learning courses and subsequently learning outcomes.

Key words: adult learning, constructivism, online learning.

New and radically reformative thinking about the enactive and embodied basis of cognition holds out the promise of moving forward age-old debates about whether we learn and how we learn. The radical enactive, embodied view of cognition (REC) poses a direct, and unmitigated, challenge to the trademark assumptions of traditional cognitivist theories of mind – those that characterize cognition as always and everywhere grounded in the manipulation of contentful representations of some kind. REC has had some success in understanding how sports skills and expertise are acquired. But, REC approaches appear to encounter a natural obstacle when it comes to understanding skill acquisition in knowledge-rich, conceptually based domains like the hard sciences and mathematics. This paper offers a proof of concept that REC’s reach can be usefully extended into the domain of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning, especially when it comes to understanding the deep roots of such learning. In making this case, this paper has five main parts. The section “Ancient Intellectualism and the REC Challenge” briefly introduces REC and situates it with respect to rival views about the cognitive basis of learning. The “Learning REConceived: from Sports to STEM?” section outlines the substantive contribution REC makes to understanding skill acquisition in the domain of sports and identifies reasons for doubting that it will be possible to apply the same approach to knowledge-rich STEM domains. The “Mathematics as Embodied Practice” section gives the general layout for how to understand mathematics as an embodied practice. The section “The Importance of Attentional Anchors” introduces the concept “attentional anchor” and establishes why attentional anchors are important to educational design in STEM domains like mathematics. Finally, drawing on some exciting new empirical studies, the section “Seeing Attentional Anchors” demonstrates how REC can contribute to understanding the roots of STEM learning and inform its learning design, focusing on the case of mathematics.

Key words: enactivism, ecological dynamics, attentional anchor, mathematics.

Web-based learning tools (WBLTs), also known as learning objects, have been evaluated with a wide range of metrics, but rarely with respect to pedagogical design. The current study evaluated the impact of instructional architecture (direct instruction vs. constructive-based) WBLTs on middle (n=333) and secondary (n=389) school student attitudes (learning, design, and engagement) and learning performance (remembering, understanding, and application tasks). Students rated WBLTs with a direct instruction architecture significantly higher than WBLTs with a constructive-based architecture in the areas of learning effectiveness, design, and engagement. Students also commented that a direct instruction format had better organization and visual supports, higher quality graphics and animations, and superior help features. Students performed significantly better in the understanding and application knowledge categories when a direct instruction format was employed. No significant differences were observed between direct instruction and constructive-based architectures with respect to the remembering knowledge category. It is speculated that a direct-instruction design may be better suited younger students who are learning basic level concepts, although more research is needed to explore higher level knowledge areas.

The paper employs two case studies to develop an approach for using podcasts to enhance student learning. The case studies involve two cohorts of postgraduate students enrolled on a blended course, over two years. In both cases, the institutional learning management system was used as a server to host the podcasts, giving students discretion on how and when to listen to podcasts. The podcasts were integrated in learning design hence tightly coupled in pedagogy in Case One, and optionally used i.e., loosely integrated in Case Two. Semi-structured in- depth interviews were employed to solicit student experiences of using podcasts. Access logs from the podcast server provided insight into frequency of use of podcasts, thereby helping to establish the relation between podcast use and facilitation of learning. The findings suggest that students were confident in using podcasts for academic purposes. This is despite having had to overcome some challenges not limited to institutional policies on limited Internet quota for students. The findings also suggest that use of podcasts within a constructivist learning environment afforded learners control and flexibility, reflection and self-paced learning. The paper concludes that podcasts facilitate learning when tightly coupled to a curriculum and used within constructivist learning environments.

Key words: podcasts, ubiquitous technologies, constructivism.

Purpose: This paper aims to present an approach from first principles to the design of learning experiences in interactive learning environments, that is learning designs in the broadest sense. Design/methodology/approach – The approach is based on conversation theory CT, a theory of learning and teaching with principled foundations in cybernetics. The approach to learning design that is proposed is not dissimilar from other approaches such as that proposed by Rowntree. However, its basis in CT provides a coherent theoretical underpinning. Findings: Currently, in the world of e-learning, the terms instructional design and learning design are used to refer to the application of theories of learning and instruction to the creation of e-learning material and online learning experiences. The paper examines the roots of the two terms and discusses similarities and differences in usage. It then discusses how the processes of learning design fit into the larger processes of course, design, development and delivery. It goes on to examine the concept of a learning design pattern. Originality/value – The paper contends that, whilst learning design patterns are useful as starting-points for individual learning designs, learning designers should adopt the cybernetic principles of reflective practice – as expressed in CT – to create learning designs where received wisdom is enriched by contextual feedback from colleagues and learners.

Key words: Cybernetics, Learning, Design