From involvement to engagement to improved learning
July 2005
It is generally agreed that, in order to create effective and relevant educational technologies, developers need to involve those who are intended to use these resources - namely teachers and children.
This is widely accepted by most developers, and today learner involvement in design is increasingly seen as a common sense approach to avoiding the pitfalls of designing resources that learners and teachers can neither stand nor understand.
But, in order for the outcome to be viable from both an educational and a commercial perspective, developers need to do more than involve users simply to inform the interface design or to map the product onto the curriculum. They need to move beyond this if they are to develop tools that not only look good and engage children but, critically, also improve learning.
The challenge here is to involve children in the conceptual stages of the design process in order to identify the real cognitive and social challenges in learning from their perspective, and then to develop, through iterative stages, resources that allow them to improve their learning in these areas. This is not user testing - it goes much further than that. This approach of 'children as co-designers' also relies on involving teachers to evaluate how tools will be used in context, thereby leading to effective learning environments.
Crucially, this offers an opportunity for children to shape their own and their peers' learning experiences, and for teachers to identify challenges that meet their students' needs. However, in practice, this approach of learner-centred design is persistently under-used for many reasons including tight schedules and budgets, meaning that developers often miss the chance to create a product that is exactly what its audience wants and needs.
In addition, we should not forget that children have a right to be involved in and inform things that matter to them. This includes their own learning. Involving children in co-designing the tools that will be used in education is one key way of respecting this right. At the same time, we need to recognise that involvement in the design process is also an educational right in terms of understanding where technology comes from. If children are only involved in 'using' technology and not 'shaping' it, we are effectively teaching them how to read but not how to write.