It has been argued that teachers need practical principled knowledge and that design research can help develop such knowledge. What has been underestimated, however, is how to make such know-how and know-why useful for teachers. To illustrate how principled knowledge can be “practicalized”, we draw on a design study in which we developed a professional development program for primary school teachers (N = 5) who learned to design language-oriented mathematics lessons. The principled knowledge we used in the program stemmed from the literature on genre pedagogy, scaffolding, and hypothetical learning trajectories. We show how shifting to a simple template focusing on “domain text” rather than genre, and “reasoning steps” rather than genre features made the principled knowledge more practical for the teachers.
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This book focuses on one particular way to promote the urban knowledge economy: the creation of knowledge ‘hotspots’.
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In this paper we discuss the design process that took place while creating social software for Amsterdam University of Professional Education (AUPE) and the interactive knowledge platform, called ‘Theme-sites’. Themesites are used collaboratively by nine universities bound by a consortium, Digital University (DU). The DU is experimenting using communities of practice (CoPs) as a way to to stimulate the use of ICT in Higher Education. We describe the redesign, for which we used principles of design research (Col-lins et al., 2004). However in both described cases user experiences revealed that users have difficulties in getting actively involved in the knowledge portal. We propose how we might redesign the knowledge platform to support learning processes better, using theories like Wenger’s (1998) related to learning ar-chitectures. This paper aims at expanding design knowledge about knowledge portals and CoPs and dis-cusses the yet overseen critical design elements, like the brokering competences that facilitators need.
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