A new form of digital learning?

Here I gather information from my work of digital learning and how to design learning spaces of tomorrow - but why wait until tomorrow? Let's start today!

If you have to chance to create digital teaching and learning in higher education from scratch...

January 2022

... how would you do it? What would you focus on? What elements can't be missing at all? What would you differently to the existing practice? When there are almost no structures or institutional boundaries at place yet, how would you design digital learning in a new university/college?

I am looking for experts in the field to interview and planning to do expert workshops. In my new role as Founding Vice President for Academic and International Affairs, I aim to developing new forms of Digital Teaching/Learning. The focus lies on collaborative learning cultures.  At the TU Nürnberg - University of Technology in Nuremberg (UTN) www.utn.de/en -  a new place of studying is taking shape. Most courses are in English. We want to build an international university.  UTN was born in 2021.

Stay tuned for more.

User Experience (UX) for Learning Experience Research (LX) to improve digital learning

Nov/2, 2020

We see a new emergent field that combines UX and LX research to advance learning with educational technology in the field of Learning Design & Technology. The edited and open access book by Matt Schmidt, Andrew Tawfik, Isa Jahnke, & Yvonne Earnshaw (2020) is the first of its kind that collects work that integrates UX and LX.

As Matt Schmidt said on the AECT2020 conference, "Ultimately, this work is predicated on the premise that the complexity of designing for learning with technology cannot be adequately informed on the basis of theories and models derived from educational psychology and learning sciences alone."

But what is UX and LX?

In really simple words,

  • UX focuses on human-computer interaction,
  • LX focuses on how people learn.

"LX is not only concerned with the effectiveness of designed learning interventions, but also with the interconnected and interdependent relationship between the learner- (or the teacher-/instructor-) as-user, the designed technology, novel pedagogical techniques or instructional strategies, and the learning context."


from the chapter "Introduction to the Edited Vol.", Abstract: https://edtechbooks.org/ux/introduction_to_ux_lx_in_lid  


User-friendly technology...

Sept./27, 2017

I have been interviewed at the University of Missouri "Featured Profile". Read the results here (online available at  https://mizzouadvantage.missouri.edu/project/featured-profile-isa-jahnke):

"Dr. Isa Jahnke examines whether technology is user-friendly and helps educators envision the future of creative technology-enhanced learning.

A specialist in user experience studies, Jahnke studies how technology-enhanced designs affect learning and work. She investigates the ways in which new learning technologies could enhance education in the classroom and the workplace. Her results show how to design for creativity in higher education, how to utilize remote labs in engineering education and how to make use of tablets in schools for meaningful learning. With her socio-technical human-centered design approach, she helps technology developers to make their products and processes more user-friendly and usable.

Jahnke is also interested in how offline and online worlds merge together, a phenomenon she calls CrossAction-Spaces. In 2016, she published a book, "Digital Didactical Designs: Teaching and Learning in CrossAction-Spaces" which guides teachers and researchers through new ways to study and conduct technology-driven education. The book has been very well received, with one reviewer calling it "a compelling, rich and thoughtful vision of the future."

In addition to her research and writing, Jahnke - who joined the University of Missouri faculty in 2015 - teaches courses in information science, designing computer-support collaborative learning and learning with web-based technologies.

Dr. Isa Jahnke is an associate professor and Director of Research for the Information Experience Lab at the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies (SISLT) in the College of Education."

Designing the creative classroom of the future - Interview

July/05/2015

This interview has been published at Umeå University in Sweden. The original article can be found here:  https://www.umu.se/english/research/popular-science/researcher-profiles/isa-jahnke

"Smartphones, tablet computers, social media - new trends in information technology have emerged during the last decade. Isa Jahnke studies how these new technologies can help to support teaching and learning.

In a few years, textbooks may not be needed anymore in schools. Tablet computers like the iPad can not only store all books in one handy device, but offer new possibilities of teaching and learning. "However, new technologies like the iPad are not used to their full potential yet," says Isa Jahnke, professor in ICT, Media and Learning at Umeå University. "Many teachers don't know how to integrate new technologies into their learning environment, so they ban them from their classrooms."

Isa Jahnke studies how the classroom of the future must be designed to include new technologies, and how to help teachers to use them. "Studies have shown that active learning is better than passive consumption. Students need to be not only consumers, but producers of knowledge. They learn best if they contemplate the subject matters, not if the teacher just tells them the facts," says Isa Jahnke. In educational sciences, this is called the shift from teaching paradigm to learning paradigm. However, today's classrooms still mainly consist of teaching.

Isa Jahnke wants to find out how active learning can be supported. "How can we improve the teaching and learning situation to enable opportunities for learning?" is her main research question. "New technologies can support the shift from teaching to learning, but not by themselves. Implementing new technologies in a learning environment may also require new didactical methods. If iPads are just used like electronic textbooks, the students are still not actively involved in the learning process," explains Isa Jahnke.

This is where she sees her research area. With an academic background in sociology and social sciences, Isa Jahnke became more of an interdisciplinary researcher when integrating educational and computer sciences into her PhD work. As one of the very few researchers who combine these subjects, she is an expert for the socio-technical design of learning environments: "I work with a socio-technical-educational approach. We cannot examine the use of new technologies in learning environments without considering the social and educational changes connected with it."

She elaborates: "A lot has changed in information technology during the last years, which has influenced our ways of learning and communicating. If you have a question, you google it or ask your friends on Facebook or Twitter, and you'll get an answer within seconds. If you disagree with someone during a discussion, you can quickly look up on your smartphone who is right. This kind of informal learning has made quite an impact on the formal, institutionalized learning in school, universities or companies. Combining the formal learning with, for example, social media, is an added value especially for the students."

When Isa Jahnke, who is originally from Germany and previously worked at Bochum University and Technical University of Dortmund, read the job posting for the professorship in ICT, Media and Learning at Umeå University, she was thrilled: "The professorship combines all my fields of interest and research. I did not even know where exactly Umeå was, but it felt like this job was created just for me." So she moved 2000 km up north - a decision she does not regret."

From Interaction to Crossaction - new designs for teaching and learning in a networked world?

May/26/2015


From interaction to crossaction... Under the premise that the digital world is a new form of multiple communication spaces with many different layers, my new book argues that human action in such a networked world is not only grounded in interactions but rather on multiple crossing actions (crossactions) within and across such communication spaces, in short I call it CrossActionApaces (Chapter 1 in: Isa Jahnke, 2015, Routledge).


Digital Didactical Designs - Teaching and Learning in CrossActionSpaces.New York & London: Routledge


Approaching a new normal in education?

May/07/2013

Peter Hinssen (2010) created the idea of the "New Normal" . He used the example of societal processes in the digital world.

Following this idea, we (Anders Norberg and Isa Jahnke) question whether higher education and schools do also approach a new normality in some years or not. Does education just stuck on traditional models although the world around us is changing? What does higher education look in 2030? You are invited to disagree!

We discuss this vision in our paper entitled, Isa Jahnke & Anders Norberg (2013), "Digital Didactcs - Scaffolding a New Normality in Learning" submitted to the call "OPEN EDUCATION 2030. JRC-IPTS CALL FOR VISION PAPERS. PART III: HIGHER EDUCATION"  https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/openeducation2030/

Isa Jahnke & Anders Norberg (2013). Digital Didactics - Scaffolding a new Normality of Learning. In: Visionary paper for https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/openeducation2030  Online-Publication.

Reference
Hinssen, P. (2010). The New Normal - Explore the limits of the digital world. Lanoo.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9517901-the-new-normal

Understanding, reflecting, designing mobile learning spaces of tomorrow

Oct/17/2011

We, the IML group (Interactive Media and Learning) at the TUV department, Umeå University in Sweden, are on the way to initiate a new Research and Teaching Center for Mobile Learning (Mobile Learning Lab). We wrote a conceptual paper for a research and teaching center that focusses mobile learning, written by Peter Bergström, Krister Lindwall, Leif Marklund, Eva Mårell-Olsson, Fredrik Paulsson, and Peter Vinnervik who provided revisions on different versions.

In this presentation below, we describe emerging problems in the "new" Social Media World, and present research questions regarding ICT, technology integration, and media in teaching and learning. Additionally, the theoretical background is provided. Finally, we list challenges for research and teaching we face today -- with regard to the creation of new learning spaces - the classroom of tomorrow?