I would encourage people to think what happens next?

What happens beyond this episode and setting?

How does this experience extend and connect with characters lives further into the future (and how can we as designers support the making of these connections and their sustenance)?

Overly complicating ideas as only academics can do … 

Fig. 1. The interactions and resources of the Zone of Available Assistance ZAA (Luckin, 2010 p92).

“The ZAA describes the variety of resources within a learner’s world that could provide different qualities and quantities of assistance and that may be available to a learner at a particular time”. (Luckin 2010 p 28)

What is the difference between “Ecology of Resources” and Lave and Wenger’s “Situated Learning”?

The Ecology of Resources (EoR) is a design framework that supports us in designing learning experiences that take into account the learner’s context (it provides a method for modelling the learner’s context in terms of people. tools, environment, knowledge and skills to be constructed, and the learner’s knowledge, motivation, etc). The EoR does not specify that we design for learning in authentic contexts (i.e. contexts where the knowledge would be applied – as situated learning discusses). We might be designing a classroom experience. But modelling the learner’s context through the EoR helps us design that classroom experience so that it is not an isolated, abstract one, but an experience that is connected to other resources (people, tools, etc) in the learner’s context. For example, the learner might come across relevant knowledge/skills/learning outside of the classroom, and with careful design we could create connections to those experiences.

Katerina Avramides (OLDS MOOC 2013 18 Jan 2013)

Uncovering the potentially helpful resources learners and designers can draw requires investigation of context.

Cloudworks forces an asynchronous conversation while other platforms permit something that can be close to synchronous. My experience of three years as a post graduate on the OU MAODE … and before that a decade in e-learning, that messaging, and Twitter and any platform where you can express thoughts in your own time, but have a response soon after is far better than emptying the contents of your head onto the bird table and waiting for others to come and pick at it … or not. I found in Cloudworks, using it a year ago, that I might place all kinds of ‘gems’ about the place and get no response. Looking at the views and comments on e-learning gurus such as Grainne Conole I concluded that far from being clouds (wishful thinking) we were in a desert bereft of precipitation.

Give me a jungle, as a metaphor for a learning ecosystem any day.

REFERENCE

Luckin, R. (2010) Re-designing Learning Contexts Technology-rich, learner-centred ecologies. Routledge.