Digital Production and Students as Learning Designers

Today’s digitalization allows users to interact, collaborate, communicate and create user-generated content. The technology is intuitive and easy to use even for young children, and new learning opportunities emerge. Particularly, students’ production as a learning form benefits from digitalization as the new opportunities enable young students to integrate their playing competencies and skills into the formal school learning. This paper presents and discusses a theory regarding students’ digital production from a learning and design-for-learning perspective, which is generated based on the project Netbook 1:1 (2009–2012), where information and communication technology (ICT) was readily accessible for each child at school and at home in grades 1–3 at two Danish public schools. The paper presents a Four Levels Design for Learning Model, which can be used for both design for learning and analyses of learning processes. The discussion is supported by empirical examples from the project, which explored emerging relations amongst ICT, production and subject matter-specific practice (Danish, mathematics and interdisciplinary activities). We understand design for learning as related to both process and agency, and in the study, we have examined and found that students are capable of operating as learning designers.

"The project demonstrates that ICT-integrated student productions in conjunction with the developed designs for learning can both facilitate students’ learning processes and qualify their academic learning outcomes." (p. 70) "Moreover, the project has developed and tested tools for organizing lessons that accommodate individual students’ learning abilities, learning processes and competencies." (p. 70)