Didaktisk design med digitala resurser. En studie av kunskapsrepresentationer i en digitaliserad skola

Didactic design with digital resources: A study of representations of knowledge in a digitalised school

In digital-classroom practices, pupils design their learning processes in collaboration with their peers, employing different semiotic resources when representing signs of learning in a constant flow. There still remain differences, however, between learning practices and the way pupils are formally tested. During tests, knowledge is regularly represented individually and often by delimited resources in contrast to digital learning practices where technologies enable redesign with a broader mix of written text, images, colours, graphs etc. In this thesis I investigate the increased access to and the frequent use of digital resources in schools and how these challenges contribute to tensions between and among school practices. In addition I discuss how digitalised learning environments can be studied in educational research. The aim of my thesis is to add to the existing knowledge about how the use of digital resources shapes knowledge representations and also the pupils’ possibilities to represent their knowledge. Knowledge representations are seen partly as an expression of the pupils’ knowledge in school and partly as an expression of products that are designed to be used in education such as digital educational games, two of which I will study in this thesis. My theoretical understanding draws on a design-oriented multimodal perspective on learning. Findings are discussed in relation to didactic design and Learning Design Sequence model (LDS). A developed LDS model is presented that summarises and highlights my findings. In the thesis I also discuss some of the challenges for a researcher when studying learning in a digitalised school with a focus on interaction and communication and how multimodal data can be transcribed, analysed and presented in a publication.