Teachers as digital task designers: an agenda for research and professional development

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Acknowledgements

This paper is the result of research and development work undertaken as part of the Digital Curricular Literacies (DCL) project funded by the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. The DCL project team is composed of the following: Principal Investigators, Peter R. Freebody, John G. Hedberg, and Guo Libo; Collaborators, Chin Hui Li Christine, H. Doreen Tan, and Phillip A. Towndrow. I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the following colleagues in the collection and analysis of DCL data: Lim Tze Mien, Chen Min Pyng, Ole C. Brudvik, Uma Natarajan, Sam Ming Shann Charmaine, Tiu Angela, Julie Lim Poh Gek, Sunita Shankar, and Muthukumar S. L. The DCL project is managed by Tiu Wendy.

Notes

1. I summarize at this point the arguments in Towndrow (2001).

2. The teacher’s name is a pseudonym.

3. It is possible that Ms Koh did not make a conscious decision in this respect, but it still remains clear that a teacher’s task‐design decisions embrace what is included, and by implication what is excluded. Kress (2003: 49–51) makes a similar point concerning the centrality of design and the need to attend to the implications of both planned and unplanned events in relation to literacy and multi‐modality in contemporary educational contexts. In all likelihood, Ms Koh probably thought that it was more efficient to show the class how to compare plant and animal cells because she believed that the learners were not able to do so by themselves.

4. I am not interested in attempting to explain why Ms Koh did not use IT in her class or to speculate about what some of her other choices might have been. Rather, my purpose is to show in the remainder of the paper what could have been possible if she had used IT, in particular, and how teachers like Ms Koh can be helped to make more informed learning‐task decisions that involve the strategic use of new technologies.

5. As an extension, the simultaneous use of multiple perspectives in difficult domains is also required. See Spiro and Jehng (1990).