Components of 21st Century Learning as a tanka poem

Now, there it finally is: Four Components of 21st Century Learning (pdf). Done and sent!

Here's the complete study, crystallized in a tanka poem:

Nature of edtech 

has components like seasons: 

technical, social, 

epistemological, 

and cognitive. Use em all!

Here's a longer version, shortened from the Abstract:

As the Learning Solutions team that I work in was to arrange a new course called "Edutech bootcamp" for teacher trainees at the time of finding a research subject for this study, I felt it fitting to apply a pedagogical model and to evaluate how it would help us in planning and analysing the course. 

I ended up using the pedagogical infrastructure framework developed by Minna Lakkala in her dissertation. I decided to study the framework itself: How practical and comprehensive would this model be in planning the course? What is my opinion of Lakkala's model compared to other similar models like TPACK and Learning by Design? 

The pedagogical infrastructure framework is a useful all-around tool that pays attention to all the essential spheres of a socio-constructionist learning process. It is particularly useful in pinpointing the areas in need of improvement, like the cognitive component in this case of Edutech bootcamp. 

All in all, the teacher's experience and didactic competence are more essential factors for a successful course than choosing the right model or framework.

What's the recipe for a community of practice?

Last week's Friday afternoon at InnoOmnia, Espoo. Small groups of adult students wandering around the vocational institute. They had gotten keys to access almost any space to watch and observe, to ask and interview, to learn and to get a grip on the community.

These teacher trainees were on Edutech bootcamp, a part of their vocational teachers' pedagogical studies. They had been learning education technology and pedagogy for two days, and this was their concluding task.


The trainees formed groups of three, got a key and an iPad, and started by consulting the course blog about what does "community of practice" mean, how can it be used as a support in learning, and what they are exactly expected to dig out in their own task.

There were two questions the students had to find answers for:

• How do CoP principles show up in InnoOmnia? 
• How does technology support the CoP in InnoOmnia? 

By letting the students do their learning in an authentic context, by letting them decide over their task management themselves we wanted to get them engaged, and to take the ownership of their own learning. By making them to analyze and evaluate InnoOmnia's practices and to create an unconventional learning outcome, we wanted them to use also their higher-level thinking skills (as they are classified in Bloom's taxonomy).

As their just-started studies are mainly carried out as distance learning, by such a procedure we wanted to support the creation of their own common practices, and their own community of practice.

Three groups interviewed students, entrepreneurs and teachers in InnoOmnia on video (above and eg. this and this). One group took pictures and made blog entries, another a Facebook page, and yet another a comic strip.

Further reading on communities of practice in education and on using technology to support them: 

• Barab, S. A., & Duffy, T. (2012). From Practice Fields to Communities of Practice. In D. Jonassen & S. M. Land (Eds.), Theoretical Foundations of Learning Environments (2nd ed., pp. 29–65). 
• Hoadley, C. (2012). What is a Community of Practice and How Can We Support It? In Theoretical Foundations of Learning Environments, see above (pp. 286–299). 
• Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2011). New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning (3rd ed.). See example pp. 232-245.
• Lloyd, A. (2010). Lessons from the workplace: Understanding information literacy as practice. In Practising Information Literacy: Bringing Theories of Learning, Practice and Information Literacy Together (pp. 29–50).