eBlog by Tore Hoel

The next few days I will participate in the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36 meeting in Toronto. Although my job is to contribute to top notch standards for metadata, quality management, accessibility, collaborative technologies, etc, I will be thinking of this introduction to my Mind the Gap project:

Learning technologies use technical standards. Embedded in these standards are pedagogical models. These models are not necessarily presented as design requirements at the start of a specification process. Often they will be “extracted” after the technology is implemented. Faced with the affordances of tools and digital learning environment the question is often raised: Whose interests were actually “translated” into the specifications?

My research interest is to see how the agency of the educationalists is enacted. I have three research questions:

1. How is the agency of the different stakeholder groups participating in learning technologies standardization managed?
2. What role does cultural artefacts and means play in the standardization activities we study?
3. Will it be possible on the basis of our descriptive study of learning technologies standardization to develop boundary objects that could be introduced to standardization projects to “bridge the gap” between the educationalists and the technologists?

The aim of the project is to contribute to a design of learning technologies through standardization that is better grounded in the pedagogical needs of the end-users. This will only be achieved if there is an extensive professional exchange between the users of technology and the designers of that technology. We need to understand this professional exchange as a certain mediated discourse with its own characteristics. Our focus is to identify these characteristics and see if we can learn how they work. What we learn we would use to improve the design process and strengthen the voice of the end-users of learning technologies.

Our focus will be the mediated actions taken by the different stakeholder communities in standardization. As our own participation in standardization activities has foregrounded aspects of the mediational means used in these activities, we will attempt to narrow down our analysis to the tool aspects of professional discourse.

I look forward to the SC36 meeting. With the Mind the Gap project idea in the back of my head I will have much to ponder about when we are trying to resolve Canada’s 111 comments and nobody seems to know what the coded references to unknown ISO standards means. I will not despair, my focus will be: What action is taking place here? Whose interests are being acted out?