These are readings which may be useful to students learning about designing learning technology. If you have a favorite article and would like to submit it, click here to add your article to the list using our easy-update article template.

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Readings in Design Principles & Methodologies

These readings will help ground students in an understanding of design as an iterative, user-focused, and reflective process.

• Bucciarelli, Louis (1996). Designing Engineers (Inside Technology) — This is an important book on training engineers, engineering values and engineering world views. The thought is based in part on computing case studies and is relevant insofar as our audience is teaching participants in engineering culture and practices.
• Cennamo, K. & Kalk, D. (2004). Real World Instructional Design — There is some good information scattered throughout it, but their descriptions of the design process were a bit confusing (and they had multiple models that they didn't always integrate well).
• Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2003). eLearning and the science of instruction — Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2003). E-learning and the science of instruction. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Collins, A. (1996). Design issues for learning environments (article) — Discusses cost-benefit tradeoffs that designers of learning environments should consider, in the following categories: content (e.g., breadth vs. depth), context (e.g., incidental vs. direct learning), sequence (e.g., structured vs. exploratory learning), and teaching methods (e.g., coaching).
• Gruen, D. (2000). Storyboarding for design - An overview of the process — A concise step by step guide for organizing a storyboard to communicate a design idea. This paper is really about goodstorytelling, not about making a visual impact.
• Jones, Capers (1995). "End-User Programming" (article) — Short article on the potential and impact of end-user programming.
• Newsome et al (1989). Workshop on Design Theory and Methodology — A compilation and distillation of NSF funded research into engineering education done in the late 1980s.
• Norman, D. (1990). The design of everyday things — A classic treatise on all things interface related. A strange property of this book is that it turns computer scientists into people who care about psychology, but it turns educators into people who substitute usability for learning.
• Preece et. al. (2002). Interaction design - beyond human-computer interaction — An example of a textbook for students that has a companion website. Also interesting as an example of something I like as a teacher but the students don't like.
• Schon, D.A. (1992). Designing as reflective conversation with the materials of a design situation — Classic design paper highlighting that design is a psychological phenomenon.
• Wiggins, G. & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design, 2nd ed — Chapter 1 presents "backwards design", an approach to curricular design that starts by considering what knowledge, understanding, and proficiency a student should have, then determining the evidence that assesses that understanding, and finally, planning the learning experiences and instruction. Chapter 4 presents six facets of understanding that indicate whether a student has achieved in-depth understanding. The six facets are: explanation, interpretation, application, perspective, empathy, and self-knowledge.

Readings in Educational Game Design

A subset of the literature on software design deals specifically with games. Of course, games are not always designed with educational outcomes in mind, but our instructors considered these readings valuable.

• Aldrich, C. (2005). Learning by Doing — The book describes ways of to select, research, build, sell, deploy, and measure various types of educational simulations.
• Bos, N.D. (2001). What do game designers know about scaffolding? — This paper analyzes the popular simulation game SimCity with the goal of identifying design principles that would be useful for educators.
• Crawford, C. (1982). The Art of Computer Game Design — This book, by one of the key people in computer game development, helps provide an overview of computer game design as well as a detailed taxonomy of terms, styles and approaches.
• Klawe, M. (1999). Computer games, education and interfaces — This paper reviews seminal research in the area of educational games from 1992 to 1998 conducted by researchers at the University of British Columbia.
• Sherrell, L. B., Robertson, J. J., & Sellers, T. W. (2005). Teaching Combinatorics with Simulations — This article describes a serious game, written in AgentSheets, that was used to teach permutations and combinations to high school students.

Readings in Multidisciplinary Teamwork

• Bolton, R. (1986). People skills — Chapter 4, "Four Skills of Reflective Listening," is an excellent practical introduction to thoughtful listening and effective dialogue in groups. A very good reading for helping students think metacritically about group dynamics.
• Johnson, R. & Johnson, T. (1994). An overview of cooperative learning — An excellent overview article, defining cooperative learning and documenting its benefits.
• Locker, K. O. (1992). What Makes A Collaborative Writing Team Successful?

Readings in Theories of Teaching & Learning

These readings focus on theories of teaching and learning as they apply to the kind of constructivist, project-based courses taught in affiliation with TRAILS.

• Bransford et al. (2000) How People Learn — This book is solidly grounded in the latest educational research and lucidly written, and is an excellent introduction to theories of learning.
• Collins et al (1991). Cognitive Apprenticeship — This reading has been strongly endorsed by Stanford students as a good way to think about supporting learning.
• Oppenheimer, T. (2003). The Flickering Mind — Provocative, and ultimately surprisingly motivational book for CS students about the false promise of technology in the classroom and how learning can be saved.
• Van Merrienboer, J. (1997). Training Complex Cognitive Skills — The book summarizes important cognitive psychology research and relates it to specific instructional design practices.

Readings in User Testing & Observation

• Hoadley, C. (2002). Creating context - Design based research in creating and understanding CSCL — Discusses the importance of learning context for design, and also highlights how research and design support each other.

Readings - Other

• Adams et. al. (2003). Challenges in teaching capstone courses — Many of us run capstone project courses and do so in different ways. The members of this panel come from different countries, belong to different types of institutions, teach in different computing disciplines and the capstone projects they run also vary considerably. Yet, there is a strong sense of consensus about what a capstone project is and how valuable it is as a learning experience for students.
• Agre, Phillip (1996, 1997.) The Internet and Education — A stimulating article about how technology development should be situated within a larger awareness of the needs of communities and individuals. Agre writes, "We know that we have really begun to develop a socially-driven agenda once the technology seems contingent - no longer inevitable or monolithic but a matter of choice that we can shape in a conscious way." To this end he suggests that key concepts in the minds of technology developers should be collective cognition, community systems design, and developmental democracy.
• Brna, P. & Aspin, R. (1998) Collaboration in a Virtual World - Support for Conceptual Learning?
• Clear et. al. (2001). Resources for instructors of capstone courses in computing — This report is intended to assist instructors of capstone courses, particularly those new to the model of teaching and learning inherent in the capstone course.
• Conn, Richard (2004). A reusable, academic-strength, metrics-based software engineering process for capstone courses and projects — This paper describes a mature Software Engineering Process that may be applied to capstone courses, student projects, and research projects in a university environment. This process, based in part on the Team Software Process of the Software Engineering Institute, features mature software engineering best practices, including extensive use of metrics to gain insight into process effectiveness and product quality.
• Dede, C. (1995). The evolution of constructivist learning environments
• Fincher, S., Petre, M., and Clark, M. (Eds) (2001). Computer science project work - Principles and pragmatics — This book is highly relevant to instructors planning a computer science project based course. It categorizes project courses, presents case studies, describes common issues and potential pitfalls and presents alternatives for addressing them, and describes best practices. It touches on the Close support and Collaboration parts of TripleC.
• Fruchter, A. and Emery, K. (1999). Teamwork - Assessing cross-disciplinary learning
• Gold, Annegret (2003). Providing process for projects in capstone courses
• Hoadley, C., & Kim, D. E. (2003). Learning, design, and technology - Creation of a design studio for educational innovation — Chris Hoadley writes: "This article embodies some of what I'm trying to get across when I teach design; it's not necessarily a great teaching article, but good for explaining how I teach to other people."
• Koschmann, T. et. al. (1996). Computer-supported problem-based learning — This paper outlines a methodology for conducting theory-based research in the learning sciences. The authors identify some very useful principles for thinking about learning in open-ended, ill-structured domains, such as the Principle of Activeness, the Principle of Authenticity, and the Principle of Termlessness.
• Mortensen, J., et. al (2002). Collaboration in tele-immersive environments
• Roschelle, J., & DiGiano, C. (2004). ESCOT - Coordinating the influence of R&D and classroom practice to produce educational software from reusable components — Reflections on the success factors that allowed the ESCOT project to generate a series of interactive math puzzles over two school years. This paper emphasizes the importance of design perspectives from different disciplines and a structured design process. Long, but useful background, since the ESCOT project spawned TRAILS.
• Stein, M. (2002). Using large vs. small group projects in capstone and software engineering courses
• Stein, M. (2003). Student effort in semester-long and condensed capstone project courses

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