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Wise technology integration is not simply a matter of selecting to use, but a matter of how to effectively use technology in context within the curriculum. Technology integration cognition should thus be thought of as pedagogical design thinking that involves critically examining the affordances of learning technologies and then strategically applying them to teach particular subject matter ideas within a specific classroom context. To better describe such teacher cognition concerning technology integration, this study proposes TPACK-L, an expanded framework for teachers' technology integration knowledge, by adding the principles of learning theory to the existing TPACK framework, and delineates what this pedagogical design thinking looks like in the context of a specially designed card game, CARD-tamen™. This study also addresses the issue of how to measure technology cognition in-the-moment during card play. Situated cognition served as the framework to assess using card gameplay in context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We attempt to describe what a methodology for situated action should do for students given problem solving in school settings. Working from an ecological account of perception-action, we propose that a methodology for understanding situated action should afford the instructional designer (often the classroom teacher), the methodologist, and the problem solver opportunities to co-construct coupling dynamics that operate on multiple space and time scales including "real time." With this goal in mind, we propose the use of the Jasper Planning Assistant (JPA), an online learning and assessment system that becomes part of the design-learning-research situation and serves as a scaffold for the learner. Through analysis of log-file data produced by the JPA, we illustrate that a methodology for situated action should be neither a purely quantitative nor qualitative account, but rather an inscription-an emergent visualization of the coupling dynamics between a student and his or her environment. We conclude that ideally this emergent inscription should reveal the multiple space times in which problem solving is occurring, yet be reductive in such a way as to create affordances for future action: Methodology should have functional value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a response to that of Moore and Muller 'The Discourse of Voice and the Problem of Knowledge and Identity in the Sociology of Education', which appeared in Volume 20 of this journal. It starts by summarising and endorsing their criticisms of 'voice discourses' but argues that their case is weakened by their failure to distinguish clearly between the 'debunking of knowledge' associated with the postmodernist theories that underpin 'voice discourses' and the general propositions of a social theory of knowledge. The idea that knowledge has a social as well as an epistemological basis is now widely accepted in philosophy as well as sociology. The paper draws on a paper by Stephen Toulmin and makes a distinction between anthropological and sociological approaches to the idea of knowledge having a social basis. It goes on to use some ideas from the author's recent work on the issue of knowledge specialisation to suggest the kind of contribution that a sociological approach to knowledge can make to current curriculum issues as well as to educational policy more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents opinion on information technology and the sociology of education. My own interest in what might be called a sociology or politics of technology relates to earlier attempts to develop a sociological analysis of school science. We started the Technology and Education Project, recognizing on the one hand the need to explore the problems and possibilities of the so-called new technologies and also to remain aware that the issues were not new or specific to particular technologies, but part of those more general processes of specialization, the hierarchies and forms of power relation associated with industrialization. Many teachers are aware of the shortages of available software, of the constraints imposed by local authority funding policies, and by the inappropriateness of the available programming languages for educational purposes. All these are important issues for both teachers and sociological research, but a concentration of them would in my view pre-empt discussion about more basic issues that have yet to be considered at least within education. Again it is important to stress that this is not an argument against the possible use of expert systems in education, which might broaden pupils' access to opportunities to realize their own purposes. It is rather to cause us to be much more explicit about those purposes and the extent to which particular divisions of labor and particular dependencies may become enshrined and mystified in software even more than in people.

An attempt is made to raise some preliminary implications of recognizing the ‘political’ character of education and definitions of educational knowledge in particular, by taking the Schools Council as a case study. Following a brief review of some existing approaches to the politics and control of education, and a specification of the possible significance of the Schools Council as a critical case, a more detailed critique of current orthodoxies is presented as exemplified in Manzer's study Teachers and Politics. This leads to an alternative perspective in which three critical issues are examined: I. teacher control and autonomy; 2. legitimation of knowledge; 3. types of child and the differentiation of curricula. The links between the issues and their implication for treating the separation of ‘politics’ from both ‘education’ and ‘educational research’ as themselves sociological questions, are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]