Our proposal for a symposium on Educational Design Research has just been accepted for the EdMedia 2016 conference in Vancouver, Canada. The two hour long session is titled “Educational Design Research: methodological blind spots, challenges, and alternative sources for inspiration”. This is the abstract of what we are going to address:
Among contemporary educational technology research and development approaches, educational design research (also called “design-based research”) has gained considerable attention in recent years. While its proponents promote design interventions in various types of practice settings, they often maintain the idea of the primacy of “theory” without making explicit what type of theory and knowledge claims they are hoping to produce. It often appears as if educational design researchers want to maintain an ideal of “scientific” rationale and of universal knowledge claims that does not seem to fit with their own focus on intervention in contextualised practice.
In our symposium we will explore various methodological blind spots and challenges of contemporary educational design research and its application in the field of educational technology. In addition, we will review some potential sources for inspiration that could fuel the further development and fundamental emancipation of educational design research as a system of inquiry.
Beyond the contributions of Tobias Schmohl and myself from the HUL at University of Hamburg, Germany, the symposium will feature work of Robert Fitzgerald and Simon Leonard from the University of Canberra, Australia, Mark W. Johnson from the University of Liverpool, UK, and Beaumie Kim from the University of Calgary, Canada.
