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platforms should support teacher individual and social practices of knowledge
construction (Markauskaite & Reimann, 2008). In other words, technical affor-
dances should be aligned with and support cognitive and social knowledge creation
practices.
Teachers as innovators and researchers need inquiry models that are better
tuned to their everyday professional needs and allow creating trustworthy theory
and research-inspired classroom innovations, thus combining the key strengths of
practitioners' and researchers' inquiry approaches. The integration of the key epis-
temic strengths and steps of practitioner and design-based research could provide
such models for teacher-researcher instructional innovations. We propose that such
model could have a strong focus on a theory and research-based design, practition-
ers' reflection and sharing of outputs. In this way, design-based practitioner research
model should have a strong focus on the following steps: (a) an initial definition of a
learning problem; (b) identification and planning of theory and research-based solu-
tions and actions; (c) design of the instructional interventions and other changes;
(d) implementation and monitoring; (e) analysis and evaluation using scholarly
qualitative and quantitative research techniques; (f) reflection and evidence-driven
refinement of instructional strategies; and (e) communication and dissemination of
innovations and research outputs.
A Teacher-Led Inquiry Platform
From sociotechnical perspective, the structure and the major elements of an
e-inquiry environment for teacher innovation should not necessarily mirror, never-
theless support the above delineated model of knowledge construction. For example,
Fig. 12.2 shows one of such possible designs of educational innovation and research
platform. It includes three interconnected inquiry spaces: (a)
design, research, and
reflection space
primarily designed for individual and small-team knowledge work;
(b)
collaboration and knowledge sharing space
primarily designed for a broader
community-based knowledge sharing and building; and (c)
knowledge dissemi-
nation and decision-making space
primarily designed for meta-level inquiries in
shared innovation and research repositories.
The design, research, and reflection space
includes a range of interconnected dig-
ital affordances that can help teachers to design, monitor, and evaluate ICT-enhanced
innovations. Depending on the needs, this space could be used for individual or
group innovations, but it primarily provides tools that are used for classroom inno-
vation, research, and reflection and those inquiry tasks that are typically more
individual or cooperative rather than collaborative, as it is common in classroom
innovations, and do not require extensive synchronous interaction. For example,
tools for instructional design allow to create new instructional resources repurpos-
ing available design patterns, learning objects and other resources. Tools for inquiry
help to design and manage associated design-based practitioner inquiry studies.
They can allow teachers to access and reuse standard design-based practitioner
inquiry workflows, use various project management tools, integrate various doc-
uments, data, and other digital objects created at various stages of inquiry, and
