Technology for Classroom Orchestration - New Science of Learning - page 519

not “work well” if the students don't perceive this method as useful for passing the
course exam.
Factor 12. Assessment relevance . Is the method compatible with the different
assessments that students will have to pass?
In theory, curriculum relevance should guarantee the assessment relevance, but
in practice there are gaps: the specific way of measuring skills and knowledge may
differ from the way they are taught, the national or international assessments may
differ from local curricula, etc.
Legacy
Given the complexity of causal relationship within an ecosystem, external inter-
ventions have to be minimalist. The same applies to the classroom ecosystem. The
learning environments we design do not land in an empty world. Every class has its
legacy of methods, tools and resources that have been used so far. A new method
cannot wash out the past. For instance, a method that “works well” should be com-
patible with the main book used in the course; otherwise teachers would be in a very
difficult position of explaining why they do not use the topic that has been bought.
Another example is that every student or teacher has a legacy of habits with respect
to computational tools. If the learning environment proposes a specific email tool
or a specific chat tool, it will suffer from a strong competition with the email and
chats that students are using, i.e. the ones that already include all their contacts,
their histories, their goodies, etc. The obvious implication is to design a minimal-
ist intervention that respects this legacy, namely to design a learning environment
that is limited to the functionalities strictly required by the pedagogical method.
This means design should resist the temptation to provide a fully integrated learning
environment (with yet another agenda, yet another forum, etc.).
Factor 13. Minimalism . The functionalities offered by the learning environ-
ment are only those specific to the learning scenario and those are not provided
by the tools (books, software, etc.) already in use by the students
However, minimalism has drawbacks: an integrated environment enables inter-
connection between tools, for instance a link between chat utterances and graphical
objects on the display (as in ConcertChat, Mühlpfordt & Wessner, 2005) or a link
between a forum and a spreadsheet (as in http://www.sense.us ). Despite emerging
standards and multiple APIs, it remains a technical challenge to provide this kind
of interactions between the environment we design and multiple existing tools (e.g.
with the five most popular chat systems). In other words, there is a trade-off between