Information Technology Reference
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minimalist intervention and integration, but the ecosystem model is rather on the
first end.
Sustainability
The classroom has limited energy resources as any ecosystem. The energetic effi-
ciency of a pedagogical method is a key factor to claim that it “works well.” The
energy that students will invest is of course limited; it is actually measured in
terms of time (i.e. credits). For instance, it happens that a very exciting project
concentrates all the students' energy on one specific course, leading them to
fail other courses. But, most importantly, we refer here to the teachers' energy.
A method based on teachers' heroic investment over a few months is not a method
that will “work well” for several years. Teachers and their team will do it well
the first year, even better the second year and then the investment will inevitably
decrease over the following years.
Factor 14.
Sustainability
. The energy required to run the method can be
maintained over several years
We should not forget that teaching is a long-term repetitive activity: researchers
do an experiment once in a classroom but teachers have to repeat it for many years.
A method that “works well” has to have realistic energy expectations. It may for
instance be that groups of two are better than groups of four for the targeted inter-
action but they require twice more energy for grading the assignments. Design is
always a trade-off.
The “SWISH” Model and the ManyScripts Environment
This section and the two next ones illustrate how the factors mentioned actually
shape the design of technologies used in the classroom. We report the local design
models used for building these environments, their implementation and how they
relate to the 14 factors.
The “SWISH” model
A macro-script is a pedagogical method that aims to trigger specific interactions
during teamwork (Dillenbourg & Jermann, 2007). Here are two scripts we want to
relate to our 14 factors. Their score-like representation is reported in Fig. 26.2.
