Understanding Creative and Participatory Literacy Practices: A Design Ethnography

This paper describes our experience using design ethnography to support educational leaning making that informs the design and development of a digital language application.
Our participatory, multi-year, ethnographic inquiry helped us understand the curricular, pedagogical, technological, and administrative elements circulating in a public elementary school classroom. Herein, we outline the opportunities and obstacles we encountered as we continue to make meaning out of the creative and participatory classroom literacy practices
and work to apply our emerging understandings to the design and development of educational technologies.

Also available here: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B53zfPTjFPYdbVp3eHFjNmNGUlU/edit?usp=sharing

Transcript

2. The Language Learning and Technology Research and Design Group [LLTR&D] was formed in 2007 by a number of graduate students in the Instructional Technology Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Since its formation, we have explored a number of ideas around language and literacy acquisition and technology. Our major project to date has been the sustainable, alternatively- resourced iterative design, development, and implementation of an invisible mashup we call FunWritr.