Customer‑Driven Development is a technique from the software development method called extreme Programming (XP) where customers (most importantly including end users of all levels) are closely involved in the software design and redesign process. This method of producing software suitable for customers has been adapted to help in the production of e‑learning material, in particular, Assessment Learning Objects (ALOs) consisting of multiple‑ choice questions. Asking undergraduate students to produce multiple‑choice questions as part of their formal assessment processes facilitated this. The outcome shows two distinct benefits to this process. Firstly, the students who took part in this project benefited from the encouragement to participate in reflective learning, both on the specific topic on which they chose to produce a multiple choice question, and in the methods and purposes of multiple choice questions (which form a significant part of their self‑assessment regime and summative assessment exam). Secondly, of the questions produced by students a significant number of them were of suitable quality to be used for future cohorts and to be made available to the wider community. This gives two important benefits to staff: developing a wide range of questions is difficult and time consuming; student insight into misunderstandings of material can often be greater than that of staff. Resources for the development of ALOs are scarce and given that students benefit directly from being asked to develop their own questions, the year‑on‑year expansion of a question set produced by students can be a very useful resource.

In this paper, I describe a professional development approach and a conceptual framework used to create critically thoughtful and media‑rich science learning resources. Greater clarity about the nature of critical thinking and how to support teachers in learning to implement it are needed if we are to respond to broader calls for critical thinking both as a central goal in science education and as a key aspect in the ecology of 21st Century e‑learning environments. The conceptual framework is a model of critical thinking developed by the Canadian Critical Thinking Consortium that involves embedding the teaching of five categories of intellectual tools into the teaching of curriculum content. The "tools for thought" include addressing the need for focused and relevant background knowledge, criteria for judgment, thinking concepts, thinking strategies and the development of habits of mind. The professional development approach engages practicing teachers through focused inquiry groups in collaboration with rich media technicians to develop the e‑critical challenges (lessons). Aspects of this "comet approach" include a series of face‑to‑face sessions, gradual and planned for introduction to use of laptop computers, developing inquiry oriented writing teams and expert mentorship between large group face‑to‑face sessions. I explain the unique aspects of both the development process and the challenges in the context of a project involving twelve teachers in the creation of media‑rich critical thinking lessons in science for Grade 7 students. Although project assessment data analysis is currently underway, I offer several initial conclusions in relation to the four goals of the project.

Drawing on what researchers and professionals in the field internationally report, this paper reviews educational technology as an emergent field. The review reveals the continuum of perspectives on what the field is, and how it is bounded or fragmented. The paper describes the field from two perspectives: the professional and scholarly and considers how the forms of knowledge differ and overlap in each domain. It posits some dichotomies which may frame the field such as science social science and positivist post‑modernist. Finally the paper provides conceptual frameworks for distinguishing fields from each other and suggests what the categorisation of the field might mean, especially considering its emergent status in a rapidly changing context.

Higher education institutions are compelled to accommodate growing class sizes as student numbers have increased over time, especially at undergraduate level. Good teaching principles are relevant to all class sizes. For example, teachers of all classes are required to create safe learning environments, motivate and engage students, interact with students, provide stimulating assessment tasks and give prompt feedback. However, meeting these requirements in the context of large classes is more challenging. As a result, traditional large class teaching methods are often characterised by the passive absorption of material, which is not ideal. What constitutes a large class? Class sizes of 60 or more have been considered large. In this paper, we report on online teaching, learning and assessment strategies for classes made up of approximately 600 first year students in Business Management 1 offered at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. The purpose of this ongoing research project is to integrate educational technologies in the classroom and study the impact of these classroom changes on the students' learning experience. The programme, which blends face‑to‑face teaching, paper‑based teaching materials and online learning by means of WebCTBlackboard tools, is now in its second cycle of implementation. This teaching strategy aims at greater lecturer‑student interaction, engaging students with the course materials on a regular basis and eliciting feedback from students, which is used to re‑teach concepts that the students find particularly difficult. The blended learning strategy resulted in enhanced student perceptions of the quality of teaching and learning, and a significant improvement in student throughput. The findings and recommendations reported in the paper are based on student feedback, gleaned through online surveys, online artefacts created by students and lecturers' classroom experiences. Although the authors report on online teaching, learning and assessment practices that proved to be effective in large classes, many conclusions may be of relevance to smaller classes.

This paper examines the impact of weblogs on individual learning processes in a university environment. It outlines experiences with weblogs as an instrument of learning reflection or a learning journal. This paper presents an innovative didactical concept based on the Web 2.0 paradigm and evolving technologies. Weblogs have emerged with the paradigm of Web 2.0 and user‑generated content and have gained in importance through the various evolving application contexts, for example, the transfer of knowledge within enterprises, the communication and exchange of experiences with customers, and even the acquisition of projects by power bloggers. In this paper, weblogs are considered in the specificity of learning journals that focus on two objectives: first, supporting individual learning by means of reflection as the most effective method of individual learning; and, second, multiplying these efforts through interaction and discussion within a group of individuals with common interests. The latter is based on contribution‑based pedagogies that maintain that collaboratively creating learning resources and sharing them with others are promising practices through which students can learn. Additionally, it is argued that this style of teaching relates to a growing trend in higher education in which the focus of learning is moving away from building a basic knowledge store and toward emphasizing a wider range of skills. We successfully applied the weblog approach to several academic courses during which qualitative and quantitative data were collected in an empirical study. This paper reflects our experiences with weblogs as a support for university lectures and is based on four semesters of exploration and adaptation. Within the scope of the research approach of design research (Hevner et al. 2004), it provides a structured method to support individual learning processes within a learning community realized by a weblog in the specificity of a learning journal. Verification with students and experts has led to a holistic method through which lecturers and coaches can successfully integrate weblogs into academic courses or even professional trainings. This paper addresses both academic learning and professional education management initiatives. Essentially, it aims at in‑house trainings in enterprises, vocational schools, and universities. Interviews with experts will also reveal how to successfully align this method with professional trainings. In conclusion, this paper suggests a method with which to design a learning environment by means of learning journals to enforce increased individual learning. More specifically, it reveals that learning journals enable the achievement of level three (transfer to and application in the working environment) of Kirkpatrick's (1994) four‑level model, which was generated to evaluate learning programs.

A nomadic collaborative partnership model for a community of practice (CoP) in Design for Learning (D4L) can facilitate successful innovation and continuing appraisals of effective professional practice, stimulated by a 'critical friend' assigned to the project. This paper reports on e‑learning case studies collected by the UK JISC eLIDA CAMEL Design for Learning project, which implemented and evaluated learning design (LD) tools in higher and further education as part of the 2006‑07 JISC Design for Learning pedagogic e‑learning programme. Project partners carried out user evaluations on innovative tools with a learning design function, collecting D4L case studies and LD sequences in post‑16HE contexts using LAMS and Moodle. The project brought together learning activity sequences from post‑16HE partners into a collaborative e‑learning community of professional practice based on the CAMEL (Collaborative Approaches to the Management of e‑Learning) model, contributing to international D4L developments. This paper briefly provides an overview of key project output contributions to e‑learning innovations, including results from teacher and student evaluations using online surveys. The paper explores intentionality in the development of a community of practice in design for learning, reporting on trials of learning design and social software that bridged some of the tensions between formalised intra‑institutional e‑learning relationships and inter‑institutional project team dynamic D4L practitioner development. Following a brief report of practitioner D4L e‑learning case studies and student feedback, the catalytic role of the 'critical friend' is highlighted and recommended as a key ingredient in the successful development of a nomadic model of communities of practice in the management of professional e‑learning projects. eLIDA CAMEL Partners included the Association of Learning Technology (ALT), JISC infoNet, three universities and five FESixth Form Colleges. Results reported to the UK JISC Experts' Pedagogy Group demonstrated e‑learning innovations by practitioners in D4L case studies, illuminated by the role of the 'critical friend', Professor Mark Stiles of Staffordshire University. The project also benefited from case study evaluations by Dr Liz Masterman of Oxford University Learning Technologies Group and the leading work of ALT and JISC infoNet in the development of the CAMEL model.

This paper reports on the initial findings from a project which offers a complementary perspective to much of the research on e‑learning and student learning in a digital age. Rather than foregrounding technological applications and their associated affordances, its focus is on texts and practices and textual engagements in digital environments. Drawing on previous research into academic literacies (Lea & Street 1998; Lea & Stierer 2000; Lillis, 2001; Thesen & Van Pletzen 2006), it takes a textual lens to the experience of undergraduate students' learning in a digital age. The project contributes to our understanding of a changing environment in exploring the nature of literacies, learning and technologies and how these intersect in students' lives as learners. The research has been carried out in three very different institutions of higher education in the UK, using qualitative, text‑ based methods. Forty‑five undergraduates participated in the project and were interviewed on three occasions over a six month period. The interviews included discussions around their use of digital texts and technologies in their lives as students. In discussion with the research team, participants in the project accessed websites across a range of personal and curricular spheres, including social networking sites and resources directly or indirectly linked to their studies. They also showed examples of their work for assessment and guidance from tutors. This has provided a rich base from which to examine the nature of digital literacies for today's undergraduates and the implications of engagement in a range of texts and practices around technologies for learning.

Over the last ten years e‑learning has rapidly emerged as a potentially effective mode of higher education, but it is still unclear what factors are important in the design of an effective e‑learning course. e‑Learning has been described as being a "disruptive technology" that changes how learning is approached in higher education (Garrison and Anderson 2003). The extensive changes in the technologies over the last decade have the potential to influence the way we engage with knowledge, but the potential will only be realised if we integrate this with an understanding of learning, and design the use of e‑learning technologies accordingly within different contexts (Laurillard 2005). This paper explores the influence of the areas of technology, pedagogy and context on e‑learning practice in higher education. Three vignettes relating to e‑learning are presented which represent the shifts in technology and the tensions and influences of this on context and pedagogy. These vignettes provide the background context within which to discuss the design of an e‑ learning alignment guide (eLAG). This guide is a navigational tool, which offers e‑learning designers a perspective on navigating the e‑learning topography. It is devised to assist practitioners when navigating the changing and complex terrain of e‑learning and teaching. The key finding of this paper is that technology, pedagogy and context need to be closely aligned in order to realise the potential of e‑learning in higher education.