THE PROBLEM OF CONTEXT: THE CIRCUMSTANCES IN WHICH ICT CAN SUPPORT LEARNING

Rosemary Luckin
The London Knowledge Lab
The Institute of Education
UK

Context matters to learning; it is complex and local to a learner. Conceptualizing context so that, as designers and educators, we can understand and use it to better support the development of technology-rich learning activities is an important challenge. The Ecology of Resources model addresses this challenge and offers a way of characterizing a learner in terms of the interactions that form that learner’s context. It offers an interpretation of Vygotsky’s theory in the form of an abstract representation that can be shared by practitioners, technologists and beneficiaries as they explore the potential learning benefits afforded by the wide range of available resources, in particular technologies. It represents the learner holistically with respect to the interactions that make up their context.

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