Enriching Spaces in Practice-Based Education to Support Collaboration while Mobile: The Case of Teacher Education

Overview & Synopsis

Practice-based education is gaining a growing popularity in fields as diverse as, for example, software engineering, pedagogy and medical studies. In practice-based education learning takes place across different learning arenas and requires cooperation among all the actors involved in the learning process. However, mobility of students across these arenas impact deeply on cooperation patterns, and therefore on the learning process. In this paper we investigate the usage of shared display systems to promote cooperation among students in practice-based education. Our focus is on teacher education and the paper is based on our experiences with the teacher education programme at our university. Based on our observations of students out in practice, we discuss the importance of common spaces and the role of bulletin boards of different types. We then define high-level requirements for a shared display system to support practice-based education and we illustrate the main concepts with a demonstrator. Strengths and weaknesses of our approach are pointed out through an evaluation of the demonstrator.