Digital Production and Students as Learning Designers

Today’s digitalisation allows users to interact, collaborate, communicate and create user-generated content. The technology is intuitive and easy to use even for young children and new learning opportunities emerge. Especially students’ production as a learning form benefits from digitization as the new opportunities enable young students to integrate their playing competencies and skills in the formal school learning. This paper presents and discusses theory regarding students’ digital production in a learning and a design-for- learning perspective, that is generated based on project Netbook 1:1 (2009-2012), where ICT was readily accessible for each child at school and at home in grade 1-3 at two Danish public schools. The paper presents a Four Levels Design for Learning Model. This model can be used for both design for learning and analyses of learning processes. The discussion is supported by empirical examples from the project, that explored emerging relations between ICT, production and subject matter -specific practice (Danish, Math, and interdisciplinary). We understand design for learning as both related to process and agency and in the study we have examined and found that students are capable of operating as learning designers.