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The Emerging Learning Design Journal

A Note From The Editors

Kirk McDermid, Jerry Alan Fails

Technologies continue to emerge and evolve, affording teachers the opportunity to experiment and sometimes change their practices to engage students in interactive and meaningful ways. These technologies can be used to engage students on social and cognitive levels, which we all know can be pivotal in creating and sustaining academic engagement. They allow teacher and student to relate to one another differently through avatars, and allow students to interact with intellectually-stimulating fictional and simulated environments, to emphasize and sustain the key experiences that foster learning by automating or de-emphasizing the incidental and distracting machinery of many classroom environments. Teachers, and the learning environments they build, are also heavily influenced by design: well designed learning experiences are what we all aim for. But, unlike many current examples of educational technology, design decisions can be very subtle yet equally powerful in how they shape the learning experiences of students. While we often hear claims of a specific technology or design choice achieving remarkable success, it is almost always the case that good learning happens at the confluence of technology and design. To ignore one in favor of the other is a dangerous (and often costly) mistake. We are excited to share this issue, which we hope demonstrates the importance of this interaction between technology, learning and design and look forward to continued growth in interest in the design and implementation of emerging learning technologies.