This paper provides a summary account of Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD). ACAD offers a practical approach to analysing complex learning situations, in a way that can generate knowledge that is reusable in subsequent (re)design work. ACAD has been developed over the last two decades. It has been tested and refined through collaborative analyses of a large number of complex learning situations and through research studies involving experienced and inexperienced design teams. The paper offers a definition and high level description of ACAD and goes on to explain the underlying motivation. The paper also provides an overview of two current areas of development in ACAD: the creation of explicit design rationales and the ACAD toolkit for collaborative design meetings. As well as providing some ideas that can help teachers, design teams and others discuss and agree on their working methods, ACAD has implications for some broader issues in educational technology research and development. It questions some deep assumptions about the framing of research and design thinking, in the hope that fresh ideas may be useful to people involved in leadership and advocacy roles in the field.
enABLe is Portsmouth's University's emergent framework to support an innovative approach to team-based learning design. We are currently refining the elements of an enABLe workshop and toolkit, that colleagues across the University have helped to define through a series of pilot events.
"Perhaps the relativity of the goodness of software is at the root of the classic distinction between the software design styles that have been named the New Jersey and MIT schools. Where the latter strives for software that is well modeled directly, regardless of the underlying platform, the former strives for software that is well modeled as a simple implementation on top of an underlying platform that is assumed to be worth understanding regardless."