Modern classrooms are complex socio-technical spaces where multiple heterogeneous legacy tools and novel technologies coexist. The design and the study of such technological ecosystems (or of single technologies that have to integrate into one such ecosystem) is still under-researched, and we lack established conceptual tools to understand how a learning scenario is orchestrated across such heterogeneous sets of resources, and the role and affordances of each technology in it. In this contribution, we present the orchestration matrix, a simple table-like form that can help technology designers and researchers to analyze an existing technological classroom ecosystem from the point of view of teacher orchestration of a learning scenario, or propose new ecosystems that are (hopefully) more effective.
Classrooms have always been complex, both in terms of social dynamics and processes. They are public spaces
with their own history, highly immediate, where multiple activities take place simultaneously
As educational technology researchers, we not only strive to find new ways of using technology to learn. We also need to take into account which other technologies already exist there, which may fulfill a similar role, or a complementary one, in a sort of ecosystem where the different new and legacy technologies compete (or collaborate) for teacher and student usage (Zhao & Frank, 2003). However, there is no standard, structured way for researchers (or technology designers) to think about this classroom ecosystem, and how teaching and learning within it can be facilitated or hampered.
In this contribution we present a simple, table-like form to do precisely this kind of analysis, which we call the “orchestration matrix”. We have already used it during the design of our own research efforts into classroom technologies, and we hope it can be useful in the context of the ‘orchestrated collaborative classroom’ workshop, to understand current and future classroom ecosystems, and to ideate new technologies (or new ecosystems of technologies) for them.
The next section reviews briefly the notion of classroom as a technological ecosystem, and other ecosystemic approaches in education and human-computer interaction (HCI). Then, we present the orchestration matrix itself, and illustrate its usage with a real example from our own research. We end the contribution with a few conclusions and projections about future work in this line of research.
The metaphor of socio-technical spaces (such as the classroom) ‘ecosystems’1 has been present in the fields of
HCI and education for a long time. Before the turn of the 21st century,
This interest in ecosystems as a metaphor can also be found in the field of educational research, where
we can find “ecological approaches to classroom management”
Closer to our topic as educational technology researchers and designers, Zhao & Frank (2003) also use
this metaphor to talk about technology adoption in schools: basically, within the school ecosystems, computer
uses are living species, with teachers acting as ‘keystone species’, and technological/pedagogical innovations
representing the invasion of an exotic species.
From the teacher perspective, the notion of the classroom as a complex ecosystem has been retaken
recently by
Hence, we can see that it may be useful, when designing technologies for the classroom, to consider not only our proposed innovation, but also the different resources that teachers and students have at their disposal. Also, it may be useful to consider the role that each of these elements can have in the different (teaching and learning) practices that will take place within this ecosystem: will they be supported by the different technological (or legacy) elements? Will they be hampered by them? Will they collaborate or compete in providing this support?
In order to understand the role of the different technological (or legacy) resources of the classroom in the
teaching practice, we created the ‘orchestration matrix’, whose basic principle is to map such resources and the
orchestration activities that occur in the classroom. Although no clear model of orchestration activities exists,
drawing from existing literature on orchestration and classroom management in general
Then, by creating a table with the different classroom technological resources (including legacy, hardware and software), we obtain the orchestration matrix (see table 1). Within this table, in each cell we write how each element affects the corresponding orchestration process (e.g., if students are using laptops, the awareness of students’ progress may only be obtained if the teacher goes behind each student, not from the front of the class; if the teacher is using a web application to have students do individual exercises, the logistics of distributing the task will require the URL to be delivered somehow to each student). When filling in this table, it is important to consider the concrete learning activity taking place; thus, we can have a different orchestration matrix for each pedagogical scenario taking place in a concrete classroom ecosystem. The order of the columns presented in Table 1 has no specific significance, and can be modified.
To illustrate this approach, we briefly present how we used the ‘orchestration matrix’ when designing a recent classroom experiment in a secondary school classroom, in which a new technology was going to be used. We were considering the usage of multiple tabletop computers in the classroom (along with the existing classroom ecosystem that included a projector, a teacher computer, etc.), as part of the evaluation of a new educational game (called ‘Tessellated Battleship’). Tessellated Battleship is a review activity about geometry, coordinate systems and directed numbers (the activity was designed for 11-12 year old students), all topics within their mandatory curriculum. This experiment was framed within a larger project in which we explore the effects of paper (and especially, augmented paper technologies) in classroom orchestration (1).
Figure 1 shows the actual orchestration matrix used, with the different technologies in the ecosystem (including the tabletops we were introducing, but also existing elements such as the wall display usually present in the classroom) represented as rows on the left side. Thinking about the learning scenario we had in mind (basically, a collaborative game in which different groups of students try to stop the advance of a virus infection using lasers with different geometrical forms, in a similar fashion to the classic battleship game), we filled in the role that we envisioned for each technology (e.g., the wall display would help in the classroom logistics by displaying the current phase and the overall state of the game; orchestration cards were to be used to facilitate disciplinary measures like freezing the game, etc.).
In this orchestration matrix example we can also see its usage as we were considering several variants in the design of the classroom ecosystem, and in the orchestration of the scenario (represented by the arrows between different cells). For instance, in the right side of the figure, we can see how we were considering two different ways of aiding the teacher in the regulation/adaptation of the lesson: either by showing prompts at different times on the wall display, or by providing teacher with a ‘cheatsheet’ of prompts and adaptations to be performed at different times during the lesson.
It is worth noting that, in this example, the designer was operating alone, considering especially how the different research questions (e.g., what is the role of augmented paper elements on the orchestration load of the teacher) could be investigated by modifying different elements in the ecosystem. Later on, the different alternatives that emerged while brainstorming with the orchestration matrix were discussed with the teacher, helping shape which ecosystem variations were feasible within her particular classroom.
We have presented here a new way of organizing information about the technology in a classroom ecosystem,
aimed at helping researchers and designers better understand their use in classrooms, from the point of view of
how each of the present pieces of technology affect the orchestration processes. As presented here, the focus is
on classroom orchestration (often performed by the teacher) in run-time. However, this table form could be
extended in the future to cover other orchestration processes (such as the activity preparation beforehand or the
post-hoc evaluation of the learning process). It could also be expanded to include the student view of things
(e.g., how the different technologies affect the learning processes of students), for example using
(1) http://chili.epfl.ch/miocti
This research was supported by a Marie Curie Fellowship within the 7th European Community Framework Programme (MIOCTI, FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IEF project no. 327384).