The sixth annual ISDDE conference was attended by 48 delegates representing a wide range of educational design expertise from the UK, USA, The Netherlands, Germany, Australia, France, Norway and Israel.

Further details and reports will appear on this site shortly.

Conference Themes

The particular theme of this conference will be on the ways in which people experience and use products and processes designed by others, and the ways in which designers can anticipate and learn from these experiences and put them to use in building and refining designs.

The designs may be intended for policymakers, examiners, teachers or students – the foci of the working groups in which much of the work of the conference will be done. As in previous conferences, each day will begin with a plenary lecture and end with a demonstration session. A distinctive feature this time will be “Experience” sessions where participants in each working group will be led to experience a design as “users”, going on to reflect on the implications for design of that experience. We hope that the conference will thus both be informative and experiential.

Plenary Lectures

• Designing and experiencing a science curriculum: Angela Hall and/or Robin Millar
• Designing and experiencing tasks for mathematical thinking: John Mason and Anne Watson
• Designing and experiencing educational policy: Phil Daro

Experiences (E sessions)

Four parallel experience sessions are envisaged, with design foci on: Classrooms; Teacher development; Examinations; Policy-making. These will be ‘hands-on’ sessions, for everyone to take part in. An invited designer will present a task for the group to work on. There will be a classroom or assessment task to do, a framework to implement, or a teacher development activity to engage in. This will be followed by a discussion of the varied experiences of the participants and these will be compared with the designer’s original intentions and principles. By studying specific designs in depth, we aim to ground the working group discussions and begin to draw out more general issues.

Working group sessions (W sessions)

Four parallel working groups are envisaged, using the same design foci as the experience sessions. These will build on the work done at previous ISDDE conferences. The purpose of each working group will be to discuss and assemble a presentation on:

• How do we learn from experience?
• What data is gathered and how is it used?
• What have we learned from experience?
• What have we learned from particular failures and successes?

In the working group sessions the emphasis will be on sharing of knowledge and experience, and on reflective discussion, not on formal presentations.  Papers will be circulated in advance using the conference website, and discussed in the sessions. Participants are encouraged to bring examples of designs for others to discuss.

Demonstrations (D sessions)

These will be opportunities for participants to present a ‘show and tell’ of their current design work. A short period of questions will follow each demonstration.

Full Programme

The full programme is available here.