Building Educational Technology Partnerships Through Participatory Design

Abstract

Over more than five years, we worked with a group of public school teachers to define, develop, and assess network-based support for collaborative learning in middle school physical science and high school physics. From the outset, we committed to a participatory design approach, in part to explore what issues and possibilities arise when participatory design is pursued more extensively. The nature of our interactions, and in particular the nature of the roles played by the teachers, did change significantly through the course of the project. We suggest that there may be a long-term developmental unfolding of roles and relationships in participatory design.