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By Andrea Gauthier, Mina Vasalou, Yang Yang and Team FoodWiser: Sanya Bajaj, Enying Chen, Xinyue Dong, Thi Huyen Mi Nguyen on 3 October 2024

As the new academic year begins, we reflect on our ‘Digital Design Thinking and Making’ (DDTM) module, which is part of IOE’s Education and Technology MA. The aim of DDTM is to support the critical understanding and application of design to educational technologies, with a focus on environmental sustainability. Taking a research-based design approach rooted in creative design practice, during Spring 2024 the student team ‘FoodWiser’ worked with UCL’s caterer, Gather and Gather, to develop a new digital tool for tackling food waste in the UCL halls of residence cafeteria. Food waste isn’t just an annoying problem of dealing with leftovers: each discarded plate of food means wasted resources and unnecessarily inflated greenhouse gases. (more…)

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By Wayne Holmes on 17 September 2024

This commentary is adapted from Wayne’s contribution to the ESRC Education Research Programme event, More or less technology in the classroom – the value and purposes of technology use in schools. Watch the event recording on UCL Mediacentral.

Technologies have long been designed for use in education. However, the ‘potential’ of this EdTech, especially AI-enabled EdTech, has been frequently overstated and its limitations underexplored. In any case, while EdTech offers ‘solutions’ to a variety of educational problems, not only do they rarely actually ‘solve’ the problems that they target, it isn’t even clear whether they are the ‘right’ problems in the first place. (more…)