This chapter focuses on the interaction and development of two strands of 21st century learning and teaching: group-situated design and the use of highly interactive classroom
networks. Relative to design, perhaps the most overt and yet often underutilized feature of any classroom is that it is a group of people. Participants come together, typically in a physically contiguous space, where the potential exists for the teaching that takes place to be much more than a parallel delivery system–that is, much more than the simple sum of its parts. Moving beyond treating the group just as a physically proximate collection of individuals or as an undifferentiated monolith, we ask how do we better design for group-situated learning and teaching interactions? We also ask how can a new generation of much more highly interactive classroom networks explicitly enable and extend aspects of group-situated design? These new network systems are capable of supporting the exchange of complex artifacts as well as new
forms of highly participatory inter-activity. It is our belief that these systems stand ready to play a significant mediating role in advancing a more fully socially-situated approach to learning and teaching.
The goal of this chapter is to articulate, and begin to make practical, a more fully participatory approach to learning and teaching using the capabilities of these next-generation classroom networks and what we call generative design. In addressing this goal, we introduce and outline the what, why, and how of a diversity by design approach to formal education where diversity is addressed in terms of ideas and ways of participating, including variety in native languages, in communication practices, and in interaction patterns.