Positioning Design Epistemology and its Applications in Education Technology

This position paper proposes to broaden the conception of personal epistemology to include design epistemology that foregrounds the importance of creativity, collaboration, and design thinking. Knowledge creation process, we argue, can be explicated using Popper’s ontology of three worlds of objects. In short, conceptual artifacts (World 3) like theories are products of human minds that result from personal thinking and experience (World 2) and are encrypted through language, signs and symbols on some physical media (World 1). Examined from this perspective, knowledge creation necessitates design thinking, and ICT facilitates this process by providing a historical record of the development of ideas and allows for juxtapositions of ideas to create new ideas. The implication for education is that educators and researchers should develop students’ epistemic repertoires, or ways or knowing, so as to create cognitive artifacts to make sense of the problems and challenges that a student encounters.