One of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) established by the United Nations is Quality Education, specifically aiming to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all (SDG 4). This goal emphasizes the provision of education that is accessible, fair, and of high quality to individuals regardless of their background or circumstances. Innovative technologies, such as Generative Al, offer new prospects for enhancing both the access to and quality of education. However, they also introduce new challenges that could potentially have negative impacts. This panel aims to provide a platform for sharing international perspectives, with panellists from different countries, and for exchanging ideas, experiences, and practices towards achieving SDG 4. The discussion will focus on three main areas: 1) global challenges in achieving inclusive and equitable quality education; 2) good practices in promoting inclusive and equitable education with digital technology; 3) the impact of innovative technologies, such as Generative Al in promoting access to quality education. The goal of this panel is to promote research in inclusive and equitable education within APSCE by highlighting the significance of digital technology as a catalyst for change and exploring strategies to realize quality education for all.

Integrating data literacy skills into school curricula for a data-literate society extends the span of '21st-century skills' assumed to be essential in school education for over two decades. Due to rapid digital advancements, however, the full scope of these skills remains unclear. This short paper explores data literacy skills in education, placing initial emphasis on discerning facts from data in a digital world increasingly shaped by Al. Dialogue is also highlighted as a critical element that augments digital literacy in challenging reliance on search technologies. Critical thinking, decision literacy, and data literacy are identified as all mutually informing.

Despite extensive global efforts to make education accessible for all, one out of every five children are out-of-school. The situation demands re-thinking of learning strategies particularly in underprivileged contexts. Continued advancements in learning technologies may offer novel solutions and this paper reports on a study that explores such opportunities. Opportunities to think laterally also reveal that the centuries old one-room schoolhouse is a proven educational system that has yielded promising results for rural areas all around the world. Using a contemporary multi-grade teaching method, the one-room schoolhouse provides a resilient model educating children at locations, which lack quality teachers and resources. This paper reports a case study of an integrated approach to teach out-of-school children in rural Pakistan using education technology in a one-room schoolhouse. A synthesis of knowledge and practices associated with one-room schoolhouses is presented together with an analysis of education technology developments that look promising. A digital transformation roadmap to implement and scale this method to educate out-of-school children in other underprivileged communities is summarised.

This paper outlines ethical issues surrounding a Design-based Research (DBR) project to explore the value of questions in digital environments. The context dictates a broad yet defined approach which is not confined to a single entity. Striking a balance between scope and focus has been problematic as the variables are too complex to justify a scientific analytical methodology. We discuss implications for the selection of our research question as well as consequences for our implementation strategies. The humanist foundation underpinning DBR provides inclusiveness together with the required rigor. The ethical dilemmas outlined provide a critique for determining the authenticity of our project.

We outline an emerging research agenda that brings together three distinct topics relevant to the changing requirements of school education: STEM education, inquiry learning, and data literacy. When examining current curriculum materials in Australia we find that data in the digital environment is primarily seen as something to be examined in terms of its representations, interpretations, and visualisation – all activities that can be understood as downstream from data production. We argue that in the same way that inquiry learning involves a shift from the teacher to the student as the pivotal questioner, that a comprehensive and systemic approach to understanding data in the digital environment must involve appreciation for its production as well as consumption. Teaching STEM as an integrated and interdisciplinary way to decomposing real-world problems, not just the STEM subjects, requires a systemic approach running through and across the curriculum. It also now demands data literacy.

Whether it is the alphabet, a song, or knowledge of touchscreen navigation, young children now routinely learn many things while playing with iPads and similar devices. Despite this child-friendly technology clearly stimulating engagement there also exist significant debates about this topic among early childhood education professionals. This paper reports on a small research project that investigates: a) whether touch screen digital devices can provide young children with practical and educational information; b) whether these children can transfer their learning through individual play with such devices; c) what factors need to be considered that could improve the learning outcomes of young children; and, d) how young children manifest their learning outcomes. Through an observational case-study that involved young (2-year old) children we observed the transfer of learning from 2D sources to 3D objects and the ability of these children in drawing 2D images from understanding 3D objects. Although a video deficit effect showed young children displaying poorer ability in transferring learning from 2D sources to 3D objects relative to their ability to do likewise from a live demonstration, these children were effective at transferring their learning from 2D sources to 3D objects. However, it was also found that to be effective requires multiple presentations, experience and assistance of language cues to scaffold their understanding. These findings suggest that parents and teachers could further examine the value of using 2D sources, such as television, videos, computers and touch screens in this way.

Discrimination can be said to take place during early childhood when the difference between safety and danger are detected even though notions of real and imaginary may still be blurred. Importantly, the versatility of this construct reaches further into lifelong learning and is used in this paper as a means of distilling a range of competencies that are invoked by terms such as information literacy, digital literacy, media literacy, e-literacy, ethical responsibility, global citizenship, and the ‘getting of wisdom’. Following a meta-analysis of the various ways in which 21st century skills are elucidated we propose a conceptual re-alignment of the foundation skills of education to include being discriminate (discerning) alongside being literate and numerate. Motivation for doing so arises from two sources: (1) a perceived privileging of literacy and numeracy – particularly in the context of high-stakes testing; and, (2) the converse of this situation in which literacy and numeracy appear to have a diminished presence within the ‘21st century skills’ agenda. A gap between these agendas becomes more prominent when considering that our interactions with the world are increasingly configured by increasing production and consumption of data from an increasing diversity of sources.

This conceptual paper problematizes a distinction between meaning-making and sense-making as activities that support learning. In framing this distinction, various theoretical perspectives on sense-making are introduced from a range of disciplines that have direct implication for the ongoing development of the digital environment designed specifically to support learning. The digital environment is replete with choices that enable communication, information-seeking, knowledge sharing, computation, and learning – all made possible by a diversity of technologies. Semantics have a significant computational role in this environment and making sense of it, amidst constantly emerging capabilities, represents opportunities for innovation as well as challenges for digital learning. While meaning-making has a pivotal role in knowledge construction in this environment it is argued that sense-making often precedes it, thereby indicating a specific role for sense-making technologies.

In this paper we report on an exploration of how to apply the theory of Slow Design to mass produced products to establish more mindful usage of products; the intention behind this is to promote product attachment and the associated sustainable benefits of long term use. Slow Design is a design philosophy that focuses on promoting well-being for individuals, society, and the natural environment. It encourages people to do things at the right time and at the right speed which helps them to understand and reflect on their actions. Several authors have proposed Slow Design principles and cases have been reported in which these principles were applied in cultural design projects. These applications indicated that Slow Design can indeed have a positive impact on wellbeing. Although promising, this philosophy has not yet been used in the design of mass consumer products. In this paper we present a design case study in which we explored how the Slow Design principles can be applied in the design of an electric fruit juicer. Two studies are reported on where the conditions for implementing Slow Design are explored. The results led to a revision of the principles for use by product designers. The main finding from the case study is that the Slow Design principles can be used to create more 'mindful' interactions that stimulate positive user involvement. This is not from designing interactions that require more time per se, but by stimulating the user to use more time for those parts of the interaction that are meaningful and less for those that are not meaningful.

LED-based lighting systems have introduced radically new possibilities in the area of artificial lighting. Being physically small the LED can be positioned or embedded into luminaires, materials and even the very fabric of a building or environment. Hundreds of LEDs can be used in a single luminaire or space, of which each could have different light output properties. The light switch therefore in many situations will need to be enhanced or fully replaced by intelligent controls and smart environments that are sensitive to the context and responsive to the people in the environment. The focus of this workshop is to explore new ways of interacting with light where lighting is no longer simply an on or off system, but a flexible system capable of creating a large range of functional, decorative and ambient light effects.

To execute good design one not only needs to know what to do and how to do it, but also why it should be done. For a standardization expert the rationale of a standardization project may be found in the proposal for a new work item or terms of reference, but rarely in the scope statement. However, it is also commonplace that the rationale of the project is not clearly stated in any of these parts. If the rationale is not surfaced in the early phases of a project, it is left to the design, sense-making and negotiation cycles of the design process to orient the project towards a goal. This paper explores how scope statements are used to position standardization projects in the IT for Learning, Education and Training (ITLET) domain, and how scope and rationale are understood in recent projects in European and international standardization. Based on two case-studies the paper suggests some actions for further research and improvement of the process.

This paper brings together two perspectives on current developments in information and communications technology (ICT) utilized for the purposes of learning, education, and training (LET). One perspective is concerned with governance and legitimacy issues regarding the process and relevance of standards development; the other, is concerned with the role of discerning relevant questions in LET and the potential scope for innovation that might develop tools to support such discernment. Discussion of information systems architecture is introduced as a means to set the context and provide a framework for bringing together an overall narrative and coherence to these two perspectives. Questions initiated by „why‟ are of particular interest because they typically demand an explanation in natural language to satisfy the questioner. By focusing on „why‟ as a key „primitive‟ of enquiry the authors present an approach that might inform improved processes of ICT for LET (a.k.a ITLET) standardization.