Search

Producción Científica The physical face-to-face classroom still represents the core educational setting in which everyday CSCL practice takes place. However, current classrooms are not limited anymore to books, blackboards and other physical artifacts: laptops, tablets, digital whiteboards, wikis, shared applications and simulations have also become part of this learning landscape. These last ones add new layers of complexity to the everyday educational practices and the dynamics of the classroom. CSCL researchers have traditionally proposed standalone systems or innovations, focusing their evaluation on the effects and management of a single system/intervention. However, everyday classroom activities involve multiple subject matters, different pedagogical approaches as well as a variety of technologies. The assumption that our innovation is alone no longer holds. The multiplicity and heterogeneity of resources (digital and legacy) pose a unique set of opportunities and challenges for the CSCL research community, which are bound to become stronger as time goes by. This collaborative workshop brought together technology designers, researchers and practitioners, in an attempt to match CSCL technologies to the pedagogical needs and contextual constraints of practitioners, identify a set of guidelines to design and connect existing CSCL systems with each other and with legacy classroom resources, and help teachers and students to make sense of these heterogeneous learning ecologies. Junta de Castilla y León (programa de apoyo a proyectos de investigación - Ref. VA277U14)

Learners’ physical performances can serve as focal objects for reflection and insight across a variety of contexts and content areas. This session brings together a set of projects that leverage the physical performances of learners, construct concrete and abstract representations of those performances, and investigate how learners reflect on and understand the relationships between their performances and target content—physics, health and fitness, data literacy and navigation, animal foraging, and climate change. The session will share findings and design principles from each of the studies around constructing technological scaffolds for physical performance reflections. The symposium highlights the various ways performance can be used to engage learners, and how different settings and learning goals affect the designs of performance representations.

Producción Científica, The physical face-to-face classroom still represents the core educational setting in which everyday CSCL practice takes place. However, current classrooms are not limited anymore to books, blackboards and other physical artifacts: laptops, tablets, digital whiteboards, wikis, shared applications and simulations have also become part of this learning landscape. These last ones add new layers of complexity to the everyday educational practices and the dynamics of the classroom. CSCL researchers have traditionally proposed standalone systems or innovations, focusing their evaluation on the effects and management of a single system/intervention. However, everyday classroom activities involve multiple subject matters, different pedagogical approaches as well as a variety of technologies. The assumption that our innovation is alone no longer holds. The multiplicity and heterogeneity of resources (digital and legacy) pose a unique set of opportunities and challenges for the CSCL research community, which are bound to become stronger as time goes by. This collaborative workshop brought together technology designers, researchers and practitioners, in an attempt to match CSCL technologies to the pedagogical needs and contextual constraints of practitioners, identify a set of guidelines to design and connect existing CSCL systems with each other and with legacy classroom resources, and help teachers and students to make sense of these heterogeneous learning ecologies., Junta de Castilla y León (programa de apoyo a proyectos de investigación - Ref. VA277U14)

MOOCs have traditionally been seen as providing an individual learning experience, however there is an increasing trend towards enabling social learning in MOOCs. To make online learning at scale more social and collaborative, some MOOCs have introduced cohorts. The interaction between a smaller number of learners, within a cohort, facilitates a richer exchange of experiences and ideas as compared to the effect of “drinking from the fire hose” felt in MOOCs without cohorts. Traditionally, these cohorts have been formed randomly. In this paper, we examine the MOOC “Inquiry and Technology for Teachers”, where we formed cohorts based on student demographics relevant to our course design. Furthermore, these cohorts (which we called Special Interest Groups, SIGs) contained a nested social structure of small teams that worked together on co-creating a final artifact. The different social planes (whole course, SIGs, teams, and individuals) were linked together by pedagogical scripts that orchestrated the movement of ideas and artifacts vertically and horizontally. In this contribution, we analyzed the interaction between these social planes to contextualize the co-creation of artefacts.

This dissertation investigates the design of large online courses from the pedagogical perspective of knowledge communities. Much of the learning sciences literature has concerned itself with groups of up to 20-30 students, but in universities, courses of several hundred to more than a thousand students are common. At the same time, new models for life-long and informal learning, such as Massive Open Online Courses, are emerging. Amidst this growing enthusiasm for innovation around technology and design in teaching, there is a need for theoretically grounded innovations and rigorous research around practical models that support new approaches to learning. One recent model, known as Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI), engages students in the co-construction of a community knowledge base, with a commonly held understanding of the collective nature of their learning, and then provides a sequence of scaffolded inquiry activities where students make use of the knowledge base as a resource. Inspired by this approach to designing courses, the research began with a redesign of an in-service teacher education course, which increased in size from 25 to 75 students. This redesign was carefully analyzed, and design principles extracted. The second step was the design of a Massive Open Online Course for several thousand in-service teachers on technology and inquiry, in collaboration with an affiliated secondary school. A number of innovative design ideas were necessary to accommodate the large number of users, the much larger diversity in terms of background, interest, and engagement among MOOC learners, and the opportunities provided by the platform. The resulting design encompasses a 6- week long curriculum script, and a number of overlapping micro-scripts supported by a custom- written platform that integrated with the EdX platform in a seamless manner. This thesis presents the course structure, including connection to disciplinary principles, its affordances for community and collaboration and its support of individual differentiated learning and collective epistemology. It offers design principles for scripting and orchestrating collective inquiry designs for MOOCS and higher education courses.