Search

The incorporation of digital learning and teaching tools has been recognized as presenting an opportunity to maximize access, quality, and inclusion, especially when it comes to international education. Unanticipated events, such as the COVID 19 pandemic, can result in profound disruptions to teaching and learning, and the use of these tools can provide mitigation to these disruptions. This paper reports on the design and study of an InVEST global virtual team (GVT) program that incorporates global competency training modules (GCMs) and leverages digitization to engage engineering students across multiple locations deeply in global collaborative work -- a skillset that is critical for 21st-century engineers. Study results showed the GCMs were effective in helping students develop the global competencies necessary for international virtual collaboration. We also highlight challenges and provide recommendations for practice.

Susan Gal and Judith T. Irvine, Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 319 pp. The concept of ideology has gone out of [...]

Climate change is not local; it is global. This means that many environmental issues related to climate change are not geographically limited and hence concern humans in more than one location. There is a growing body of research indicating that today's increased climate change is caused by human activities and our modern lifestyle. Consequently, climate change awareness and attention from the entire world's population needs to be a global priority and we need to work collaboratively to attain a sustainable future. A powerful tool in this process is to develop an understanding of climate change through education. Recognizing this, climate change has been included in many science curricula as a part of science education in schools. However, teaching such a complex and global topic as climate change is not easy. The research in this paper has been driven by this challenge. In this paper, we will present our online science module called Global Climate Exchange, designed with inquiry activities for international peer collaboration to teach climate change. In this study, we engaged 157 students from four countries (Canada, China, Sweden, and Norway) to collaborate in Global Climate Exchange. To explore the opportunities that international peer collaboration in Global Climate Exchange gives, we have analyzed how students develop their explanations about climate change issues over time. Our analysis showed that the students increased the proportion of relevant scientific concepts in relation to the total number of words in their explanations and that they improved the quality of links between concepts over a six-week period. The analysis also revealed that the students explained more perspectives relating to climate change issues over time. The outcomes indicate that international peer collaboration, if successfully supported, can be an effective approach to climate change education.

K-12 classroom settings are not yet incorporating emerging technologies such as ubiquitous computing, augmented reality, nor even touch surfaces, despite the significant impact that such media have made in many other aspects of our lives. Unfortunately, classroom environments have not generally evolved to support students in the new modes of collaboration, idea sharing, and inquiry that characterize many of our research-based innovations. Responding to this challenge, our research was conducted by a multi-disciplinary design team including educational researchers, a high school physics teacher, and technology designers. We embarked on a series of design-based research projects to investigate a smart classroom infrastructure that scaffolds students and teachers in new forms of collaboration and inquiry, including a substantive role for large projected displays and small touch surfaces, as well as a dependency on students' physical location within the room. This paper describes our designs, including: (1) the role of large displays for communicating aggregate and ambient information, (2) the role of real-time communication between students, (3) the application of intelligent software agents to enact real-time pedagogical logic, (4) support for learning across contexts, and (5) orchestration of inquiry roles, materials and environments. These designs are particularly relevant for the Learning Sciences community, as they offer insight into how the orchestrated classroom can support new forms of collaborative, cooperative and collective inquiry. One important outcome of this work is a set of design principles for supporting smart classroom research.

We report on a multi-year design study of a technology environment called Common Knowledge (CK), designed to support learning communities in K-12 classrooms. Students represent their ideas in the form of notes, add their ideas to a collective knowledge base, and use this knowledge base as a resource for their subsequent inquiries. CK supports teachers' orchestration of inquiry in blended learning environments, scaffolding the learning community as it progresses through a complex inquiry script. A community knowledge base is dynamically visualized on the classroom's interactive whiteboard, serving as a persistent visual reference that allows teachers to gauge the progress of the class, identify patterns, gaps or conflicts, and engage the students in extemporaneous or planned discussions of their ideas. We present enactments of two design iterations in which CK was integrated within broader elementary science units where the curriculum was guided by a theoretical framework called Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI). For each version, we analyzed the role of CK in scaffolding student inquiry, with a focus on teachers' facilitation of productive whole-class discussions. Analysis of teachers' orchestration patterns revealed a "3R" orchestration cycle (Reflect--Refocus--Release) that teachers used repeatedly within a single class session, to guide reflective community discussion and refocus students' inquiry. We also identified four distinct teacher discourse orientations, finding that these were invoked in different proportions depending on the orchestrational needs of the inquiry script. Synthesizing our findings, we discuss the role of CK within a classroom activity system for learning communities.