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BackgroundAlthough smartphone-based emergency care training is more affordable than traditional avenues of training, it is still in its infancy, remains poorly implemented, and its current implementation modes tend to be invariant to the evolving learning needs of the intended users. In resource-limited settings, the use of such platforms coupled with gamified approaches remains largely unexplored, despite the lack of traditional training opportunities, and high mortality rates in these settings. ObjectiveThe primary aim of this randomized experiment is to determine the effectiveness of offering adaptive versus standard feedback, on the learning gains of clinicians, through the use of a smartphone-based game that assessed their management of a simulated medical emergency. A secondary aim is to examine the effects of learner characteristics and learning spacing with repeated use of the game on the secondary outcome of individualized normalized learning gain. MethodsThe experiment is aimed at clinicians who provide bedside neonatal care in low-income settings. Data were captured through an Android app installed on the study participants’ personal phones. The intervention, which was based on successful attempts at a learning task, included adaptive feedback provided within the app to the experimental arm, whereas the control arm received standardized feedback. The primary end point was completion of the second learning session. Of the 572 participants enrolled between February 2019 and July 2019, 247 (43.2%) reached the primary end point. The primary outcome was standardized relative change in learning gains between the study arms as measured by the Morris G effect size. The secondary outcomes were the participants individualized normalized learning gains. ResultsThe effect of adaptive feedback on care providers’ learning gain was found to be g=0.09 (95% CI −0.31 to 0.46; P=.47). In exploratory analysis, using normalized learning gains, when subject-treatment interaction and differential time effect was controlled for, this effect increased significantly to 0.644 (95% CI 0.35 to 0.94; P

Background: As a non-cognitive trait, grit plays an important role in human learning. Although students higher in grit are more likely to perform well on tests, how they learn in the process has been underexamined. Objectives: This study attempted to explore how students with different levels of grit behave and learn in an exploratory learning environment. Methods: In this study, 66 students participated in seven exploratory tasks in Snap! for approximately 60 min after a 30-min lecture. Students were categorized into a high grit group and low grit group using a grit scale. The Mann-Whitney U test, epistemic network analysis and lag sequential analysis were used to explore the differences between groups in learning performance, technology acceptance and behavioural patterns. Results: Students with different levels of grit engaged in explorative tasks in a short period of time might not present significantly different learning performance, perceptions of usefulness and ease of use, but students higher in grit, actively engaging more different types of activities, tended to put greater sustained effort to solve the challenging task. Take Away: Although grit was not significantly correlated with learning performance when students engage in classroom-based explorative activities, grit did predict whether students are more likely to explore and put greater sustained effort into solving the challenging task.

Constructionism, long before it had a name, was intimately tied to the field of Artificial Intelligence. Soon after the birth of Logo at BBN, Seymour Papert set up the Logo Group as part of the MIT AI Lab. Logo was based upon Lisp, the first prominent AI programming language. Many early Logo activities involved natural language processing, robotics, artificial game players, and generating poetry, art, and music. In the 1970s researchers explored enhancements to Logo to support AI programming by children. In the 1980s the Prolog community, inspired by Logo's successes, began exploring how to adapt logic programming for use by school children. While there have been over 40 years of active AI research in creating intelligent tutoring systems, there was little AI-flavoured constructionism after the 1980s until about 2017 when suddenly a great deal of activity started. Amongst those activities were attempts to enhance Scratch, Snap!, and MIT App Inventor with new blocks for speech synthesis, speech recognition, image recognition, and the use of pre-trained deep learning models. The Snap! enhancements also include support for word embeddings, as well as blocks to enable learners to create, train, and use deep neural networks. Student and teacher project-oriented resources highlighting these new AI programming components appeared at the same time. In this paper, we review this history, providing a unique perspective on AI developments--both social and technical--from a constructionist perspective. Reflecting on these, we close with speculations about possible futures for AI and constructionism.

This paper introduces the concept of digital structural violence and examines the negative role it could have in future learning systems. To address it, we propose a new interdisciplinary research agenda at the intersection of three current but disparate lines of work that: (1) Use the concept of epistemic privilege to theorise the inclusion of marginalised learners in the design of learning systems, and utilise participatory action research and emancipatory methodologies to pragmatically ensure this happens; (2) Support young learners and teachers to understand and build their own artificial intelligence algorithms; and (3) Develop sustainable interdisciplinary links with computer science to address digital structural violence at the algorithmic level and to make its societal implications and underlying processes more widely understood, especially by teachers. Taken together, these provide for a material form of resistance to digital structural violence and a theoretically and methodologically coherent future research agenda for building just learning systems.

This article presents a cross-national exploration of responses to widening participation (WP), with a specific focus on the provision of foundation year (FY) programmes and the use of contextualised admissions (CA) in "selective" Irish and UK institutions. There remains a dearth of research on these routes, with little understanding of the characteristics of students who utilise them, of why students use these routes and little knowledge of their effect on students' experiences in university and their overall sense of belonging. A year-long longitudinal comparative case study design examined three alternative entry routes in two selective higher education institutions (HEIs) in England and Ireland: a well-established FY; a newly formed FY; and a CA pathway. Data were collected through a mixed-method approach. Questionnaires and in-depth focus groups were employed at fixed points with participating students in each route. Results indicated that FY students had lower levels of familial educational history and parental occupation. FY students' sense of belonging significantly increased over the year, with students reporting increased confidence and sense of belonging due to the relationships established during the FY. CA students' sense of belonging remained the same, with students reporting feeling different and isolated. Results indicate that while students utilising FYs may be 'more disadvantaged' than CA students, their experiences helped establish a sense of belonging; illustrating the need for diverse WP routes catering to a wide range of needs. Results highlight the importance of providing opportunities to develop social and bridging social capital for all non-traditional students.

This theoretical paper argues that Feminist Science and Technology Studies (FSTS) can help advance the emancipatory project in critical Ed Tech research. To support this claim, we deploy Tsing's concept of 'scale-making projects' (2005. "Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection." Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) to connect 'global' narratives to 'local' users in a mobile learning project for Kenyan health workers. Drawing from this exemplar case, we discuss more broadly how FSTS provides useful theory and methods for tracing the trans-national power relations of digital technologies 'on the ground'. The paper concludes by advocating for new forms of emancipatory Ed Tech research -- ones framed not only within oppositional pairings such as 'global' versus 'local', but which elucidate how binaries themselves are constituted through far-flung trans-national arrays of sociomaterial practice.

Although mobile learning is a popular topic in current research, it is not well conceptualized. Many researchers rely on under-theorized conceptions of the topic, and those who have tried to refine the ideas involved have found this to be complex and difficult. In this paper a new interpretation of the concept "mobile learning" is offered, drawing on the tradition of activity theory. The interpretation focuses on the continuity of learning activities that take place in multiple contexts, which are embodied as the combination of the physical and social setting of the learning activities. The paper starts by sketching the current research context and then outlines the theoretical tradition within which the interpretation of "mobile learning" is located. Then the new interpretation is offered and the concepts are applied to case studies to illustrate how this new understanding develops current thinking in the area. The paper concludes by discussing the implications for research of adopting such a perspective. (Contains 3 figures and 3 tables.)

Technologically enhanced learning environments raise complex challenges for their designers, developers and users. Design patterns and pattern languages have recently emerged as a potential framework for addressing some of these challenges. However, the uptake of design patterns has been slow outside of the computer science community. We argue that this is largely a consequence of a weak positioning of pattern languages, as a form of delivering expert knowledge to layperson, and suggest an alternative view: the development of a pattern language as a community endeavour. In terms of open education, the workshop model can be viewed as an open production process for developing educational resources, in our case design patterns. We propose a model of pattern elicitation workshops, in which collaborative development of a pattern language provides a framework for sharing design knowledge within interdisciplinary communities. This model was iteratively developed at five international conferences. It was then postulated as a design pattern itself, encompassing a series of practices and a set of supporting tools. We believe this model could be applied in a broad range of communities concerned with the development of open digital educational resources. (Contains 2 figures and 2 footnotes.)

Mobile learning has seen a large uptake in use in low- and middle-income countries. This is driven by rhetorics of easy scaling, reaching the hard-to-reach and the potential for generating analytics from the applications used by learners. Healthcare training has seen a proliferation of apps aimed at improving accountability through tracking and measuring workplace learning. A view of the mobile phone as an agent of change is thus linked with a technocentric approach to measurement. Metrics, initially created as proxies for what gets done by health workers, are now shaping the practices they were intended to describe. In this paper, we show how, despite some valiant efforts, "measuring better" remains difficult to achieve due to entrenched views of what measurement consists of. We analyse a mobile health (mHealth) classification framework, drawing out some implications of how it has been used in training health workers. These lead us to recommend moving away from a view of mobile learning linked tightly to accountability and numbers. We suggest a focus on an alternative future, where "measuring better" is promoted as part of socio-cultural views of learning and linked with a social justice conceptualisation of development.

Background: As a non‐cognitive trait, grit plays an important role in human learning. Although students higher in grit are more likely to perform well on tests, how they learn in the process has been underexamined. Objectives: This study attempted to explore how students with different levels of grit behave and learn in an exploratory learning environment. Methods: In this study, 66 students participated in seven exploratory tasks in Snap! for approximately 60 min after a 30‐min lecture. Students were categorized into a high grit group and low grit group using a grit scale. The Mann–Whitney U test, epistemic network analysis and lag sequential analysis were used to explore the differences between groups in learning performance, technology acceptance and behavioural patterns. Results: Students with different levels of grit engaged in explorative tasks in a short period of time might not present significantly different learning performance, perceptions of usefulness and ease of use, but students higher in grit, actively engaging more different types of activities, tended to put greater sustained effort to solve the challenging task. Take Away: Although grit was not significantly correlated with learning performance when students engage in classroom‐based explorative activities, grit did predict whether students are more likely to explore and put greater sustained effort into solving the challenging task. Lay Description: Students higher in grit are likely to be actively engaging more different types of activities.Students higher in grit tend to put greater sustained effort to solve the challenging task.Grit was not significantly correlated with learning performance in classroom‐based explorative activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to promote pedagogically informed use of technology, educators need to develop an active, inquisitive, design-oriented mindset. Design Patterns have been demonstrated as powerful mediators of theory-praxis conversations yet widespread adoption by the practitioner community remains a challenge. Over several years, the authors and their colleagues have facilitated many workshops in which participants shared experiences, captured these as design narratives, extracting design patterns, and applied them to novel teaching challenges represented as design scenarios. This paper presents the core elements of the methodology that emerged from these workshops: the Participatory Patterns Workshops (PPW) methodology. (Contains 1 figure and 2 notes.) [This paper was published in the ALT-C 2012 Conference Proceedings.]

One of the important themes that emerged from the CAL'07 conference was the failure of technology to bring about the expected disruptive effect to learning and teaching. We identify one of the causes as an inherent weakness in prevalent development methodologies. While the problem of designing technology for learning is irreducibly multi-dimensional, design processes often lack true interdisciplinarity. To address this problem we present IDR, a participatory methodology for interdisciplinary techno-pedagogical design, drawing on the design patterns tradition [Alexander, C., Silverstein, M., & Ishikawa, S. (1977). "A pattern language: Towns, buildings, construction (Center for environmental structure series)." New York, NY: Oxford University Press] and the design research paradigm [DiSessa, A. A., & Cobb, P. (2004) Ontological innovation and the role of theory in design experiments. "Journal of the Learning Sciences, 13"(1), 77-103]. We discuss the iterative development and use of our methodology by a pan-European project team of educational researchers, software developers and teachers. We reflect on our experiences of the participatory nature of pattern design and discuss how, as a distributed team, we developed a set of over 120 design patterns, created using our freely available open source web toolkit. Furthermore, we detail how our methodology is applicable to the wider community through a workshop model, which has been run and iteratively refined at five major international conferences, involving over 200 participants.