Title: The Digital Video Inquiry Collaboratory
PI: Roy Pea, Stanford University
Other collaborating institutions: Indiana University; Michigan State University; Northwestern University; SRI International; San Diego State University; UCLA; University of Georgia; University of Michigan; University of Pittsburg; University of Washington; Vanderbilt University
Digital video records afford primary data for documenting, analyzing, and sharing student conceptions and developments, learning discourse interactions, teacher pedagogical strategies, collaborative learning in small groups, and the sociocultural and material contexts that shape the nature and processes of learning. Yet there is extremely little community coordination of the independent struggles, insights, tools, and literature that researchers, teacher educators, and the technical community are developing to make the capture, annotation, and analysis of digital video more ready-to-hand and high quality in nature.
The opportunity exists to lay the groundwork, with a community-oriented website and a face-to-face workshop, for a digital video collaboratory that will bring together online and, through a progressively more inter-coordinated set of face to face meetings and collaborative grants, an extensive and diverse set of partners to make progress on the following issues:
Title: Research Circle: Online Learning and Teaching
PIs: Margaret Riel, SRI International; Britte Cheng, University of California, Berkeley
Other collaborating institutions: Pepperdine University; Harvard University; Simon Fraser University; Metacourse, Inc.; The Concord Consortium; Indiana University
The primary objective of this grant is to test a new model for cross-research project interaction. The model--Research Circles--is based on Learning Circles (www.iearn.org/circles) which have been successfully implemented by many different groups throughout the world as a way to structure project-based learning among K-12 classrooms. As an outcome of our primary goal, our second project goal is to build our collective knowledge about online teaching and learning.
Researchers, like teachers, are "prisoners of time" (National Education Commission on Time and Learning [1994]). While they place a high value on the theories, approaches and ideas of their peers, the informal structures for sharing these are often inadequate for the level of exchange that would be of greatest value. Researchers want to entice others to work around their project or intellectual challenge, to have others read their work, or help them puzzle out their ideas for a grant submission. And yet they are often less eager to respond to similar requests of others, especially if these appear to be only distantly related to their research paradigms or writing topics.
We propose to design a Research Circle with the goal of evaluating this structure for its potential use in a wider application. The Research Circle will group 7-8 "lead" researchers (and some of their research colleagues) around a research theme or problem. For this experiment, we will use online teaching and learning as the problem space of the circle.
Title: Social Activity in Educational Digital Libraries: Community, Tools, and Resources for Learning
PI: Wes Shumar, Drexel University
Other collaborating institutions: Penn State University; Utah State University; Swarthmore College; SRI International
This project will begin to create a profile of how technology supports teachers collaborating around digital library resources. While both digital libraries and online communities promise to impact education, the two have been inadequately linked. The project identifies three types of online sites along a continuum from sites that are primarily resource collections to sites that are primarily collaborative with a blended site of resources and interactions in between. We propose to identify common activity structures occurring in different site types by surveying a number of online community and digital library sites and by collecting data on three example sites: CILTKN (resource collection), TAPPED IN (collaborative), and the Math Forum (blended).
A pre-conference workshop will be held at ICLS in order to elicit activity structures from other sites and hone measures for our three-site study. A catalog of user activity structures will be compiled from the research and posted on the CILT Design Principles database for other researchers to use and build on.