Title: Media Rich Annotations for Learning
PI: Reed Stevens, University of Washington
Other collaborating institutions: University of California, Berkeley; University of Missouri, St. Louis; McGill University and TeleLearning NCE; Arizona State University; Carnegie Foundation
The goal of this project is to explore how activities involving the annotation of digital video can support learning. Through a cross-institutional pilot test of concept, two subgroups will explore versions of media rich annotations for learning as a promising new genre of learning technologies.
The preliminary results are promising. Media rich annotations appear to be a significantly new genre of technology-mediated learning activity. We have found that participants could successfully make annotations and that the diversity of these annotated documents is suggestive of how they might serve to support a distributed learning conversation in both informal learning centers and in teacher education. In the science center sub-group, we have learned that the framing activities'what precedes a visitor's initial contact with the interface'is consequential for the kind of annotated video document that they make. Part of what we expect to describe in our final report are some of the subtle contingencies involved in these framings in these types of learning environments. The diversity of the types of annotated documents or video traces is also suggestive for further investigations in allowing participants to link their traces and comment on each other's work. Stevens presented a keynote lecture about the work at the University of Washington in the Annual Program for Educational Transformation Through Technology Spring Forum.
One promising model for our future work is a consortium model led by Stevens. Stevens intends to seek further grant support for the research through the National Science Foundation's Informal Science Program or through ROLE. More than likely some of the other participants would be involved either as co-PIs or consortium members.
Title: Learning Sciences Research Group
PI: Sasha Barab, Indiana University
Other collaborating institutions: University of Washington; University of Michigan; South Carolina University; UCLA; SRI International; Rutgers University; University of Texas, Austin; Vanderbilt University; Boston College; University of California, Berkeley; Concord Consortium; Georgia Tech; Michigan State University
The purpose of the group was to bring together a number of early career individuals (first six years since first position) to form a networked improvement community to create a collective vision. Together we will move forward to bring about change in schools'especially in terms of how technology is used to support learning among diverse learners. It is our goal to collaboratively assemble the people who have the interest, resources, competence, and enthusiasm to identify a vision that communicates the next Zone of Proximal Development for the learning sciences over the next decade. We intend to leverage our collective interest, resources, and enthusiasm so that we can effectively harness the power of technology to advance the state of the learning sciences community and, more importantly, the diverse body of learners that the learning sciences serve.
We came together on two occasions to describe our goals for this group. On the first occasion we met at AERA and talked about the focus of this group and who should be participants. We talked about having a focus on impact, insight, and innovation. We also decided that the goal of our face-to-face would be to continue to strengthen these bonds by defining what we think our mission is as a community, to figure out what our strengths currently are (what we're doing well), and identify methods/strategies for our future work.
From here, we planned a face-to-face meeting at IU and spent two days together. At this retreat, we determined what our needs and concerns are, we took stock of our resources, and discussed an action plan for addressing group concerns. We identified four core concerns that will serve as the focus of this group:
- Developing Our Own Skills (writing, teaching, management, mentoring, research, networking)
- Establishing an Identity in the Field (communicating to multiple audiences, defining and/or establishing social identity, building a network of connections, balancing broad focus vs. focused identity)
- Supporting Career Challenges (family and job, institutional concerns and personal goals, integrating research with teaching and service, balancing research and having impact)
- Building the Learning Sciences Field (defining the field, justifying the field's importance, increasing its impact/usability of our work, positioning our work as credible in academic circles and public opinion, developing theory and method)
Project Web site: http://crlt.indiana.edu/lsrgroup/
Title: Assessing Equity in Online Environments
PI: Rebecca Schlecker, Indiana University
Other collaborating institutions: University of Missouri, Columbia
We began this research with the objective of studying the factors of online collaborative learning tools that afford equity in their use. Our original goal was to develop a set of criteria and a rubric for evaluating these tools, based both in the literature and in our examination and use of a number of extant tools.
What emerged for us as a more useful guide was a set of dualities, tensions, or pairs of characteristics that designers and end-users must negotiate in making evaluative decisions about online tools for collaboration that best fit the contexts in which they work. We have found a good deal of overlap between concerns for supporting collaboration and community. Therefore, the reader will note that many of the dualities we outline are drawn from the literature on teaching and learning communities and communities of practice, in both online and co-present contexts (Calderwood, 2000; Kim, 2000; Grossman, Wineburg, & Woolworth, 2000; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Preece, 2000; Smith & Kollock, 1999; Wenger, 1998; Westheimer, 1998.)
What most often brings people together to collaborate is sharing in a common goal or the desire to accomplish a joint task or learn about a mutually engaging issue. Those shared goals often grow out of shared values and interests, and sometimes grow out of common experiences. In the case of this collaborative project, for example, our collaboration grew out of our shared interest in computer supported collaborative learning, which brought us together to share a common experience in the CILT2000 conference. Shared values and interests in learning communities brought us together in the same workshop where we first conceived this collaborative research. Short-term and long-term task forces, committees, and organizations share the characteristics of collaborative work, from the neighborhood committee to the national organization. Many are increasingly using online tools to facilitate collaboration.
Yet, collaborative groups also must embrace diversity. The values, interests, and goals that bring individuals together may often be 'big tented' and vague enough to allow room for differences. Differing ideas and opinions that arise out of different experiences, interests, and values can help a collaborative group grow and learn. Classroom learning situations are not always mutually conceived and yield many opportunities for student to student and student to teacher differences. Far from always being destructive and divisive, differences in the classroom can lead to cross fertilization of ideas, new curiosities, questions, and enrichment. The degree of difference is a tricky balance where too much difference (such as the speaking of unlike languages) leads to utter break down in communication while too little difference has its own dangers of little stimulation, and reduced opportunities for learning.
The questions we ponder in regard to this tension are: How do online tools for collaboration make room for diverse voices and expression of multiple points of view? How much difference can be encompassed within a single collaborative group? How much similarity can be tolerated?
Results, to date, are the set of dualities we have outlined as critical for making decisions about online collaborative tools. These dualities include:
| Shared interests, values, experiences, goals | Diverse interests, values, experiences, goals |
| Participation | Reification |
| Designed | Emergent |
| Hierarchies of power and authority | Shared responsibility |
| Usability | Sociability |
| Identity | Negotiation |
| Local | Global |
Title: PlaySpace: An Examination of Learning in Multicultural, Digital, Playful Environments
PI: Alvaro Galvis, The Concord Consortium
Other collaborating institutions: SRI International; Center for Children and Technology; RiverDeep Interactive; George Mason University; Computers for Youth
A multidisciplinary group, sharing interest about learning in multicultural, digital, playful environments, did a literature and product review, with the purpose of generating a rubric and recommendations to be used by software designers, parents, and teachers dealing with playful digital learning environments in multicultural settings.
A Web site was created showing the different concepts behind the project as well as resources available for solving the questions posed by the participants in this project. A paper is being prepared giving answers to the focal questions. It will be available at the project's Web site.
The most important result of this process is the articulation of this interdisciplinary group around an idea that is shared by all of the members: playful learning environments are worth using in education, and this cannot be left to the inspirational power of the business people producing educational interactive materials. The synergy that can be derived from the seed project will help generate research and development proposals where the knowledge generated in this group will be applied. The rubric resulting from this effort is a concrete deliverable that will be available to all of the academic community, as well as to the intended audiences: software producers, parents and teachers.
The most immediate consequences of this effort are that new proposals of R&D will emerge from this group, building on the knowledge that has been generated. These new proposals will develop playful digital educational resources that help solve some of the problems of children's education in multicultural settings.
Project Web site: http://playspace.concord.org/