Location: Salon 2
This is a roundtable in the Cyberlearning 2017 Roundtable session.

Cross-Community Interaction for Sustained Knowledge Building

Jianwei Zhang

Fostering cross-community interaction for sustained knowledge building is a new challenge and opportunity for cyber-enabled collaborative learning research. This project tests a multilevel emergence approach to cross-community interaction, which is mediated through boundary-crossing knowledge objects. A design-based study was conducted in a set of Grade 5/6 knowledge building communities. The classrooms studied human body systems with the support of Knowledge Forum over multiple months. As the students conducted focused inquiry and knowledge building discourse within their own community, they reviewed productive threads of ideas and posted syntheses in a cross-community space, as synthetic boundary objects. A set of idea thread syntheses from previous classrooms studying human body systems was also posted in the cross-community space as a resource. Qualitative analyses of classroom videos, online discourse, and interviews provide a rich description of how the students conceived, generated, and interacted around the synthetic boundary objects for knowledge building across communities. Insights gained from these analyses help us to refine the re-design of Idea Thread Mapper to support cross-community interaction as an expanded layer of knowledge building discourse.
Project: Homepage, NSF Award #1441479 – Connecting Idea Threads Across Communities for Sustained Knowledge Building

Cyber research and international collaborations

Eric Hamilton

Around 120 K-12 students and teachers have formed a network of sixteen digital makerspace clubs in the US, Namibia, Kenya, and Finland, with the expectation of club members producing digital media projects (initially videos) around STEM topics in collaboration with each other. Funded primarily by NSF’s Informal Science Education program, the effort includes a sizable research component and a focus on the nature of international and cross-cultural STEM collaboration among precollege students and their teachers.
Project: Homepage, NSF Award #161284 – Research on an International Network for STEM Media Making and Student-led Participatory Teaching

Commercializing Educational Innovations for Dummies (READ: Faculty)

Perry Samson
We nurture and promote our innovations in education for the sake of contributing to the scholarship of cyberlearning. However, all good grants come to an end and the decision needs to be made whether and how to sustain the innovation post-NSF. This round table offers advice on how to vet your sustainability options, which include downsizing but maintaining enough to continue the research, cajoling your IT department to support it longer term as a campus resource, selling the technology to a commercial firm or creating a business entity to grow the innovation further. This round table is designed to invite conversation about the realities of all these options. Included will be a chance to learn about resources that may be helpful, especially if you have a curiosity about commercialization.