CIRCL News
Our community shines as we celebrate many recent notable achievements:
- Congratulations to our cyberlearning colleague Paulo Blikstein for receiving the Jan Hawkins Award last year. Join us for Paulo’s address at AERA on Sun, April 30, 2:15 to 3:45pm, Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, Meeting Room Level, Room 217 D.
- A warm welcome to CIRCL advisor Stephanie Teasley, incoming President of the SoLAR (learning analytics) society
- If we had a cyberlearning “grit” award, it would go to Bill Finzer (perspective below) for tireless efforts to bring a Data Science Education strand to life, beginning in early cyberlearning meetings and recently brought to fruition in a first conference on Data Science Education Technology.
- We’re also pleased to learn of the selection of Dr. Na’ilah Suad Nasir to be the next president of the Spencer Foundation in Chicago.
Cyberlearning also shines in the insights, innovations, and inspirations emerging from so many projects, which we look forward to hearing about at our upcoming Cyberlearning ‘17 conference (story below, including important opportunities for remote participation) and the STEM for All Video Showcase. Congrats also to the new cyberlearning awards (list below), who are lighting the way forward.
Got some news worth highlighting of your own? Drop us a line.
Cyberlearning 2017: Program Update, Webcast & Twitter
A detailed program for Cyberlearning 2017: What’s Next? Making Connections to Shape the Future on April 18-19 in Arlington, Virginia is now available. The event features 4 keynotes, 17 roundtables, 12 expertise exchanges, working sessions, a shark tank, a gallery walk with more than 40 demos and posters, and an optional visit to state legislators.
Please invite your colleagues and students to register for the webcast and join the online conversation using the twitter hashtag #NSFCL17. We especially recommend checking out the four keynotes via webcast: by Jeremy Bailenson on virtual reality interaction, Eileen Scanlon on citizen science and a perspective from UK, Mary Helen Immordino Yang on neuroscience, learning, and affect, and Karthik Ramani on frontiers in HCI and learning. For updated information, follow CIRCL on Twitter and Facebook, and check the Cyberlearning 2017 page.
STEM for All Video Showcase: Join us Online May 15-22
On May 15-22, more than 150 projects will showcase three-minute videos of their innovative work broadening participation and access to STEM in the 2017 STEM for All Video Showcase. This year’s theme is Research & Design for Impact. Researchers, practitioners, administrators, policy makers and the general public are invited to view the videos and to interact with each of the presenters online. We hope you can participate!
The 2017 Showcase follows on the success of the 2016 NSF Video Showcase: Advancing STEM All and the 2015 Teaching and Learning Video Showcase. The 2015 and 2016 showcases together attracted about 50,000 participants and received accolades from NSF program officers. Your participation will make the 2017 event equally successful in sharing of work across NSF programs and with the public at large, and also in promoting reflective collegial discourse.
Featured Perspective: Meet Bill Finzer
Bill Finzer is a Senior Scientist at the Concord Consortium, and helped organize the 2017 Data Science Education Technology Conference that featured the Concord Consortium’s Common Online Data Analysis Platform (CODAP) project.
How does your work on data and data science relate to cyberlearning?
Working with data is a technologically mediated process. Data are ubiquitous in the workplace and research labs and need to become ubiquitous in classrooms as well. Data science is a partial union of math and statistics, computational thinking, and subject matter expertise. We have entered an age when a great deal of the learning that we do is mediated by those three things. When using technology, the learning students do generates data, whether it is online through logged data, or through use of sensors in the learning environment. How can we harness and use these data? Learning theories help us understand the data generated by learners. It’s not useful to know students click this button twice as much as they clicked that button; we need to understand what type of learning the pattern of button clicks represents. We can use data generated by students in real classrooms to validate our learning theories and to generate feedback to improve curriculum materials. Read more of Bill’s Perspective.
Funding Opportunities
NSF DCL: Request for Information on Future Needs for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure to Support Science and Engineering Research invites contributions from the whole science, engineering, education, and CI research community to inform a planning effort to refresh the Foundation’s cyberinfrastructure vision and strategy. Contributions due April 5.
NSF DCL: Public Participation in STEM Research invites proposals encompassing citizen science, citizen sensing, crowdsourcing, community science, and related approaches. Proposals due April 11.
The Spencer Foundation invites proposals from scholars for small research conferences and focused symposia related to measuring educational quality and improvement. Grants will be up to $50,000 for each conference. The deadline for proposals is 4:00 pm CDT, May 18.
NSF Science of Learning (SL) invites proposals that advance program goals to develop basic theoretical insights and fundamental knowledge about learning principles, processes and constraints. Proposals due July 12.
NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program invites proposals for faculty members beginning their independent careers. Proposals should describe an integrated path that will lead to a successful career as an outstanding researcher and educator. Proposals due July 19.
NSF Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) invites proposals that advance program goals to enhance the quality of undergraduate STEM education and research at HBCUs as a means to broaden participation in the nation’s STEM workforce. Letters of Intent due July 25.
Calls for Papers and Participation
Call for Participation: Synthesizing CSCL Perspectives on the Theory, Methods, Design, and Implementation of Future Learning Spaces is a pre-conference workshop on Sunday, June 18 at the upcoming CSCL conference in Philadelphia. Researchers and practitioners who are actively researching, are interested in researching, or want to learn more about innovations in the theory and design of Future Learning Spaces, are invited to apply to attend by March 31.
HICSS 2018, held January 3-6 in Hawaii, invites submission of full research papers in various areas of information, computer, and system sciences. See the conference site for a list of tracks, minitracks, author instructions and opportunities to fast track HICSS papers to journal publications. Submissions accepted April 1-June 15.
Call for Papers: The European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL), held at Tallinn University in Estonia on September 12-15, invites Full Papers, Short Papers, Posters & Demonstrations (abstracts due April 3; full versions due April 10) and Workshop proposals (due April 10). See the call for papers.
Call for Journal Papers: Special Issue on Multimodal Data for Learning. This special issue of the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning (JCAL) is focused on the implications of the data collected through the rise of the Internet of Things and maker movement. Submission deadline: May 8.
Job Opportunities
NSF seeks an Office Head for NSF’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure. (Note: While government agencies are currently in a hiring freeze, recruitment continues in an effort to ensure NSF is best positioned to resume hiring after the hiring freeze expires.)
The Department of Curriculum & Instruction at UW–Madison invites applications for a Game Design Faculty Associate. The faculty associate will teach about games and game design, and work with the program director to support undergraduate students seeking a Game Design Certificate to design, develop, and think critically about games, learning, and social/societal context.
New Cyberlearning Awards
A sample of new projects with a cyberlearning theme funded by the NSF Cyberlearning program and programs across NSF.
Recent NSF Cyberlearning awards:
- CAREER: Improving Adaptive Decision Making in Interactive Learning Environments, funded by CFLT & Robust Intelligence. PI: Min Chi, North Carolina State University.
- CAREER: Intelligent Representations: How to Blend Physical and Virtual Representations by Adapting to the Individual Student’s Needs in Real Time, funded by CFLT. PI: Martina Rau, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
- EXP: Agile Research Studios: Scaling Cognitive Apprenticeship to Advance Undergraduate and Graduate Research Training in STEM, funded by Science of Learning & CFLT. PI: Haoqi Zhang, Northwestern University, Co-PIs: Elizabeth Gerber, Matthew Easterday.
- EXP: Assessing ‘Complex Epistemic Performance’ in Online Learning Environments, funded by S-STEM & CFLT. PI: William Cope, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Co-PIs: ChengXiang Zhai, Duncan Ferguson, Willem Els.
- EXP: Exploratory Study on the Adaptive Online Course and its Implication on Synergetic Competency, funded by S-STEM & CFLT. PI: Noboru Matsuda, Texas A&M University, Co-PIs: Norman Bier, Larry Johnson.
- EXP: Fostering Self-Correcting Reasoning with Reflection System, funded by CFLT. PI: Michael Hoffmann, Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Co-PIs: Richard Catrambone, Jeremy Lingle.
- EXP: Linguistic Analysis and a Hybrid Human-Automatic Coach for Improving Math Identity, funded by CFLT. PI: Jaclyn Ocumpaugh, Teachers College, Columbia University, Co-PIs: Scott Crossley, Ryan Baker, Victor Kostyuk, Leigh Mingle.
- EXP: Linking Complex Systems: Promoting Reasoning within and Across Interconnected Complex Systems, funded by STEM+C & CFLT. PI: Carolyn Staudt, Concord Consortium, Co-PIs: Meridith Bruozas, Chad Dorsey, Eric Klopfer.
- EXP: Linking Eye Movements with Visual Attention to Enhance Cyberlearning, funded by CFLT. PI: Daniel Levin, Vanderbilt University, Co-PIs: Adriane Seiffert, Gautam Biswas.
Recent cyberlearning-themed awards across NSF:
- Collaborative Research: A study of How Pre-College Informal Activities Influence Female Participation in STEM Careers, funded by AISL. PIs: Philip Sadler, Harvard University; Roy Gould, Smithsonian Institution Astrophysical Observatory. Co-PI: Gerhard Sonnert.
- Collaborative Research: Debugging Failure: Fostering Youth Academic Resilience in Computer Science, funded by AISL. PIs: Noel Enyedy, University of California-Los Angeles; Melissa Chen, 9 Dots Community Learning Center; Dor Abrahamson, University of California-Berkeley. Co: PI: Francis Steen.
- EAGER: Smart and Connected Communities: Engineering Networked Devices for Multiteam Learning and Performance, funded by Core R&D. PI: Brenda Bannan, George Mason University. Co-PI: Nathalia Peixoto.
- Closing Gaps: Connecting Assessment and Culture to Increase Achievement, funded by ITEST. PI: Sharon Nelson-Barber, WestEd. Co-PIs: Jonathan Boxerman, Matt Silberglitt.
- Support for Undergraduates at the Community College Engaged in STEM Studies, funded by S-STEM:SCHLR SCI TECH ENG&MATH. PI: Candice Foley, Suffolk Community College. Co-PI: Nina Leonhardt.
- Developmentally Appropriate Strategies for Targeting Early Adolescents’ Motivation in STEM, funded by ITEST. PI: DeLeon Gray, North Carolina State University. Co-PIs: Braska Williams, Lauren Bryant.
- Teaching Critical Thinking Skills in Science with sInvestigator, funded by IUSE. PI: Gheorghe Tecuci, George Mason University. Co-PIs: James Trefil, Dorin Marcu, Mihai Boicu, Nancy Holincheck.
Resource & Tech Corner
Sean Reardon’s talk, paper, and slides on The Landscape of Socioeconomic and Racial/Ethnic Educational Inequality illustrate what education inequality looks like in the United States based results of roughly 200 million standardized math and reading tests administered to public school students from 2008-2013. Big questions that drive this work include: How much do educational outcomes vary across communities in the U.S., and why? And what can we do to equalize outcomes?
The Citizen Science Association (CSA) Education Working group has developed a set of questions to inspire practitioners to reflect on as they design projects and programs in which transformative learning can occur. See Learning Through Citizen Science: An Aspirational Vision and Ten Questions to Prompt Reflection on Practice.
Springer has announced a new journal, The Journal of Formative Design in Learning, which will present original papers that inform the study and practice of formal and informal education and training, including evaluation reports. All articles will be available for free during 2017 and 2018.
Springer’s Smart Learning Environments journal is now fully open access, with no charge to authors or readers. Submissions are invited on the issues related to the reform of the ways of teaching and learning to improve current learning environments and move them towards smart learning environments.
Thinking about how to best disseminate your work? CADRE offers a dissemination toolkit with resources, tips, and strategies that may help. There are multiple ways to use the toolkit, depending on the stage of your project and your purposes for dissemination.
Share Your News
Have some news (project highlights, publications, job opportunities, etc.) that you want to share? Contact CIRCL.
CIRCL is supported by NSF grants IIS-1233722, IIS-1441631, and IIS-1556486. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.