CIRCL News
Our new page, Five Ways CIRCL Can Help You, shares how our center can make your research stronger and increase its impact. For example, we’re an organizer of the upcoming Video Showcase (register by March 15) — and we’ll help to promote submitted videos about Cyberlearning projects. Last year, over 20,000 people attended the video showcase — hence, this is a big dissemination opportunity. Or if you are registered for the rescheduled CL ‘16, consider signing up for a Hill Visit (now on Tuesday, June 7; email mhachey@edc.org). We’re also continually working to increase the quality and diversity of our community. Did you know we have a resources for proposal writing page? Please share it with people you know who are contemplating writing a new cyberlearning proposal, and also check out the Primers, which are much appreciated by people who are newer to our community and want to participate more fully. Take a moment and have a look at all the ways we can help. We’re here to strengthen the contribution of the cyberlearning community.
CIRCL Webinars
Join us for the upcoming webinars:
- From Research to Practice: Bridging the Academic and Publishing Worlds with David Dockterman on Thursday March 24, 2016 from 11-12 pm PT / 2-3 pm ET.
- Coding, Sharing, and Reusing Video Data with Databrary on Friday April 29 from 11-12 pm PT / 2-3 pm ET.
Archived recordings and slides are also available from recent webinars:
- Connected Learning with Mimi Ito.
- Digital Equity, Deeper Learning and the Cyberlearning Community with Bob McLaughlin, and discussants Raymond Rose and Paula Hooper.
- How can we make microbiology interactive and available to everyone? with Dr. Ingmar Riedel Kruse.
Featured Perspective: Meet Deborah Fields
Deborah Fields is a part-time consultant and part-time professor at Utah State teaching online. She has a Cyberlearning project and a newly-funded iTEST grant with Yasmin Kafai. Deborah and Yasmin also gave the Joint Keynote for the 2014 Cyberlearning Summit and GLS Playful Learning.
How did you get started in cyberlearning?
The interests that I came to grad school with were about supporting kids in making connections across settings. Now it’s called connected learning, but I was interested in it before it was called that. It didn’t necessarily have anything to do with digital worlds or anything like that. But when I was getting my Masters degree at UW Madison, I took Jim Gee’s first Video Games and Learning course (see the book), and that was where I first encountered one way that technology could be this wonderful connective spot. He was documenting all this amazing learning that was happening, and many people weren’t aware of the value of what they were learning. It tapped into their interests, and it was hugely social and relational, which goes against stereotypes.
Read more of Deborah’s perspective.
Opportunities
Join the next NAPLeS webinar on Tools of Quantitative Ethnography: Epistemic Network Analysis and nCoder led by David Williamson Shaffer on March 17 at noon ET.
Join an informational webinar about NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program led by Program Officer Karen King on March 15 at 3pm ET.
The Data Consortium Fellows program invites applications for up to $2000 in participant support for a new collaboration that results in a short (500+ word) white paper detailing a new research question, method, or finding in creative learning analytics and play. Applications due March 15.
A half-day workshop at ICLS on Examining Longitudinal Patterns of learning Behaviour through Evidence Centered Design workshop on Tuesday, June 21 will bring together researchers from a variety of disciplines interested in better understanding how longitudinal data from digital environments (i.e., games, intelligent tutoring systems, MOOCs, and hypermedia) can be used to better understand learning behaviours. Learn more and apply to join the workshop by April 1.
The DARPA Young Faculty Award provides awarded early career researchers with an initial 24 months of funding (up to $500K), with the chance to receive an additional 12 months (up to another $500K). Proposals due April 5.
The Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) invites you to submit for the 2016 Special Topic Meeting: Technology and Media in Children’s Development to be held at the University of California, Irvine from October 27-30, 2016. See the Call for Submissions. The submission deadline is April 6.
The 22nd International Conference on Collaboration and Technology (CRIWG 2016) will be held in Kanazawa, Japan, Sep. 14-16, 2016. Conference proceedings will be published by Springer as a volume in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. The paper submission deadline is April 27.
CSTA 2016, the annual conference of The Computer Science Teachers Association, will be held in San Diego July 10-12, 2016.
The 15th Annual Hawaii International Conference on Education will be held from January 3-6, 2017 in Honolulu, Hawaii. The submission deadline is August 8.
Job Openings
Reasoning Mind seeks an Education Research Manager with experience in applied educational research to lead the research team at Reasoning Mind.
The Institute for Inquiry (IFI) at the Exploratorium seeks a Senior Science Educator/Professional Developer to be involved in all aspects of planning, designing and implementing IFI’s professional learning workshops and institutes for teachers and other professional learning providers.
The Engineering Education & Cyberlearning Laboratory at George Mason University seeks a full- time Postdoctoral Researcher to work on a research project examining informal learning in STEM focused primarily on learning of engineering and technology related topics. Application deadline: March 18.
The Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings (DRL) within the Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR) at NSF announces nationwide searches to fill the following positions. (See also all open EHR Program Director positions.)
- Program Director position for Cyberlearning Research. DRL seeks individuals with expertise in cyberlearning, advanced technology for learning, big data and/or data intensive research.
- Program Director position for Physical Science Education Research. DRL seeks expertise in physical science education research, considered broadly. Physical sciences include but are not limited to physics, astronomy, chemistry, geosciences, environmental science, and/or interdisciplinary pursuits in the aforementioned.
- Program Director position for Neuroscience Research. DRL seeks a Program Director with expertise in educational neuroscience or cognitive neuroscience research, broadly construed.
- Program Director position for Mathematics Education Research, considered broadly.
Resource & Tech Corner
edSurge has curated and compiled a list of 50 edtech conferences convening all around the world in 2016, along with a couple that will stream online. In addition to dates and category, they’ve organized the list according to geography to help you find the gatherings closest to home. They have a nice hi-res image and PDF available — or you can even order a poster!
Visual Classrooms lets you create and share rich content to support peer interaction and collaboration in online and blended learning. Integrated sketch pad, videos and images from mobile devices, screen capture, formula builder, and more. Learn how educators are using Visual Classrooms to support blended and online learning and request a demo.
CADRE, the DR K-12 resource network, hosted the 9th STEM Smart Workshop in early February on NSF-supported research and standards-based science instructional resources that can enhance K-12 STEM education. Visit successfulstemeducation.org for workshop-related resources on instructional materials selection and evaluation, evidence-based materials that align with or can be adapted to the NGSS, the scientific practices of argumentation and modeling, cyberlearning resources, professional development for teachers, and new ways of looking at assessment. Additional resources include A STEM Smart Brief on NGSS, Storify of #NSFSTEM Tweets highlighting key ideas throughout the meeting, and Program Descriptions of featured work at the meeting.
Books & Publications
Have a recent publication or article about your cyberlearning project, or that you think the community should know about? Let us know and we’ll announce it here!
New book of interest to CIRCL community: Design as Scholarship: Case Studies from the Learning Sciences, edited by Vanessa Svihla & Richard Reeve. For researchers in the Learning Sciences, there is sparse literature how we actually go about designing. Design as Scholarship: Case Studies from the Learning Sciences addresses this need by providing design stories of how researchers actually do their work—how they identified and met needs, how they collaborated across disciplinary boundaries, and how they took advantage of emergence or opportunism in their work. The book includes chapters on designing technologies for learning, community co-design, and more.
Accelerating Science: A Computing Research Agenda by Honavar, Hill, and Yelick s a new Computing Research Association report on accelerating science through computing. The report seeks to articulate a research agenda for developing cognitive tools and leveraging big data to augment human intellect and enable new modes of discovery. It may also inspire some interesting ways to think about smart and connected communities of learners.
Opportunity for All? Technology and Learning in Lower-Income Families by Vicky Rideout and Vikki Katz is a new report from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center that explores gaps in educational opportunity for low-income families with young children, and how many low-income families are using media and new technologies in creative ways to support their children’s pathways to success and to strengthen family relationships. The study, which analyzes data from a national survey of 1200 parents and 200 interviews with students, parents and teachers, focuses new attention on key assets that culturally diverse
families bring to the technology adoption process.
25th Anniversary Issue of Artificial Intelligence in Education has 37 articles (available for free download) by authors of high-impact articles from the journal’s past. Over the first 25 years of its existence, the journal has been a vibrant forum publishing the best work on the use of AI methods to advance education.
The 2015 Innovating Pedagogy Report proposes ten innovations that explore ways of teaching, learning, and assessment for an interactive, engaged world. The report is the fourth of its kind, produced in collaboration with SRI International and The Open University. The full document details several examples and studies to support these innovations.
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.