CIRCL Newsletter – Issue 26, October 2017

CIRCL News

Our most exciting topic is the release of our Cyberlearning Community Report — see below — which has been over a year in production. Here are three quick requests. First, read it to learn more about cyberlearning research (and send us any feedback). Second, help us publicize the report (e.g. tweeting it, liking posts you see about it). Third, if you want to write up a Genre, Method or other aspect of Cyberlearning for a 2018 Community Report, let us know. By the way, CIRCL team member Patti Schank presented a poster on the report at EC-TEL in Tallinn, Estonia! And Katie Headrick Taylor, our featured perspective (below), reflects on her experience as one of the co-authors of the Cyberlearning Community Report.

In other big news, NSF has posted a new Cyberlearning solicitation, Cyberlearning for Work at the Human-Technology Frontier, to fund learning technology research in STEM and other foundational areas that enable STEM learning. Proposal are due in January 8, 2018. Many other cyberlearning-related programs at NSF also have upcoming due dates; learn more about these, and the new Cyberlearning solicitation, below.

Finally, please register for October CIRCL webinars on multimodal analytics (October 10) by Marcelo Worsley, and the first eColloq webinar (October 24) featuring presentations on implicit learning assessments by Jodi Asbell-Clarke and on pedagogical agents by H. Chad Lane.


Cyberlearning Community Report: The State of Cyberlearning and the Future of Learning with Technology

We’re excited to announce release of the Cyberlearning Community Report: The State of Cyberlearning and the Future of Learning With Technology. This report was written collaboratively by a group of cyberlearning researchers with a wide range of expertise in innovative learning designs (such as remote labs, virtual peers and coaches, and community mapping) and research methods (such as multimodal analysis and learning analytics), with editorial help from CIRCL. The report presents various cyberlearning projects that represent these designs and methods, as well as an overview of cyberlearning history, the current cyberlearning community, and how cyberlearning research can have a broader impact in the future. Please help us get the word out by sharing the link to the Community Report page with your colleagues and students, with professional societies, and on social media.


CIRCL Webinars: Multimodal Analytics, Implicit Learning Assessments, Pedagogical Agents

We hope you can join us for the following CIRCL webinars in October. Please share with your colleagues and invite them to register, and consider organizing a local viewing with discussion – a sort of “science café” on cyberlearning research and methods, with expert speakers for free!

October 10: In Making Sense of Multimodal Learning Analytics, Marcelo Worsley will will introduce some of the motivation, data collection and data analysis tools as well as recent research emerging from this field. Please register and join us on Tuesday October 10 from 11-12 pm PT / 2-3 pm ET.

October 24: Implicit Learning Assessments and Pedagogical Agents will feature work by two cyberlearning researchers:

  1. Jodi Asbell-Clarke will present “We Know More Than We Can Tell: Differentiation through Implicit Learning Assessments”, and
  2. H. Chad Lane will present “Research on Pedagogical Agents: How Making Computers More Human-like Can Improve Learning.”

Please register and join us on Tuesday October 24 from 12-1:30 pm PT / 3-4:30 pm ET. This is the first webinar in an eColloq Series on Cyberlearning established by Michael Hoffmann and Wendy Martin.


NSF Cyberlearning for Work at the Human Technology Frontier

NSF has posted a new Cyberlearning solicitation, Cyberlearning for Work at the Human-Technology Frontier, to fund learning technology research in STEM and other foundational areas that enable STEM learning. The program responds to the pressing societal need to educate and re-educate learners of all ages in STEM content areas to ultimately function in highly technological environments. Note that the solicitation has been substantially revised from past solicitations — for example, there is a new added focus to fund exploratory and synergistic research in learning technologies to prepare learners to excel in work at the human-technology frontier. Also, the Exploratory (EXP) category is no longer relevant, as all proposals should be exploratory in nature. Proposal deadline: January 8, 2018.


Featured Perspective: Meet Katie Headrick Taylor

Meet Katie Headrick Taylor

Katie Headrick Taylor is an Assistant Professor of Learning Sciences and Human Development in the College of Education at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on the role of digital media and emerging technologies in the lives of children, youth, and adults.

How did you get started in cyberlearning?

After starting at U. Washington in 2015, I found CIRCL online and signed up for the newsletter. That probably got me some list about CIRCL events. I attended a CIRCL proposal writing workshop in Boston in 2015. There were several mentors there, and Erica Halverson was mine. Chris Hoadley was also there, along with others who had received NSF Cyberlearning awards. At the end of that meeting, Chris said something like, “Does anyone have any final thoughts?” and I raised my hand and said, “I’m so glad that this community exists because I have always felt like such a fringy person — in either learning sciences or social sciences, or educational research — and I feel like I’ve found my niche.” I’ve tried to stay connected with the cyberlearning community since then. I attended the Smart & Connected Communities for Learning Innovation Lab at SRI the following year, and that was an “Aha, I’ve found my people” moment. I met Nichole Pinkard, Andres Henriquez, Ruth Kermish-Allen, Juhn Ahn, Remi Holden, and many others. Nicole and Andres and I won our NSF EAGER grant on Mobile City Science after that. Read more of Katie’s Perspective.


Project Spotlight: Scaffolding Learners’ Self-Regulation Skills to Optimize Science Learning

An interview with Roger Azevedo, a professor in the Department of Psychology at North Carolina State University about his work to model and scaffold learners’ self-regulatory skills.

Meta Tutor

What is the big idea of your project?

Generally, we’re focusing on a triad of ideas. First, let’s look at learners; what are the cognitive, metacognitive, and affective, motivational processes when they are working individually or collaboratively, when they are using some advanced learning technologies? If we have students who are instrumented, and the technology is instrumented, we can study the learning phenomena and how it is related to scientific reasoning through the multimodal data we are collecting, which includes eye tracking, physiology, log file, screen recording, and hand movement data?

Second, we want to train data scientists. Now, imagine having all the data I mention above fed to a data scientist who is also instrumented. How do data scientists make inferences with this multimodal, multichannel data? What inferences are they making? What are these inferences based on and are they accurate? And third, because we know that human scientists are biologically limited, we could have a virtual human connected to the data scientists? Read more about Scaffolding Scaffolding Learners’ Self-Regulation Skills.


Opportunities: NSF, ICLS, Cognition & Learning, & More

In addition to the new NSF Cyberlearning for Work at the Human-Technology Frontier solicitation (proposal deadline: January 8), there are many sources of funding for cyberlearning-related research at NSF, including following programs with upcoming due dates:

  1. Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) – proposals due November 6.
  2. Discovery Research PreK-12 (DRK-12) and related Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) created to advance STEM+C objectives – Proposals due November 14.
  3. Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented
    Discoverers in Engineering and Science
    (INCLUDES) – Proposals due November 27
  4. Science of Learning – Proposals due January 17.

ICLS 2018 will take place June 23-27 in London, as part of the London Festival of Learning, which has two other co-located conferences – AIED and Learning@Scale. The conference theme for ICLS 2018 is “Rethinking learning in the digital age: making the Learning Sciences count. Due dates for Papers, Posters, and Symposia: November 17. Pre-Conference Workshops and Tutorials: December 15; Early and Mid-Career Workshop and Doctoral Consortium: February 16; Industrial/Commercial papers, and Crossover Papers: February 1.

Call for papers: Special issue of Cognition and Learning, Learning on-the-Move: A New Genre of Learning and Teaching with/in Communities. The collection of papers will showcase how mobility, mobile technologies, mapping tools, and/or smart and connected communities are constitutive of learning and teaching processes and support new types of learning designs.

On October 26, a half-day National Academies Workshop on The Role of Digital Tutors in Washington, DC will focus on the evidence on the efficacy of Digital Tutors, exploring our current knowledge about the capabilities and applicability of this technology for use in day-to-day teaching and learning at all levels. Register to attend.


Job Opportunities

Vanderbilt University seeks an Associate or Full Professor of Learning Sciences in the Department of Teaching and Learning of Peabody College.

New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) seeks a Maker Space Coordinator to oversee the implementation and growth of an activity area on the exhibition floor dedicated to participatory processes of visitors’ making, tinkering and exploring STEM content through hands-on approaches.

BSCS has two openings: Director, Instructional Materials Development to play a leadership role in major new instructional materials research and development initiatives, and a Science Educator to participate in one or more of the following: the design and development of instructional materials, the development and facilitation of professional development, and research on science teaching and learning.

The Wisconsin Center for Education Research seeks a Scientist interested in studying and supporting the development and implementation of digital games for learning. This position will interact with an interdisciplinary network of faculty, researchers, and game developers in departments and other game-development centers, such as the Gear Learning studio and the Field Day Lab.


New Cyberlearning Awards

A sample of new projects funded by the NSF Cyberlearning program:

Recent NSF Cyberlearning awards:


Resource & Tech Corner

CADRE developed the CADRE Early Career Guide: Tips for Early Career STEM Education Researchers, a guide to becoming a successful researcher in the field of STEM education, and a profile of the CADRE Fellows program. Early career researchers may independently access the resources in the guide or share them with a study group of graduate students and professional peers. Advisors, supervisors, mentors, and program leads who work with early career researchers may use the guide when providing informal or formal early career researcher support.

ACM’s US Public Policy Council (USACM) has reaffirmed its long-standing commitment to accessibility by releasing a statement and set of principles on accessibility, usability, and digital inclusiveness.

AccessCyberlearning shares resources for students, educators, and others interested in creating more accessible distance learning programs and increasing the participation of people with disabilities in online learning opportunities. Check out CIRCL’s Accessibility Resources page, developed in collaboration with AccessCyberlearning, to learn more about how to make cyberlearning technology and pedagogy accessible to students and instructors with disabilities.

The Cyberlearning Community Report: The State of Cyberlearning and the Future of Learning With Technology highlights examples of the exciting work our community is engaged in as we integrate the latest innovations in learning science and computer science into new research designs and methods. The report was organized CIRCL and co-authored by 22 members of the U.S. cyberlearning community.

CIRCL Primers are brief summaries of key topics in the field of cyberlearning. They are used to build capacity in the field and to give people a sense of cyberlearning’s main themes. The newest primer is Speech Technologies and Learning; others developed in the past year include Data Science Education, Persistence in Education, Citizen Science, Remote Labs, and Computational Thinking. Primers are developed by small teams of volunteers from the cyberlearning community, and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. If you’d like to contribute to an existing or new primer, let us know.


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.