CIRCL News
Happy New Year, CIRCL Community! As we enter 2018, the CIRCL team is filled with optimism for the future of cyberlearning research — for example, we have the sense the community is responding enthusiastically to current solicitations and can reasonably expect there will be more. And our webinar series keeps getting better (see below). Keep an eye on this newsletter, our web page, and our twitter feed for Cyberlearning-related opportunities as they appear.
Faster and More Connected. That’s what we hope to achieve with a new initiative to define how we can share findings rapidly, as they emerge from cyberlearning projects. Journals are slow. Facebook posts are typically superficial. Conferences rarely bring this community together in one place. We’re imagining something in the space of PrePrints, Rapid Syntheses, or Research Blogs to share substantive advances in cyberlearning quickly through the community. We need your help to know what you’d like to see: Please take the short survey below.
Finally, are you looking for a New Year’s Resolution? Here are two quick ones you could easily check off: Present at the 2018 STEM for All Video Showcase (registration is now open), and make use of the Cyberlearning Community Report with your students and colleagues in 2018. And if you want to contribute to future community reports, let us know.
Upcoming CIRCL Webinars: Equity by Design, Accessible Cyberlearning, and Computational Thinking
CIRCL invites you to register and join us for the following free webinars – and please share with your colleagues!
- Equity by Design in Learning Technologies by Justin Reich and Mizuko Ito – January 19. Why educational technology efforts so often fail to achieve equitable outcomes, and some guiding principles to address these pitfalls.
- Accessible Cyberlearning by Sheryl Burgstahler & Raymond Rose – January 24. Legal issues and first steps that projects can take to make their activities and resources more accessible and universally designed.
- Computational Thinking for Teachers and Parents by Pati Ruiz, Riley Leary, Sarah Hampton, and Judi Fusco – January 30, February 6, and February 13 (join any or all sessions). Part 1 will give an overview of computational thinking, Part 2 will discuss how teachers can support computational thinking in their classrooms, and Part 3 will discuss how parents can support computational thinking with their children.
And in case you missed them, check out recordings of recent CIRCL webinars: Cyberlearning Tools for Mobile, Community Engaged, and Connected Learning with Katie Headrick Taylor and Tom Moher (eColloq Series), Making Sense of Multimodal Learning Analytics with Marcelo Worsley, and Implicit Learning Assessments with Jodi Asbell-Clarke and Research on Pedagogical Agents with H. Chad Lane (eColloq Series).
2018 STEM for All Video Showcase: Registration Now Open
Registration for the 2018 STEM for All Video Showcase on May 14-21 is now open! The theme this year is Transforming the Educational Landscape. We encourage you to submit a 3-minute video to the showcase and discuss it with researchers, practitioners, policy makers and the general public during an interactive week long event. Previous events have attracted tens of thousands of participants. If you want present, you must register by February 15. Videos are due by April 25.
Survey: Accelerating Spread of Early Findings from NSF Projects
How might our community accelerate the spread of early findings from NSF projects? Are CIRCL and other NSF resource centers an appropriate group to develop a potential solution? What factors in a potential solution are most important to you, and would affect your participation most? CIRCL invites you to help think about the issue, and weigh in on possible approaches for supporting an open sharing service. Take our survey!
Featured Perspective: Meet Chad Dorsey
Chad Dorsey is President and CEO of the Concord Consortium. His professional experience ranges across the fields of science, education, and technology.
In 10 years what will people remember about the work you’re doing?
The hope would be that people will realize that inquiry and discovery is available for anybody and everybody and anybody, and that technology can help bridge the gaps that would otherwise make that complicated. There are a number of places where people may already realize that, but not as strongly as it might be. Probes and sensors are useful, and many people know you can use models and simulation. But I think that there is still a large degree of realization to be had about the fact that in a huge variety of domains, you can use technology to come very close to phenomena and make independent discoveries. The joy of learning by doing in science is truly accessible, and I think the work we’re doing at Concord really exemplifies the work across the board in a lot of ways. Read more of Chad’s Perspective.
Funding Opportunities
IES Announces its FY 2018 SBIR Phase I Program Solicitation: IES is accepting Phase I proposals for awards of up to $200,000 and 8 months for the development of prototypes of education technology products to improve relevant student, teacher, or administrator outcomes in education and special education settings. Submission deadline: January 25.
The NSF Smart and Connected Communities (S&CC) program invites proposals to accelerate the creation of the scientific and engineering foundations that will enable smart and connected communities to bring about new levels of economic opportunity and growth, safety and security, health and wellness, and overall quality of life. Letters of intent are due January 30; full proposals due February 28.
NSF INCLUDES invites Alliance proposals to envision a new landscape of broadening participation in STEM. Proposals must be built upon a foundation developed by one or more NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot project(s). Proposals due April 4.
Conferences and Calls: ICLS Early Career Workshop, CHI Game Workshop, EC-TEL, Mobile Tech CFP
The ICLS 2018 Early Career Workshop, Rethinking Learning in the Digital Age: Making the Learning Sciences Count in London June 20-21 is open to scholars within 5 years of achieving their PhD in learning-sciences-related studies. Applications due February 1.
The CHI 2018 Workshop: Data-Driven Educational Game Design is intended to bring together CHI specialists, educational game designers, and educational game learning analysts to discuss how to uncover and better understand the effects of games for learning, in terms of engagement, motivation, and learning. Paper submissions due by February 2.
Call for Papers: EC-TEL 2018. The 13th European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning will take place September 3-6 in Leeds, UK. EC-TE 2018 will engage researchers, practitioners, educational developers, entrepreneurs and policy makers in a joint discussion on how to put science, technology and practice at the service of learning to deal with the complexity of 21st century challenges. Workshop proposals due April 8; Papers, posters, and demos due April 15.
Call for Papers: Mobile Technology, Learning, and Achievement: A Critical Perspective on the Role of Mobile Technology in Education. The purpose of this special issue of Contemporary Educational Psychology (CEP) is to rigorously investigate the affordances and challenges of mobile and wearable technologies as platforms for both measuring and inducing processes that foster achievement and learning. Manuscript proposals due May 15.
Job Opportunities: CMU, Tufts, 100Kin10, UT Sydney, WPI, UIUC
Carnegie Mellon University seeks applications for a postdoctoral position to work on an NSF-supported grant led by Bruce McLaren on research into the underlying reasons for learning from erroneous examples. The position is funded for 2 years.
Tufts University seeks an inaugural director for the Institute of Research on Learning and Instruction (IRLI), starting in September 2018. Under the leadership of the director, IRLI will foster research that focuses on bettering our understanding of how students learn at the collegiate level and will pioneer innovative ways to improve that learning.
100Kin10 seeks a Strategic Initiatives Research Associate who will be responsible for all work related to identifying and supporting experiments, including tracking progress against grand challenges, growing and developing the knowledge base supporting the grand challenges, and monitoring trends across a broad range of relevant content.
The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) seeks a Head of School of Education to envision a future––what should the School of Education look like at a world-leading university of technology––and to make it happen.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute invites applications for a postdoctoral position in the Advanced Learning Technologies Lab to work on several research projects involving math tutoring systems for K-12 level, computational thinking, and embodied cognition, that integrate cognitive perspectives as well as metacognitive and affective perspectives of student learning, as well as supporting teachers to understand their students better.
The College of Education at the University of Illinois seeks applications for three faculty positions, tenured or tenure-track. The deadline was December 15, but review of applications will continue until the positions are filled.
New Cyberlearning Awards
A sample of new projects funded by the NSF Cyberlearning program. Recent NSF Cyberlearning awards include:
- 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.
- CAREER: Improving Adaptive Decision Making in Interactive Learning Environments, funded by CFLT. PI: Min Chi, North Carolina State University.
- CAREER: DataSketch: Exploring Computational Data Visualization in the Middle Grades, funded by CFLT. PI: Michelle Wilkerson, University of California-Berkeley.
- EXP: Paper Mechatronics: Advancing Engineering Education Through Computationally Enhanced Children’s Papercrafts, funded by CFLT. PI: Sherry Hsi, Concord Consortium. Co-PI: Michael Eisenberg.
- Catalyzing Scientific Inquiry and Engineering through Wearable Intersubjective Sensation Devices, funded by CFLT. PI: R. Benjamin Shapiro, University of Colorado at Boulder. Co-PIs: Michael Eisenberg, Joseph Polman.
- EXP: Collaborative Research: Empowering Learners to Conduct Experiments, funded by CFLT. PI: Casper Harteveld, Northeastern University. Co-PI: Gillian Smith.
- EXP: Linguistic Analysis and a Hybrid Human-Automatic Coach for Improving Math Identity, funded by CFLT. PI: Jaclyn Ocumpaugh, University of Pennsylvania. Co-PIs: Matthew Labrum, Scott Crossley, Ryan Baker, Victor Kostyuk.
- CAP: Advancing Technology and Practice for Learning Reading and Writing Skills in Secondary Science Education, funded by CFLT. PI: Rebecca Passonneau, Pennsylvania State Univ University Park.
- The cognitive and neural mechanisms of computer programming in young children: storytelling or solving puzzles? funded by CFLT. PIs: Marina Bers, Tufts University; Evelina Fedorenko, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Resource & Tech Corner
EdSurge has posted its 2018 Higher Education Technology Events Calendar, ready to get you started on planning your next conference or educational opportunity. The calendar also includes links and descriptions to give you a taste of each event. A free high-resolution version is available. Share it, print it, or purchase a poster.
The 3-Star Learning Experiences blog by Paul A. Kirschner and Mirjam Neelen aims to present learning professionals with evidence-informed ideas on how to make both the instructional and the learning experience more effective, efficient, and enjoyable.
The IEEE IC Industry Consortium on Learning Engineering (ICICLE) is an open forum and community-driven platform for defining and supporting the profession of learning engineering. Both individuals and organizations can participate, and all work is open to the public. To get involved, join as a member or sign up for the mailing list.
Digital Promise has launched the Maker Learning Leadership Framework, a toolkit that supports education leaders as they work towards ensuring that all students have opportunities to make. The Framework offers resources, strategies, and models to help school and district leaders establish their vision, build their culture, and make their program. The Framework is grounded in the work of educators and researchers, and has been vetted by a cohort of teachers and administrators from six school districts across the country who have used tools from the Framework in crafting their own programs.
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.