CIRCL News: NSF Funding for Big Ideas
At our annual retreat, the CIRCL team reviewed the NSF Budget Request. Although NSF requested the same budget amount as in the prior two years, now the Big Ideas are gaining traction and attracting more funding. CIRCL has been highlighting the importance of the Special Report on Big Ideas to you for two years now, for example, in our Community Report. We’re here to help the community conceptualize innovative research and assemble teams for these emerging opportunities.
We also want to thank all who participated in our survey on more rapid publication opportunities! It’s clear that the field wants more agile exchange of information, with ability to include media and in formats that achieve broader impacts. Survey respondents expressed a need for short publications that pull together emerging insights and findings in cyberlearning and provide a useful guide to the state of the art (e.g. our primers). Hence, we’re going to be thinking about how to launch a series of Rapid Community Reports, which would be peer reviewed and authors could get citation credit. Interested? Please volunteer to help us develop this concept.
Finally, in case you missed them, check out recordings of recent CIRCL webinars:
- Equity by Design in Learning Technologies by Justin Reich and Mizuko Ito
- Accessible Cyberlearning by Sheryl Burgstahler & Raymond Rose
- Computational Thinking for Teachers and Parents by Pati Ruiz, Sarah Hampton, Judi Fusco, Sarah Costello, and Angie Kalthoff
2018 STEM for All Video Showcase: May 14-21
Save the dates! On May 14-21, more than 200 federally funded projects will share 3-minute videos of their work in the 2018 Video Showcase: Transforming the Educational Landscape. Videos will address:
- Broadening participation & access to high quality STEM experiences
- Innovative practices transforming education
- Partnerships that advance education
- Research informing STEM learning and teaching
During the weeklong event, researchers, practitioners, policy makers and the general public are invited to view videos, discuss them with the presenters online, and vote for the videos that are most effective in conveying the creative work being done. This event is funded by NSF and created and facilitated by TERC in collaboration with six NSF-funded resource centers: MSPnet, CADRE, CIRCL, CAISE, STELAR, and CS for All Teachers. Subscribe for showcase updates.
eColloq Series on Cyberlearning: Call for Presentations
Interested to make your project known to a broader audience? Please consider presenting it online in our eColloq series. eColloqs provide an opportunity to present and discuss research and development work without the need to travel. Check out recordings of past eColloq webinars and contact Michael Hoffmann or Wendy Martin if you’re interested in presenting this spring or summer.
Featured Perspective: Meet Andrés Henríquez
Andrés Henríquez is Vice President of STEM Learning in Communities at the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI), where he leads the Queens 2020 initiative, a partnership between NYSCI and the local community. He worked previously as a program officer at both NSF and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, where he launched a national program to develop the field of adolescent literacy.
What are you doing today that is exciting?
After spending a number of years in philanthropy, I’ve rejoined my mentor Margaret Honey. When you find the right spark with a colleague, it’s an unbelievable plus. We got the band together to work on Queens 2020, which is a body of work to use NYSCI as a hub for STEM learning and a focused community – a zip code. We’re engaging a very large Latino immigrant population and figuring out ways to give them a pathway for STEM jobs and opportunities. Cyberlearning is embedded in that work: not just the technology, but also thinking about systemic change and how you use a student-centered approach with young people – using different kind of tools and focusing on what they care about – to help them reach their potential. Read more of Andrés perspective.
Funding Opportunities: NSF FW-HTF & SCH
NSF Future of Work at the Human – Technology Frontier: Advancing Cognitive and Physical Capabilities (FW-HTF) focuses on advancing cognitive and physical capabilities in the context of human-technology interactions, and will support two themes: Foundations for Augmenting Human Cognition and Embodied Intelligent Cognitive Assistants. FW-HTF is one of NSF’s 10 Big Ideas for Future Investments. Letter of Intent due April 16; full proposals due June 4.
NSF Smart and Connected Health (SCH): Connecting Data, People and Systems supports the development of technologies, analytics and models supporting next generation health and medical research through high-risk, high-reward advances in computer and information science, engineering and technology, behavior and cognition. Full proposals due May 22.
Conferences: Festival of Learning, EC-TEL, COMPASS & More
The Festival of Learning In London June 22-30, unites three conferences – ICLS (June 23-27), L@S (June 26-28), and AIED (June 27-30) – in a celebration of global talent in education. ICLS draws scientists and educators from around the world to share and explore theory and practice about the learning sciences. L@S will explore innovations in scaling and advancing learning using online environments. AIEd explores how advances in AI and neural science can impact human learning at various scales and in various contexts. Most submission deadlines are past,, but you can still register to attend!
EC-TEL 2018 will be in Leeds, UK, September 3-6. This year’s theme is “Lifelong technology enhanced learning: Dealing with the complexity of 21st century challenges.” Deadlines: Workshops, April 8; Papers & demos, April 5; Doctoral consortium, May 22.
The Conference on Mobile Position Awareness Systems and Solutions (COMPASS) will be held September 6-7 at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. COMPASS is an opportunity for museum staff, visitor researchers, mobile interpretive specialists and technologists, cyberlearning scientists, and others to share expertise and advance research and practice in the use of mobile position awareness systems in museums. Dr. Yvonne Rogers, Professor of Interaction Design at University College London will be one of two keynote speakers; Dr. Rogers was recently featured in People of ACM.
The Optimizing Human Learning Workshop on eliciting Adaptive Sequences for Learning (WeASeL) will be held June 12 in Montréal, Canada, in conjunction with Intelligent Tutoring Systems 2018. Workshop submission deadline: April 8.
Calls for Papers and Reviewers
Call for Papers: Maker-centered Science and Mathematics Education: Learning, Teaching and Environment Design. Special issue of the International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education (IJSME). Deadline for 300 word abstracts: March 31.
Call For Papers: Special issue on Computational Thinking from a Disciplinary Perspective: Integrating Computational Thinking in K-12 Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education. Special issue of Journal of Science Education and Technology (JOST). Deadline for submission of abstracts: April 1. Full papers: June 15.
Call for Papers: Technology for Equity and Social Justice in Education. This Special Issue of the International Journal of Multicultural Education (IJME) highlights the power of technology to enhance both educational achievement and social justice for diverse learners traditionally marginalized in education. Submission Deadline: June 1.
Call for Papers: Educational Research in a New Data Environment. This Special Issue of the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness (JREE) highlights use of new forms of data to learn about educational processes and effects, new analytical techniques or research designs, and opportunities and challenges for the field. Deadline for submission of abstracts: June 1.
Educational Technology Research & Development (ETR&D) seeks qualified reviewers due to record levels of submissions. See Call for Reviewers on the ETR&D homepage or contact Assistant Editors Dr. Gloria Natividad (gloria.natividad@itsaltillo.edu.mx) or Dr. Hale Ilgaz (hilgaz@ankara.edu.tr) for more information.
The Understanding Interventions That Broaden Participation in Science Careers (UI) Journal publishes translational articles focused on interventions at different stages of development. UI receives manuscripts on a continuous basis and publishes refereed articles into issues three times per year.
Resource & Tech Corner
The World Bank has unveiled a new global dataset for comparing countries’ educational performance. The report describes it as the largest globally comparable panel database of cognitive achievement, covering 90 percent of the world’s population, across 163 countries and region over the last 50 years.
The Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA) offers detailed data about U.S. schools, communities, and student success, including measures of academic achievement and achievement gaps for school districts and counties, as well as district-level measures of racial and socioeconomic composition and segregation patterns.
HundrED is a not-for-profit organization that seeks and shares inspiring innovations in K12 education. In 2016, they identified 100 great innovations from Finland; in 2017, they selected 100 innovations from all around the globe. Will an NSF innovation make their next list?
The Educational Endowment Foundation offers resources on themes chosen in collaboration with teachers, including a summary of the international evidence on teaching 5-16 years olds, actionable guidance for teachers on high-priority issues, and EFF-funded projects that have shown promising results.
edWeb is a free professional learning network that hosts online communities and webinars for educators. Recent webinars include emerging technology for learners with autism, using data to improve student engagement, and the emotional nature of learning.
Learn about Virtual Reality as a clinical tool to address the assessment, prevention, and treatment of PTSD, based on the VR projects that were evolved at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies since 2004.
Discourse is modern, open source forum software designed to promote civilized discussion. If you have been thinking about finding a better platform to support discussion for your classes, organization, or team, Discourse might be the tool for you. Jay Pfaffman now makes his living installing and supporting Discourse discussion forums, including authenticating against your existing university or Google logins and importing data from legacy forums and mailing lists to Discourse or your analysis software. See Literate Computing or email jay@literatecomputing.com for more information or to arrange for a demo at AERA.
Job Opportunities
The University of Pittsburgh’s new School of Computing and Information (SCI) has multiple openings at all levels, including a joint tenure-track faculty position with the Learning Research and Development Center. Application review has started, and applications are continuing to be accepted; please apply as soon as possible.
The Concord Consortium is looking for a Director of Technology to help bring its work in STEM educational technology to new heights. In this important role, you will manage an experienced software development team working on multiple STEM education projects, oversee IT needs for our bi-coastal organization, and help establish vision and roadmaps for future cutting-edge educational technology innovation.
Digital Promise seeks a new Chief Learning Officer (CLO), a senior leader responsible for providing policy, curriculum, professional development and coaching expertise and leadership across Digital Promise.
Books, Journals, and Publications
Pre-College Computer Science Education: A Survey of the Field by Dr. Paulo Blikstein highlights what computing education research should prioritize to advance the equitable implementation of pre-college computer science education. The report begins with a review of computing education research from the 1967 launch of Logo to current day, and adds to this synthesized interview data from 14 highly-regarded researchers in the field. The recommendations inform what should come next in CS education research to ensure that formal implementation is grounded in a solid understanding of what students need to learn, when they are ready to learn, and how they can best be taught.
What Parents Talk About When They Talk About Learning: A National Survey About Young Children and Science, a new report from EDC and SRI International, explores parental involvement in children’s early science experiences. The report includes rich descriptions of parent experiences in their own words, a full set of findings, survey questions, data tables, key takeaways and much more. Read the announcement.
The latest Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness (Volume 11, No. 1, 2018) focuses on improvement through building usable knowledge in education, some of the challenges (replication, generalizability, adapting to increasing complexity), and possible approaches for addressing them.
All Horizon Reports from The New Media Consortium are now archived and freely available in LearnTechLib. Check out the 2017 Digital Literacy Impact Study: An NMC Horizon Project Strategic Brief that uncovers the learner’s perspective of how digital literacy training influences work life after graduation, the NMC Horizon Report: 2017 Higher Education Edition, the Digital Literacy in Higher Education, Part II: An NMC Horizon Project Strategic Brief, and more.
The new Information and Learning Sciences Journal launches with an inaugural Issue in Jan. 2019. The journal will publish high-quality research at the scholarly nexus of information science and the learning sciences. Incoming co-editors include Sam Chu (Univ. Hong Kong) and Rebecca Reynolds (Rutgers). Incoming Associate Editors include June Ahn (NYU), Hong Huang (Univ. S. Florida), Eric Meyers (UBC-Canada), Soo Young Rieh (Univ. Michigan).
Innovating Pedagogies 2017 is the sixth in a series of annual reports on innovations in teaching, learning and assessment. This year’s innovative pedagogies include some that have an urgency about them. They are addressing problems of today’s world, where learners are faced with fake news, pseudo-science, ‘post truth’ and increasing tensions between some communities. This report is the result of collaboration between researchers at the The Open University in the UK, Learning In a NetworKed Society (LINKS), and Israeli Center of Research Excellence (I-CORE).
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.