CIRCL Newsletter – Issue 36, May 2019

CIRCL News

Our CL’19 Program Committee has been hard at work planning a GREAT convening October 3-4 based on your input, provided via the application survey. (Applicants: check your email; you must register by June 14!) We’re excited to announce three keynotes: Angela Booker, Sofiya Noble, and Mike Sharples, and we know each keynote is going to push our thinking about dilemmas and tensions in our field. We know you want to learn about how to get funding via NSF Big Ideas, and we’re planning engaging, interactive sessions. You asked for expertise exchanges on cutting edge topics, like data visualization; equity, identity, and power; embodied cognition; new forms of workplace learning; etc — we are planning events for knowledge sharing. Thankfully, a great number of you want to share roundtable papers, demos, posters, and other artifacts — and to serve in facilitator roles.

We’re not only planning for sharing your work at CL’19, but also to get together around new forms of publication that better feature the design advances of our community. We also will have a June 6 summit among the leaders of a collection of NSF-funded workshops, and those workshops plan to engage you in the futures their workshops uncovered. Overall, you can look forward to CL’19 being another of our highly interactive, highly unique, mind-and-relationship expanding convenings. In addition, CIRCL has coordinated with the chairs of the APA’s Technology, Mind, and Society (TMS) conference and are happy to share that CL19 attendees can receive a significantly reduced 1-day registration fee for the third day (October 5) of TMS in DC. That day, educational technology will be the focus in the keynote, with a cyberlearning panel, and in a special poster session area for cyberlearning projects. When you register for CL19, you’ll receive information on how to unlock this discount.

In this newsletter, our featured perspective, James Lester, is co-chair of CL’19 along with Tammy Clegg and Cynthia D’Angelo. Last but not least, congratulations to the 4 new elected members of the ISLS Board of Directors, Jun Oshima, Ravit Duncan, Jasmine Ma, and Kris Gutierrez! Their 6-year terms will begin following CSCL. Follow us on Twitter to get updates!

Cyberlearning in the 2019 STEM For All Video Showcase

More than 200 projects shared short videos of their innovations in science, mathematics, engineering and computer science education in formal and informal settings in the 2019 Video Showcase. Check out the cyberlearning-related videos, below, and the 36 winners of Presenter, Facilitator, and Public Choice awards.

Cyberlearning-related videos

NSF Opportunities

DCL: Request for Information on Future Topics for the NSF Convergence Accelerator seeks input on future NSF Convergence Accelerator tracks within the Big Ideas of Harnessing the Data Revolution and Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier, within other Big Ideas, or on other topics that may not relate directly to a Big Idea but that may have national impact. Submit your concepts by June 24, 2019.

NSF Geoinformatics invites proposals for the development of cyberinfrastructure for the Earth Sciences. The solicitation supports efforts to develop data resources, software tools, and computational infrastructure needed to facilitate studies of the structure, dynamics, and evolution of the Earth through time, as well as the processes that act upon and within the Earth from the surface to the core. Proposals due August 15, 2019.

Featured Perspective: Meet James C. Lester

Meet James Lester

James C. Lester is Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Center for Educational Informatics at North Carolina State University. He is also Co-chair — along with Tammy Clegg and Cynthia D’Angelo — of Cyberlearning 2019.

As a computer scientist, how did you get involved in adaptive and personalized learning?

Great question. I’ve been interested for as long as I can professionally remember in learning technologies. I did my dissertation in Computational Linguistics, and the focus there was on generating explanations for students. And it was an interesting experience because we did not have an intelligent tutoring system, and we did not have an adaptive learning environment. We had no users. So, essentially every key ingredient that you would like to see in an adaptive learning intervention was missing. But I always had the idea that it would be really the most interesting thing in the world to build a system that could support adaptive learning. Read more of James Lester’s perspective.

Calls & Conferences

Call for Papers: Embodied Cognition and Technology for Learning. This Special Issue of Educational Technology Research and Development invites studies of embodied cognition and technology for learning that focus on specific learning phenomena and/or the design of learning environments associated with those phenomena. Full manuscripts due July 1, 2019.

The APA’s Technology, Mind, and Society (TMS) conference is October 3-5 in Washington, DC. CL19 attendees can receive a significantly reduced 1-day registration fee for the third day (October 5) of the TMS conference.

AnitaB.org is seeking graduate graduate student nominations for the AnitaB.org Board of Trustees as well as volunteers to help with tasks on site at the 2019 Grace Hopper Celebration in Orlando, Florida on October 1-4 (another great opportunity for students!).

Other upcoming 2019 conferences:

  • IDC 2019 – June 12-15 in Boise, Idaho
  • CSCL 2019 – June 17-21 in Lyon, France
  • ISTE 2019 – June 23-26 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
  • AIED 2019 – June 25-29 in Chicago, Illinois
  • Cogsci 2019 – July 24-27 in Montreal, Canada

Job Opportunities

EPFL invites applications for a faculty position devoted to the digital transformation of vocational education and training (VET) in Switzerland. In addition, Pierre Dillenbourg’s lab is looking for 3 postdocs or senior researchers, one in digital VET as well, one in learning sciences or learning analytics, and one in educational robotics.

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:

Recent cyberlearning-themed awards across NSF:

Resource & Tech Corner

Immersive Media Report

In Immersive Media and Child Development, Dr. Kiley Sobel synthesizes the proceedings of the Future of Childhood Salon on Immersive Media and Child Development, a convening co-hosted by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University, and Dubit last fall. The report documents the provocative conversations that took place during the event, explores existing research around children and immersive media, and includes vision papers contributed by five leading thinkers around virtual and augmented reality and children, including Jeremy Bailenson, Michael Rich, Jesse Schell, Lisa Castaneda, and Chris Chin. A blog post by author Kiley Sobel is also available.

Best Evidence Enclopedia

A recent meta-analysis of effective programs for elementary mathematics by Pellegrini, Lake, Inns & Slavin (2018) found that tutoring programs had the largest and positive impacts on math learning. More generally, “The findings suggest that programs emphasizing personalization, engagement, and motivation are most impactful in elementary mathematics instruction, while strategies focused on textbooks, professional development for math knowledge or pedagogy, and other strategies that do not substantially impact students’ daily experiences have little impact.” Learn more about this work, and other program reviews, at Best Evidence Encyclopedia (BEE).

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!

Kuhl, P., Lim, S., Guerriero, S., & van Damme, D. (2019). Developing Minds in the Digital Age: Towards a Science of Learning for 21st Century Education, Educational Research and Innovation. Paris: OECD Publishing. This new volume highlights new scientific research about how people learn, including interdisciplinary perspectives from neuroscience, the social, cognitive and behavioural sciences, education, computer and information sciences, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and engineering.

The inaugural special issue of Computer-Based Learning in Context edited by Ryan Baker and Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo is available, with articles from luminaries such as Mimi Recker, Jaclyn Ocumpaugh, Kaska Porayska-Pomsta, Rose Luckin, Amy Ogan, and Erin Walker. Share these articles in this completely and permanently open and free journal with your colleagues and friends, and/or on twitter – and submit articles for the second or third issues!

Share Your News

Have some news (project highlights, publications, job opportunities, etc.) that you want to share? Contact CIRCL.

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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.