CIRCL News
What key issues, tensions, challenges, and design principles are important to future cyberlearning proposals and projects? On June 6, CIRCL hosted a summit of the leaders of eleven recent NSF-funded workshops in Washington DC. Their presentations are available on the CIRCL site now, and we’re planning to engage everyone around their findings at Cyberlearning ’19 in October. Also new directions — Embodied, Enactive, Extended and Embedded — were featured at Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning in June, and the CSCL proceedings are freely available online (see also Jeremy’s CSCL trip report). The recent AI in Education proceedings are available online for free until July 21. We are expecting more emphasis on AI in education in NSF calls in the future… and there are many thorny issues in collaborative learning, AI and education, and related areas that will call upon our community’s talents.
We look forward to discussing this — and more — at CL’19. Our featured perspective, Tammy Clegg, is co-chair of CL’19 along with James Lester (featured last month) and Cynthia D’Angelo (featured next month).
CIRCL Webinar: Diversity, Equity, and Exclusion?
Please join us on August 7 for a CIRCL Webinar: Diversity, Equity, and Exclusion? How to address diversity with respect to ability in your research and practice in the INCLUDES National Network from 11-12 pm PT / 2-3 pm ET. Chris Atchison and Sheryl Burgstahler will discuss factors potentially limiting the work to improve access for those with disabilities, identify common barriers to participation, and consider ways to promote research and practice that is inclusive of individuals with disabilities and their perspectives. Register for this webinar. Note: This webinar is in an effort to bridge the INCLUDES National Network and the Cyberlearning community, given that Cyberlearning researchers are doing work that overlaps with the goal of INCLUDES.
Featured Perspective: Meet Tamara Clegg
Tamara Clegg is an associate professor in the College of Information Studies and the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership and at the University of Maryland.Tamara’s work focuses on developing technology (e.g., social media, mobile apps, e-textiles, community displays) to support life-relevant learning where learners, particularly those from underrepresented groups in science, engage in science in the context of achieving personally relevant goals.
What can we learn from your work with youth in a community, connecting neighborhoods, and reaching new audiences?
My career has focused on my passion for working with youth and other learners at formative stages of life and helping them to find life-relevant connections to science. Often, when educators and designers think about learning we focus mostly on schools, as they are indeed a hub for learning. But when we focus only on school contexts, we miss a lot of the really rich and powerful ways that children are learning outside of school. When we begin to focus across the contexts of learners’ lives, however, we expand the range of educators in a learners’ life. Parents, caregivers, after-school facilitators, librarians, mentors, community volunteers all become facilitators of learning in ways unique to their roles in learners lives and the contexts they interact within. So this work has been really exciting because it enables us to work with informal educators, to work with parents, and to work with teachers — and to bring them all together in these really cool ways with new technologies. Read more of Tamara Clegg’s perspective.
Opportunities: Conferences, Calls, Town Halls
Learning: Research and Practice seeks to explore theoretically and empirically supported learning processes and outcomes that challenge the existing view and introduce innovative perspectives. See the call for papers and subscribe to the NIE journal quarterly newsletter to get updates. Free access to selected articles is also available.
Call for Papers: Special Issue on Co-Creation in the Design, Development and Implementation of Technology-Enhanced Learning to be published in the Interaction Design and Architecture(s) Journal. Submissions due September 2, 2019.
Call for Chapters: Early Warning Systems and Targeted Interventions for Student Success in Online Courses. This book will review examples and challenges of early warning systems and dashboard design, and explore design principles and data visualization tools to make data more understandable, and, therefore, more actionable. Submissions due August 5, 2019.
A series of four “AI for Science” town halls are being organized by DOE National Laboratories to collect community input on the opportunities and challenges facing the scientific community in the era of convergence of High Performance Computing and AI technologies. Meetings are in July, August, September, and October. Learn more and apply to attend.
Social Sciences & Humanities Open is new multidisciplinary journal for open scholarship from across the social science and humanities disciplines. As an open access journal, articles will be permanently available for authors and readers to download, cite and share through Creative Commons.
LAK 2020 will be March 23-27 in Frankfurt, Germany with the theme “Celebrating 10 years of LAK: Shaping the future of the field.” See the call for papers.The first submission deadline is October 1, 2019.
ASSETS 2019 will be held October 28-30 in Pittsburgh, PA. This ACM SIGACCESS focuses on research on the design, evaluation, use, and education related to computing for people with disabilities and older adults.
Jobs & Grants
Northwestern University seeks a full-time, 2-year postdoctoral researcher to help lead a longitudinal study of middle school youth (5th-8th grade) to understand local STEAM participation patterns in in-school courses and afterschool clubs.
The AERA Grants Program is currently accepting proposals for both its Dissertation Grants (up to 25K) and Research Grants (up to 35K). The next proposal deadline is September 25, 2019.
The University of Illinois at Chicago invites applications and nominations for the position of Director of the Learning Sciences Research Institute to provide leadership for the institute and a vision for its continued excellence in research, teaching, service, and community engagement. Application deadline: August 30, 2019.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has several job openings in their Redwood City office, including Director of Operations, Education, Senior User Experience Researcher, Education, and Psychometrician, Learning Science.
Resource & Tech Corner
Google Education’s Future of the Classroom: Emerging Trends in K-12 Education Global Edition report is part of a series on the evolution of K-12 education, mapping out current and emerging trends in classroom education. Many of the research-based trends described in the report overlap with cyberlearning themes.
The Science Directorate of the American Psychological Association is expanding the reach of psychological science through enhanced advocacy, new partnerships and novel ventures. For example, they have briefed the National Security Commission on AI on issues of avoiding cultural bias and promoting psychological health, are involved with the Partnership on AI, are working to reconceptualize the ethical framework for research with human participants, and are working with APA’s publishing team to develop a new Technology, Mind, and Behavior journal, due to launch in 2020. The Directorate welcomes your input as they move forward; contact or join the APA to get involved.
Digital Promise’s Research Map provides a visual representation of peer-reviewed articles on education research published between 2009 and 2018. Explore a visualization of research findings for 120+ topics, check out research summaries and videos, and discover practical tips to use in schools and classrooms.
Societal inequities influence nearly every aspect of students’ education — including their academic performance, the classes they take, their access to enrichment opportunities, and their school’s approach to discipline. Monitoring Educational Equity, a new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, calls for a national system of equity indicators to identify differences in critical outcomes and opportunities across key subgroups and track progress toward educational goals.
Books & Publications
The Proceedings of the 20th International Conference Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED 2019) is now available online with free access until July 21!
Check out the CSCL 2019 Proceedings, now available online. The Best Paper Published in JLS Award for 2018, announced at CSCL, was won by Sarit Barzilai and Clark A. Chinn for their paper, On the goals of epistemic education: Promoting apt epistemic performance. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 27(3), 353-389. Congratulations to Sarit and Clark!
Practical Pedogogy: 40 New Ways to Teach and Learn by Mike Sharples provides an accessible guide to new and emerging innovations in education, with insights into how to become more effective as a teacher and learner. New teachers will find a comprehensive introduction to innovative ways of teaching and learning. Experienced educators will be surprised by the range of useful pedagogies, such as translanguaging, crossover learning, teachback, bricolage and rhizomatic learning. Policy makers will gain evidence of how new teaching methods work in practice, with resources for curriculum design and course development.
Shvarts, A., & Abrahamson, D. (2019). Dual-eye-tracking Vygotsky: A microgenetic account of a teaching/learning collaboration in an embodied-interaction technological tutorial for mathematics. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 22, 100316. Vygotsky conceptualized the teaching/learning process as inherently collaborative. This work extends prior evaluations of this claim by enlisting eye-tracking instruments to monitor the perceptual activity of four teacher–student dyads, as the student solves a challenging manipulation problem.
Glick D., Cohen A., Festinger E., Xu D., Li Q., Warschauer M. (2019). Predicting Success, Preventing Failure. In Ifenthaler D., Mah DK., Yau JK. (eds) Utilizing Learning Analytics to Support Study Success. Springer, Cham. This study describes the use of learning analytics to examine the strongest predictors of persistence and performance in an online English language course.
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!
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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.