In April, CIRCL announced that it would fund a small number of working groups to convene experts and lay out research agendas for a few cyberlearning genres. Based on the proposals received and feedback from our advisory group, we are moving forward with working groups of two types, which will meet over an extended period of time to help advance the field.

In-Person Working Groups (2 groups). One group is focused on issues related to instrumented spaces and the other involves robotics in early childhood learning and alternative input methods (such as gesture and speech). These groups will meet online before and after in-person meetings, and produce a report detailing current research in that cyberlearning genre and proposed next steps for the field.

Online-Only Working Groups (3 groups). These groups will cover the genres of virtual reality and augmented reality (VR/AR) technologies for learning, neuroscience and emotion, and community-based learning. The online working groups will convene to plan webinars and write reports/documents for the community.

CIRCL unfortunately could not fund all of the ideas that were proposed. These topics are ones that both generated a sufficient amount of interest from the community and were aligned with the broader goals of the NSF cyberlearning research community. If you did not propose within one of these topics but would like to be included in a working group, please contact Cynthia D’Angelo (cynthia.dangelo@sri.com) to see how you can be involved.