Category Archives: Teachers & Researchers

How to Encourage Young Women and Marginalized People to Participate in CS and Engineering (part two)

February 15, 2019Book Club, Computer Science, Engineering, Learning, STEM, Teachers & Researchers, Uncategorized, Written by: Pati RuizPati Ruiz

by Pati Ruiz

This is the second post in a two part series based on my dissertation which focused on encouraging the participation of women and African Americans/Blacks, Hispanic/Latinx, and Native Americans/Alaskan Natives in computing. The first post focused on modeling an interest and passion for CS and creating safe spaces for students. This post focuses on building community, introducing students to careers, and making interdisciplinary connections.

Build Community and Connect Students with Mentors

Family support is important! Young adults encouraged and exposed to CS by their parent(s) are more likely to persist in related careers (Wang et al., 2015). And did you know that women are more likely than men to mention a parent as an influencer in their developing a positive perception of a CS-related field, more often citing fathers than mothers as the influencers (Sonnert, 2009)? Unfortunately, parents’ evaluation of their children’s abilities to pursue CS-related fields differs by gender; parents of boys believe that their children like science more than parents of girls (Bhanot & Jovanovic, 2009). Nevertheless, family support is crucial for young women and supportive family members — whether or not they are connected to the tech world — play a critical role in the encouragement and exposure that young women get to the field.

Helping parents understand the role that they can play is important. As educators, we can model for them how to encourage their children as well as how to dispel misconceptions and harmful stereotypes that their children might have heard. Sometimes parents and family members themselves might unknowingly be perpetuating harmful computer science world misconceptions with the comments they make to their children. As teachers, we can provide parents with training that might help them understand how to encourage and expose their children to the field in positive ways. After all, the research shows that this support can be provided by anyone – not just educators.

All of the young women in my study described the value of mentors. Even seeing representations of female role models in the media can encourage a young woman to pursue a CS-related degree. It’s important for young women to see representations of people who look like them in the field and to have real-life female mentors and peers who can support them in their pursuit of CS-related degrees and careers. As a result of the low number of women in the field, mentors and role models for women are primarily men. While this can be problematic, it does not have to be. Cheryan et al. (2011) found that female and male mentors or role models in computing can help boost women’s perceived ability to be successful if those role models are not perceived to conform to male-centered CS stereotypes. The gender of the role model, then, is less important than the extent to which that role model embodies current STEM stereotypes.

The actionability of some of the factors described above, then, allows educators and others to positively influence and encourage young women in high school to pursue CS degrees in college (Wang et al., 2015).

Introduce Careers

In their recent report titled Altering the Vision of Who Can Succeed in Computing, Couragion and Oracle Academy described the importance of introducing youth to careers in technology. They find that:

“It is critical to improve the awareness and perception of a breadth of careers in computing to meet the demands of our workforce and the desires of our students. We need to elevate high demand and high growth computing fields such as user experience (UX) and data science – that when understood, appeal to and attract underrepresented populations.“

What this report found is what I found in my research; many African Americans/Blacks, Hispanic/Latinx, and Native Americans/Alaskan Natives students don’t know people working in the computing field and don’t know what career options can look like. Couragion is working to change this by providing inclusive, work-based learning experiences that prepare students for jobs of the future. What I like about Couragion’s approach is that students are able to use an app to explore careers and engage with role models through text, activities, and videos. As they work their way through different career options, students take notes and reflect using a digital portfolio. I think this is a great way for students to develop career consciousness, something I wish I had when I was in school (as a student and teacher)!

As a teacher, the way I would connect my students with industry careers was to connect with local groups like GirlDevelopIt and invite speakers to my classroom. I also had college students visit my classroom – it usually works well to have recent graduates come back to talk to students because students relate well to recent high school graduates. I also introduced computer scientists in the news. If I were teaching right now, I would highlight 2018 MacArthur Fellow Deborah Estrin. In her Small Data Lab at Cornell, Dr. Estrin and her team are designing open-source applications and platforms that leverage mobile devices to address socio-technological challenges in the healthcare field. Or, I might direct them to this recent article written by Clive Thompson titled The Secret History of Women in Coding.

Some participants in my study mentioned that they ended up majoring in CS because of a mentor. One participant talked about how one of her high school teachers “dragged her to” a Technovation event. There, she ended up seeing a young woman who she “saw herself” in so she decided to apply to the same college that the mentor attended, got in, and went. This participant envisioned herself there because of this near-peer. She said that she didn’t connect with her mentor once she got to the university that they both attended for a year together, but just seeing her ahead of her in the program was motivating.

Again, the idea here is to create opportunities for students to connect with people in the field – to see themselves and to see the possibilities. Some groups that my students have worked with include Girls Who Code, Black Girls Code and Technolochicas – there are many others. Which ones do your students work with?

Make Interdisciplinary Connections

Finally, we have the idea of making interdisciplinary connections. CIRCL Educator Angie Kalthoff wrote a post for EdSurge discussing this very topic. Angie encourages teachers to ask their students: What are you doing outside of school that you want to tell other students about? She and a group of Minnesota educators organize student-powered conferences where middle schoolers showcase what they’re really interested in learning about. Check out her post because getting together with other educators to organize your own student-powered conference might be an excellent way you support and recruit young women and African Americans/Blacks, Hispanic/Latinx, and Native Americans/Alaskan Natives!

Interdisciplinary connections can be facilitated by teachers and it’s important to note that all of my study participants were very thankful to their K-12 teachers for having encouraged their pursuit of a technical field – even if they didn’t know they had. As one participant described, “a teacher who’s clearly passionate” is particularly encouraging.

One resource that can help you make interdisciplinary connections with students iss Connected Code: Why Children Need to Learn Programming by Yasmin B. Kafai and Quinn Burke. Join the CIRCL Educators book club to discuss this book starting in April!

Please note that the featured image for this post was created by #WOCinTech Chat, check them out! We’d love to hear from you — Tweet to @CIRCLEducators or use #CIRCLEdu.

Free, open, and high quality resources on the learning sciences

January 2, 2019Learning, Teachers & Researchers, Written by: Judi Fusco, Written by: Pati RuizPati Ruiz

By Judi Fusco and Pati Ruiz

Below are some readings that can be used to introduce the learning sciences to a wide audience. We (Pati and Judi) have been developing a course on the learning sciences for educators (see below for more on the target audience). We made it our goal to find free, open, and high quality resources and that were written for a wider community. Please take a look and let us know what you think.

If you’re a practitioner, have you read any of these? If you’re teaching a course on the learning sciences, have you used any of these? If not, what have you used? Are there any readings would you add? We’d love to hear from you — Tweet to @CIRCLEducators or use #CIRCLEdu.

Here’s a little more information about the course we are developing:

Purpose: Connecting educators and research(ers) in the learning sciences to create learning environments that use technology in ways to deepen learning and inspire students.

Objectives: Educators will be able to:

Describe from a learning sciences perspective what is known about topics such as motivation, identity, power and privilege, cognitive principles to enhance learning, collaboration and convergent conceptual change, constructivism (theory and pedagogical approach), inquiry, and other active learning approaches
Identify a range of learning theories and connect them directly to their own classroom practices
Understand affordances and constraints of technology for learning
Engage in conversations with other educators to discuss and make connections between practice and research
Apply findings from learning sciences research to design learning environments that use technology to strengthen learning

Target Audience: This course is designed for instructional coaches and mid-career and experienced educators (with at least 2 years of classroom experience) who are ready to examine and reflect on their practice. This course is created as a Masters level course, but we are interested in working to potentially create a similar course to be an advanced course or a capstone course in a credential program.

Course Format: We are developing the course in modules and the modules could be used in any course for teachers, including pre-service, with a professor facilitating. We hope to offer the course (through a university) this summer or fall. As we develop materials for it, we will share them. Please do let us know if you are interested in talking with us about the course, learning more about the modules we’re developing, or trying anything out in your course.

Texts and Materials (all free and open)

How People Learn (2000)

How People Learn II (2018)

Developing Minds in the Digital Age (2019)

Learning Sciences – CIRCL Primer, other Primers, and Posts from CIRCL Educators

Cyberlearning Community Report: The State of Cyberlearning and the Future of Learning With Technology

Innovating Pedagogy 2019; Innovating Pedagogy 2017; and Previous Reports

2018-2015 STEM for All Video Showcase videos

2019 STEM for All Video Showcase videos

DML Connected Learning Report

Naples Videos

Technology in Education What Teachers Should Know By Pedro De Bruyckere, Paul A. Kirschner, Casper D. Hulshof

Deans for Impact Resources

Pedagogical Knowledge and the Changing Nature of the Teaching Profession

The Brain Basis for Integrated Social, Emotional, and Academic Development

Relating Research to Practice Briefs

STEM Teaching Tools. Check out the research briefs

Introduction to the Learning Sciences

Connected Learning an agenda for research and design: A research synthesis report of the Connected Learning Research Network

Repositories

MSPnet open library of research articles

NSF’s Public Access Repository

Selected (open) sections from:

The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences 2nd Edition (2014)

Power and Privilege in the Learning Sciences (2017)

Unpacking Collaboration

September 27, 2018Collaboration, Teachers & Researchers, Uncategorized, Written by: Sarah HamptonSarah Hampton

By Sarah Hampton

Collaboration. We all know that means working together, and we all know it’s an educational buzzword with a positive connotation. It’s one of those words that I kind of gloss over when I see it in a paper or blog. My brain kind of does this disengage thing like, “I get that concept. It’s old news. Moving on.” Well, you know when you ask your students if they fully understand a concept, the infamous question, “Does that make sense?” and they answer, “yes,” and you know they don’t? I didn’t fully get the concept of collaboration; I was doing exactly what my students do, saying “yes” and moving on. As I read this summer, I learned that collaboration may be something we talk about often, but there’s a lot more there than I thought. I know I’m definitely not ready to move on!

What is collaboration, exactly?

In the book, What do you mean by collaborative learning?, Pierre Dillenbourg humorously points out that, “When a word becomes fashionable – as it is the case with “collaboration” – it is often used abusively for more or less anything.” So what is it, exactly? At its core, collaboration is two or more people working together, but this can be deceptively simple. For example, collaborative learning shouldn’t be confused with cooperative learning in which students work together by dividing up tasks between team members and working independently. In collaborative learning, students must be mutually engaged in a “coordinated effort to solve the problem together.” Furthermore, merely asking students to “work together” is not enough to lead to positive learning outcomes, so teachers must be intentional about identifying and facilitating effective collaboration. (Tips for that in a minute!) On the other hand, students who are effectively collaborating may not even be in the same room together thanks to modern technology. I like how Mary Burns says it in Edutopia’s blog, 5 Strategies to Deepen Student Collaboration:

“In collaborative activities, we want to ensure that students don’t just occupy the same physical space but that they share an intellectual space—that they learn more, do more, and experience more together than they would alone.”

Why collaborate?

I knew collaboration was supposed to be good for learning, but I was surprised to see the number of documented benefits. In the Benefits of Collaboration, Laal and Ghodsi (2012) discuss collaborative learning (CL) and organize the results from multiple studies into social, psychological, and academic categories:

How can cyberlearning help?

I suspect what teachers (including me) have often called collaboration didn’t really hit the mark, and maybe we haven’t recognized collaboration when it was happening in other situations. Let’s take another look at a cyberlearning project we’ve talked about before to learn what’s going on during effective collaboration. Check out this post on Speech-Based Learning Analytics for Collaboration (SBLAC) to learn more about the project. In this video, the leader of SBLAC, Cynthia D’Angelo, talks about things teachers can look for during collaboration.

In your own classroom, you can look to see if everyone in a group is contributing to a new understanding or if one person (or a small number of the group) is doing the work. Good indicators include seeing group members verbalizing about what is confusing or talking through what makes sense. Making thoughts visible to others (e.g., saying what you are thinking or sharing in writing, a sketch, or a model) is a very important indicator that collaboration is occurring. You could even make your own rubric or checklist for what you are looking for as you walk around when groups are working together. Sharing this rubric or checklist with your students might help them collaborate better.

In the near future, I hope to see more projects like SBLAC that automatically code these indicators. It would be much more efficient to allow technology to streamline that process so we could focus on giving our students targeted interventions at optimal times.

What do you think? Did anything about the specifics or benefits of collaboration surprise you? Would you say you frequently use true CL activities or are you hoping to facilitate more for your students? Would you be excited or intimidated to use a tool like SBLAC in your classroom? How do you know if students are working well together? Leave us a comment–we would love to collaborate with you as we come to a better understanding of CL together!

I would like to give a special thank you to Judi Fusco for her time and endless patience as she recommended readings and discussed collaboration with me. Because of her, I experience the value of collaboration firsthand.

From Research to Practice: Introduction & Computational Thinking

September 17, 2018Computational Thinking, Computer Science, Teachers & Researchers, Written by: Angie Kalthoff, Written by: Pati RuizPati Ruiz

by Angie Kalthoff and Pati Ruiz

Cyberlearning researchers including Shuchi Grover, Satabdi Basu, Eni Mustafaraj, Jodi Asbell-Clarke, and Katie Rich have been writing about and discussing computational thinking. Their research has been instrumental in helping us think about what these concepts and skills look like in the classroom. One thought from the CT primer that really resonated with us is:

“Increasing access to CT instruction is now widely discussed as a social justice issue.”

As educators with the goal of making Computer Science (CS) accessible for all, we often find ourselves wondering “how can I, share CS with other educators who might feel intimidated by this topic?” In this post we, Angie and Pati will, share how we are connecting what researchers are working on in many different domains and thinking about with what K-12 educators and parents can do to bring CS to their students and children. After all, as the authors of the CT primer point out: “several CT skills are not exclusive to the field of computer science.” For both of us, taking a broader lens gives us more tools to help.

I (Angie) don’t have a formal education in CS. I started my teaching career in an English Language(EL) classroom. It was during my time in my classroom, I discovered I really enjoy helping others create through the use of technology. This led me into my current role as a Technology Integrationist in a K-12 public school district.

My first tools for electronic creation included the iPod (yes, iPods the iPad wasn’t released yet) and interactive whiteboards. While my journey with these devices started as tools of consumption, they led towards tools of creation. However, it wasn’t until I discovered CS that I really felt like I was empowering my students to create anything they could think of. I saw coding as a way of self expression. This mindset grew in me as I explored research in the early childhood CS field.

The image below shows that, while CT can be a new concept for some of us, there are already many situations in which it can easily be brought into existing lessons. Learn more about Advancing Computational Thinking Across K-12 Education (the image below is from this document).

I (Pati) studied computer science in business (Operation and Management Information Systems) in college, but I didn’t get to begin teaching stand-alone CS classes until 10 years after I started teaching because they weren’t offered in my schools. I did teach digital literacy and computational thinking (CT) classes early on, as part of a Middle School skills curriculum. However, my understanding of CT has changed a lot since I worked with my first group of Middle School students. Thanks to the work of researchers that is summarized in this Computational Thinking Primer, I was able to learn more about the skills and dispositions important in CS education and continue iterating on the very first lessons I designed. One of the things that helps me in my teaching is to read about the research being done, think about what was learned, and bring back what I can to my classroom to make improvements. The research I read gives me different ways to think about what I’m seeing in my students and also what I’d like to see.

As researchers like Shuchi Grover and Jodi Asbell-Clarke have pointed out, experts still do not agree on what CT is and there is a CT communication problem. Angie, Sarah, Judi, and I did a lot of thinking on this topic when we worked on the Computational Thinking for Teachers & Parents Webinar Series to help teachers and parents bring CT into the classroom and into their homes. It took time for us to work through relevant research articles and examples. One thing that I really enjoyed about this process was getting to discuss these topics with other very thoughtful people and hearing about new lessons and games. Although I did not play it until much later, one CT game that I now enjoy playing is Human Resource Machine. In this game, you program office workers to solve puzzles using coding commands. According to the game developers, “you start the game with just 2 commands, and gradually earn more as you’re promoted. The entire language contains only 11 total commands – but they’re enough to simulate almost any computer algorithm in the world!” As long as you can do this well, you are considered a “good employee” and can work for another year. You should check it out and see if it could fit into your classroom or just help you think about CT on your own!

Finally, as we discussed how to share what we had learned about CT with other educators, we wondered where CT fits in other terms we had been using for years like digital literacy, programming, and CS. To help us think about these terms we remixed an image by Colin Angevine that we found in a report titled Computational Thinking for a Computational World.

In summary, computer science can be seen as the academic discipline that includes programming. Computational thinking includes the problem-solving processes that involve thinking, as Grover and Pea (2013) describe, “like a computer scientist when confronted with a problem.” Computational thinking is useful in many STEM domains and can be brought into other subject areas.

If you are interested in learning more about CT, visit Digital Promise microcredentials Computational Thinking: Key Elements and Practices. At the site, you will find competency-based recognition for professional learning on a variety of additional topics. In future blog posts, we’ll consider how CT differs from Computer Science education and teaching technology skills. Finally, please leave us a comment – we’d love to hear from you about how you use research to guide your work!

References

Grover, S., & Pea, R. (2013). Computational thinking in K–12: A review of the state of the field. Educational Researcher, 42(1), 38-43.

NRC. (2010). Report of a workshop on the scope and nature of computational thinking. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.

NRC. (2011). Report of a workshop on the pedagogical aspects of computational thinking. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.

The Cyberlearning Report goes to school

November 27, 2017Cyberlearning, Cyberlearning Report 2017, Teachers & Researchers, Written by: Judi FuscoJudi Fusco

By Judi Fusco

The Cyberlearning report will be going to school! I teach Ed.D. students at Pepperdine University, many of whom are K12 practitioners. When I next teach my class on learning theories, I will share the Cyberlearning Community Report: The State of Cyberlearning and the Future of Learning With Technology. Because technology use is so common in K16 classrooms, I like to think with my students about how learning theories can help them use technology in deep ways to support learning. I don’t want technology just to be a substitute for pencil and paper. I love concrete examples and this report shows many new ways technology, grounded in learning theories, can augment or help the learning process. Here’s a little background.

What is Cyberlearning?
“Cyberlearning research is the study of how new technologies, informed by what we know about how people learn, can be used to advance learning in ways that were never before possible.” (from the report p. 6)

So why do we have this report and who created it?
Cyberlearning is a funding area of the National Science Foundation. This program has funded about 270 projects since 2011. From all of these projects, 22 researchers came together to write about exciting new directions and themes found in these 270 projects.

What else should I know about Cyberlearning?
As we’re starting, there’s one more thing I’d like to discuss before diving in to the report — something that teachers who read early versions of the report asked. They wondered if cyberlearning researchers were trying to replace teachers with technology. My answer is a resounding NO! Please know that cyberlearning projects are NOT trying to replace teachers, or other human beings. Often, they are trying to give information to improve the understanding a teacher can have about a situation or support students learning a difficult concept. Technology should not replace a teacher during the learning process. But usually, in classrooms, there’s only one teacher and a lot of students. Many projects are trying to support the teacher and give the teacher more eyes and ears to see what is occurring in parts of the classroom where they can’t be. A teacher may be able to do many things at once, but no teacher can support all of their students at all times.

As an example, let’s think about a virtual learning environment for science inquiry (see INQ-ITS in the report). In the virtual learning environment, students do their work and get instant feedback from the system about how they are doing. The teacher also gets a report from the system that tells how each student is doing. From the report, a teacher can learn who needs what kind of help. Some students would not need help and some would; this kind of information could help a teacher more efficiently target the students who need help. It could also help relieve the teacher of some of the mountain of grading they have as the system is monitoring the work in real time and summarizing it. The virtual environment would support and augment the teacher so that the teacher could have a good understanding of how to help students very quickly (nearly real time) and without creating more work for the teacher.

Right now, in a physical science lab, a teacher has to grade lab projects to understand how students are doing and can’t give feedback to all until the grading is done. If a middle school teacher has 5 labs of 30 students, the time to get all the grading done is significant. If students were in a virtual environment, a teacher could be alerted how each student was doing before the class period was over. If a student was having problems the teacher could give a quick intervention and help students correct their misconceptions.

Despite how helpful a system is, no system should or could replace the teacher. A teacher is irreplaceable and knows so much about how to help each student. Teachers bring the human touch to the student and so many students desperately need a caring adult in their life. In addition, students are not just empty heads to be filled with one-size-fits-all knowledge. Students come with their own interests and desires and a teacher can help inspire a student. We need to be really smart as we think about the future and make sure that technology is used in ways to support a human teacher in the classroom. Ultimately, we want students to be able to work with other people and having a human teacher will help to ensure human interaction. Of course we want technology to help us and we want students to understand technology — how to use it, and how to make it — but human interaction should come first and be placed as a priority. (In addition, in my opinion, a virtual environment shouldn’t replace all laboratory experiences as there are so many things to learn in a physical lab, too. )

Many cyberlearning researchers are trying to envision new technology products and activities that might improve learning. Cyberlearning research is typically exploratory, and as it is designing for the future, it is essential to have practitioners involved in the process. We need the wisdom of practice with all that is learned from working with diverse students with needs, interests, and experiences to create more inclusive designs in cyberlearning. Many projects do involve practitioners, but hearing from even more will improve the project, and give the projects new life and directions. We need to hear what makes sense to practitioners. Some of the best (in my opinion) cyberlearning research adds new thinking about equity, affect and emotion, and learning with the whole body (embodied learning research). We need researchers and practitioners working together to make sure cyberlearning research is useful for a wide variety of students.

I’m going to end this blog post with a hope that you’ll go download the report now and that you’ll come back to think more about it with me. I’d love to hear about how you think technology can help or hinder learning and what you think of the report. I’ll plan to post a few more blog posts about the report and some of what I am planning for my class. I’ve talked about the opening section here. Read up to page 11 and then come back for more. I’ll continue to discuss the report in several future blog posts.

P.S. If you’re teaching graduate students, please comment and let me know if you would take the report to your class, and how you’d use it. I’d love to hear more.

Cyberlearning 2017 Recap

May 13, 2017Educational Neuroscience, Learning, Teachers & Researchers, Virtual Reality, Written by: Judi FuscoJudi Fusco

By Judi Fusco

Cyberlearning 2017 was an inspiring event in April. You can see a storify (a record of the tweets during the meeting) that documents many of the topics and technologies presented. In this post, I’m going to share a little about the 4 keynotes and give you the links so you can watch them.

The four keynotes kicked off with a future thinking one about virtual reality (VR) by Jeremy Bailenson. The VR discussed in this keynote isn’t ready for the classroom yet, but we’ll have new technologies soon that will be classroom ready. The keynote by Jeremy Bailenson describes his work and helps us think about what we need to investigate to understand about learning and VR. Cyberlearning researchers and teachers need to be thinking and planning now for the future. (We’ll do a post soon about VR that is in the classroom.)

The second keynote by Mary Helen Immordino Yang focused on the link between emotions and learning and what we know from neuroscience. Most of the good teachers I know intuitively understand how important the emotional connection is in the learning process, but the keynote talk helps us understand reasons why emotion and cognition are so intertwined and has helped me think. I will share more in another post.

The third keynote talk by Eileen Scanlon was on the challenges of creating and sustaining a meaningful program of research. Eileen does research on Citizen Science; you can learn more about it in a CIRCL Primer on Citizen Science.

The final keynote, given by Karthik Ramani, discussed computational fabrication as a way to engage students and help them learn. He is also creating new technologies and interfaces to technologies. He describes his work and lab. His students showed off cardboard robots! In the photo on the right, one of the CIRCL Educators checks out the robots.

I highly recommend watching each of the four keynote videos at some point. Each keynote is one-half hour and if you watch, leave a comment and tell us what you think and if you see any implications for your practice. You can read reflections on the meeting by Jeremy Roschelle, one of the co-chairs of the conference.

A Cyberlearning Project looking at Collaboration

July 7, 2016Collaboration, Teachers & Researchers, Video Showcase, Written by: Judi FuscoJudi Fusco

By Judi Fusco

Our last post discussed embodied learning and Cyberlearning. Cyberlearning is many different things; on the CIRCL site, we have an overview of Cyberlearning. In this post, we’ll look at another example: a new Cyberlearning project developing technology that may be able to help support teachers and the collaborative learning process.

It can be difficult to understand what is happening during collaborative work in a classroom when there are multiple groups of students and just one teacher. In a previous post we discussed how it’s hard for an administrator to walk into a classroom and figure out what is happening when students are collaborating because it’s hard to walk up to a group and understand instantly what they are doing. It’s also hard for teachers because they can’t be in all of the groups at the same time. Of course, teachers wish they could be a fly on the wall in each group so that they could ensure that each group is staying on-task and learning, but that’s impossible. Or is it?

At the end of that previous post, I asked if cyberlearning researchers could help create tools to better understand collaboration. When I did that, I was kind of setting myself up to introduce you to a Cyberlearning researcher, Cynthia D’Angelo. She has a project that may lead to the creation of a new Cyberlearning tool to address the problem that it is impossible for a teacher to be in more than one place at a time. Watch this 2-minute video about Speech-Based Learning Analytics for Collaboration (SBLAC) and see what you think.

Cynthia’s research is still in early stages, but all the practitioners I’ve told about it find it interesting and want it for their classroom. Here’s a little more about the project:

In this project, work is being done to determine if technology that examines certain aspects of speech — such as amount of overlapping speech or prosodic features (like pitch or energy) — can give real-time insights about a group’s collaborative activities. If this could happen, and SBLAC went into classrooms, then teachers could get instant information about certain things occurring in group collaboration even when they weren’t present in that group.

The proposed technology would require a “box” of some sort to sit with each group to analyze the speech features of the group in real time. One research question in the project is, “Are non-content based speech features (such as amount of overlapping speech or vocal pitch) reliable indicators for predicting how well a group is collaborating?” Initial results suggest this is promising. (Note, this technology doesn’t analyze the content of the speech from the students, just features of the speech. Hopefully, this helps to preserve student privacy.)

It’s important to support groups during collaboration because sometimes groups aren’t effective or an individual student gets left behind. This work, while it is still in early stages, could potentially help teachers identify groups having problems during collaboration. A teacher would no longer have to guess how a group was working when s/he wasn’t present and could target the groups having difficulties to help them improve.

If you want to learn more about the project, watch Cynthia’s 3-minute video shared at the NSF 2016 Video showcase: Advancing STEM Learning for All. Or you can read the NSF award abstract. Stay tuned, as we’ll have more about this project from two teachers who are working with Cynthia on SBLAC this summer.

SBLAC really requires teachers and researchers to work together on this hard problem about collaboration as it tries to create new tools to help in the classroom. What do you think of the idea? What do you think is hard or important about collaboration? What kind of feedback would you want on the groups in your classroom. Could SBLAC help administrators understand collaboration? Going forward, we’ll talk more about collaboration and collaborative learning, so feel free to leave questions or comments about collaboration, too.

Exploring New Worlds: A Teacher Attends an Academic Conference

July 15, 2015Teachers & Researchers, Written by: Mary PattersonMary Patterson

By Mary Patterson

In June, I had the privilege of attending the International Computer Supported Collaborative Learning 2015 conference in Gothenburg, Sweden.

For four days, I was immersed in the latest research surrounding CSCL and surrounded by experts from 31 countries and 6 continents.

According to the preface to the proceedings, “The CSCL conference has an explicit focus on how and why computer support can enhance learning processes and outcomes. The CSCL field brings together researchers from cognitive science, educational research, psychology, computer science, artificial intelligence, information sciences, anthropology, sociology, neurosciences, and other fields to study learning in a wide variety of formal and informal contexts.”

As the sole, practicing K-12 educator of the group, it was quite interesting to be granted a look behind the curtain and hear the candid comments of researchers as they talked about educators in general.

While most researchers seemed genuinely appreciative of the teachers they collaborated with, there were a few who didn’t quite get the intricacies that teaching entails. One researcher expressed their frustration with a teacher who just didn’t see the importance of a treatment and non-treatment group. The teacher insisted that all students needed the treatment! Of course! Teachers have a duty and responsibility to provide the best education for their students. It would be extremely difficult for any teacher to see a positive effect and then deny it to other students. Perhaps the researcher could avoid this difficult situation by agreeing to flip groups at some point so that all students have an opportunity to experience the treatment. Teachers are held accountable today, more than ever, for the success of their students and researchers need to understand that.

In contrast to typical teacher conferences, where teachers attend in order gain new ideas and strategies that work in the classroom, this academic conference was an opportunity for researchers to share their success and failures, get ideas about further research and network with future collaborators. I was surprised at how easily methods and results were questioned, debated and evaluated. Researchers readily admitted when they didn’t have an answer and suggested further research questions to others. I would love to see more of this at a teacher’s conference. The international and interdisciplinary aspect of the conference also contributed to the collaborative atmosphere. Many teacher conferences are subject and even grade-level specific. Often, there are limited funds to support teacher attendance at conferences and therefore many teachers attend only local and regional conferences. I’d love to see what new ideas would come out of an interdisciplinary education conference! It was also interesting to note that the CSCL conference touted a new, interactive format. Instead of a typical paper presentation, participants listened to a quick synopsis of a paper, then sat in small groups to have discussions with the presenters while a moderator kept time and then had the groups rotate. Teacher conferences tend to be either “sit + get” or hands-on workshops where products are created. It would be interesting to see this interactive format at a teacher conference. I think there could be potential for some very rich conversations.

One area of the conference that I think could use the expertise of an educator is the Poster Session. Seriously! If any of my students put that much stuff on a poster that couldn’t be read from more than a foot away, we’d be having a serious discussion about design elements and graphic displays. While the posters were informative, I personally think that researchers could adopt the practice of, “Less is more!” Poster sessions at a teacher’s conference are usually on actual poster-boards, (not glossy, foam-core mounted displays) and there’s usually a take-away for the teacher; a bookmark or a handout that gives the teacher information they can use later.

Academic conferences are a great way to give people a quick look at what is hot in the field. Current research poses additional questions and this leads to new collaborations and discussions. Teacher conferences are a great way for teachers to share what works in their classrooms. Teachers leave a conference with new strategies and ideas that they can easily implement immediately. I would personally love to see more researchers attend a teacher’s conference and pitch their latest research proposal to teachers, shark tank style, in order to get valuable feedback about how best to implement their plan. Let’s work together to find the best solutions to our education challenges and questions.

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Teachers, what do YOU need from technology?

June 2, 2015Classroom Technology, Constructivism, Teachers & Researchers, Written by: Mary PattersonMary Patterson

By Mary Patterson

Technology is changing the way we teach and the way students learn.

When I started teaching in 1983, I had an Apple IIe and I used it to record grades, and for games like, Oregon Trail, Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? and Math Blaster to stimulate curiosity and practice rote facts in a more engaging way. Thirty-two years later, I have a learning management system to track individual student progress and predict future success. We create graphs from spreadsheets, use interactive modeling or simulations, and connect with others around the world through skype, email and social media.

So, what’s next?

If we consider the constructionist and constructivist pedagogical ideas of Seymour Papert and Jean Piaget, how is all this technology helping students construct meaning? And more importantly, how can technology help us do it better?

Learning scientists are partnering with technology experts and teachers to answer these questions. Current trends in Cyberlearning include research on games and virtual worlds, data visualization tools, collaborative learning environments , intelligent tutors, augmented reality and immersive environments, embodied multimodal learning, learning analytics,
adaptive learning and more.

For instance, PIs: Karl Ola Ahlqvist, Andrew Heckler, Rajiv Ramnath of Ohio State University are exploring the idea of using online map games to generate critical thinking and impact learning about a far-away place in a tool they call, GeoGames.

The Center for Innovative Research in Cyberlearning provides a peek into the future with projects highlighted on their page http://circlcenter.org/projects/

What are YOU curious about? What learning questions do YOU need answered that would give you better insight into how students learn? What technology do you WISH existed right now?

Imagine turning your classroom into a planetary system or a town above an aquifer. Researchers, Thomas Moher, Tanya Berger-Wolf, Leilah Lyons, Joel Brown, Brian Reiser, from the University of Illinois at Chicago in a project titled,” Using Technologies to Engage Learners in the Scientific Practices of Investigating Rich Behavioral and Ecological Questions,” use dynamic phenomena that are imagined to be “embedded” in the physical space of the classroom, made accessible through stationary or mobile “portals” (tablet and laptop computers, large displays, etc.) and provide continuous location-specific visualization of the phenomenon. Students collectively observe, manipulate, and chronicle the embedded phenomenon, and construct models to reflect their understandings.

In Massachusetts and Virginia, researchers, Charles Xie of the Concord Consortium and Jennifer Chiu from the University of Virginia are helping students see science concepts in action in the real world, by developing mixed-reality technologies that augment hands-on laboratory activities with sensor-driven computer simulations in a project called, Mixed Reality Labs: Integrating Sensors and Simulations to Improve Learning.

As teachers, we are often the receivers of technology systems and learning theories. Wouldn’t it be great to have a hand in the design of these things based on what we experience each day? Let’s start this conversation!

Teachers, what do YOU need from technology and learning sciences?

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Enter the SHARK Tank…if you dare…

May 6, 2015Cyberlearning, Teachers & Researchers, Written by: Mary PattersonMary Patterson

By Mary Patterson

In an effort to continue the researcher- teacher collaboration discussion, Principle Investigators (PIs) got to pitch their research idea to a team of educators at the Cyberlearning 2015 Conference. The educators asked the researchers questions about time constraints, classroom management issues, student privacy concerns, and more. Finally, after much deliberation over the merits of each proposal, the educators chose their favorite proposal for imaginary funding.

So what was learned from this experience?

Researchers had the opportunity to hear how their idea was received and interpreted by the educators and this pointed a few researchers down the iteration path. Others learned how constraints in the classroom, such as how many outlets are available to charge devices, or the varying reading levels found in a classroom, can sometimes be a barrier to a successful Cyberlearning project.

The educators became better informed about some of the trends in Cyberlearning and some of the constraints of researchers such as getting IRB approval, gaining access to schools, and the time it takes to develop a concept, product for testing.

What to do, what to do?

In an article by M. Suzanne Donovan [1] , she states, “To effectively address problems in education, research must be shaped around a problem of practice. Reorienting research and development in this way must overcome three obstacles. First, the incentive system for university researchers must be changed to reward research on problems of practice. Second, the contexts must be created that will allow the complexity of problems of practice to be understood and addressed by interdisciplinary teams of researchers, practitioners, and education designers. And third, meaningful experimentation must become acceptable in school systems in order to develop a better understanding of how to effectively stimulate and support the desired change.”

1 Donovan, M. (2013). Generating Improvement Through Research and Development in Education Systems. Science, 340, 317-317. Retrieved January 1, 2015, from www.sciencemag.org

Teachers and researchers looking to establish partnerships can contact CIRCL at www.circlcenter.org

What do YOU think?
Please send in your comments.

“In collaborative activities, we want to ensure that students don’t just occupy the same physical space but that they share an intellectual space—that they learn more, do more, and experience more together than they would alone.”

So what was learned from this experience?

What to do, what to do?