Category Archives: Webinar

Ambitious Mashups and CIRCLS

AI in Education, Cyberlearning, STEM, Teachers & Researchers, Webinar

By CIRCL Educators

CIRCL, the Center for Innovative Research in Cyberlearning, has come to an end, but don’t worry, we’re getting ready to roll over to a new project called CIRCLS, the Center for Integrative Research in Computing and Learning Sciences. Stay tuned here and we’ll keep you apprised of any changes. Of course we’ll still be working to bridge practice and research and share what CIRCLS is doing and what we, as educators, are thinking about and facing in our work. If you’d like to get more involved with our work, please contact us! We’re looking for more educators to think and write with.

In the meantime, before we transition to CIRCLS, we want to dive into the final report from CIRCL. In it, we reflect on what we’ve learned since 2013 when CIRCL started. The world and technology have both changed quite a bit. Over the years, CIRCL worked with the approximately 450 projects funded by the National Science Foundation through their Cyberlearning program. The term Cyberlearning is a hard word to grasp, but the program and the projects in it were about using what we know about how people learn and creating new design possibilities for learning with emerging technology. In addition, in a 2017 report, we noted a strong commitment to equity in the CIRCL community. That commitment continues and is discussed in our final report with recommendations for future work to strengthen this important theme.

One thing we were struck by, in the review of the projects, was that there were many innovative designs to enhance learning with technology. As we tried to categorize the projects, we noticed that most contained combinations of multiple technologies, learning theories, and methods. While this may sound confusing, these combinations were purposefully designed to help augment learning and deepen our understanding of the technologies and how people learn. We looked for a term to use to explain this phenomenon and couldn’t find one, so we came up with a new one: Ambitious Mashups. In addition to the importance of mashing things up, the report also discusses:

Next week, we’ll be part of a webinar and talk through the different sections of the report. The webinar welcomes practitioners who want to learn more about research on emerging technologies from NSF-funded projects. While the projects aren’t always ready for use in a school today they offer ideas for new projects and new ways to think about how to use technology to support learning. The ambitious mashup projects think about learning in different ways and show how grounding activities in what we know about how people learn can help meet learning goals and outcomes. Ambitious mashups are usually exciting and give new ideas. CIRCL Educator Sarah Hampton says CIRCL reports can “help you get excited about the future landscape of education.”

We invite you to join us to learn more about Ambitious Mashups and Reflections on a Decade of Cyberlearning Research Webinar
Date: 10/28/2020
Time: 4 pm Eastern / 3 pm Central / 1 pm Pacific

Register

 

 

Title slide reads Bridging Practice and Research: Connecting Teaching and the Learning Sciences with two profile pictures and a picture of a bridge

Strengthening Education Research: Connecting Teaching and the Learning Sciences

Learning, Teachers & Researchers, Webinar, Written by: Judi Fusco, Written by: Pati Ruiz

Take a look at the recorded session Digital Promise learning sciences researchers did for ICLS 2020.  At Digital Promise, learning sciences researchers investigate the why, what, and how of learning across ages, backgrounds, and contexts through four projects. We will provide examples of how our research includes a wide range of education stakeholders across K-12 and higher education and how this work gives rise to promising learning innovations, processes, and outcomes.

CIRCL Educators Judi Fusco & Pati Ruiz presented as part of the group, watch the whole session or go to 14 minutes in for our talk titled Bridging Practice and Research: Connecting Teaching and the Learning Sciences. https://youtube.com/watch?v=iTzIiN

Find our syllabus here.

Tweet @CIRCLEducators and let us know if you have questions or thoughts about this presentation.

Computational Thinking Webinar

Computational Thinking, Webinar, Written by: Judi Fusco, Written by: Pati Ruiz, Written by: Sarah Hampton

By Pati Ruiz, Sarah Hampton, Riley Leary, Judi Fusco, and Patti Schank

For the last few months, we’ve been  reading, thinking, and talking about computational thinking (CT) in preparation for three Webinars for Teachers and Parents on the topic. The webinars are on January 30, February 6, and February 13. Go to the link above to sign up for the webinar and get all the details.

ct

A lot of the websites and articles we reviewed about computational thinking for teachers gave us only a brief introduction to it.  We’ve read about what researchers have been doing and how they have been thinking about CT, and using their research, we’ve been trying to think about what CT means for and looks like in the classroom. We also know that it’s a new topic for parents, and that parents may want to think about what it means and what it can look like at home.

The term computational thinking was made popular in a paper in 2006 by Jeannette Wing, and since then, researchers have expressed different understandings and definitions of the term. There wasn’t a common understanding of what it was then, and exactly “What is it?” is still a fair question today. Some people equate computational thinking with coding, but others do not. We agree that computational thinking is a much broader set of skills than just coding or programming, and that it’s not the same thing as computer science. Computational thinking skills include abilities that help people use computers to solve problems. Being able to program is one way of interacting with a computer, but there are other ways that one can work with a computer, and computational thinking is needed in more than just programming classes. For example, when researching for a history project, students may need to use data to strengthen their arguments. Students are using CT when they locate, evaluate, analyze, and display data. Learning to program is an advantage, in terms of learning to think in a new way, but we believe that programming is not the only way to incorporate CT into classes. We’ll explore these things in our webinars.

The first session will be an overview of CT. The second session will be geared toward what CT can look like in K12 classrooms. At our third session––a special webinar for parents or other caregivers––we will think about projects and practices that can be done at home with kids to help them learn and think in this new way. Come to the webinars to learn and think with us about computational thinking and what it looks like in K12 classrooms and at home! Please share this information with interested colleagues and parents as well. We hope to see you there!

December Webinar on Cyberlearning Topics

Cyberlearning, Cyberlearning Report 2017, Webinar

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Register for our webinar on 12/6 to learn about two of the topics in the Cyberlearning Community Report (free download and see previous 3 blog posts here).

Katie Headrick Taylor will be presenting on her work, which is the first topic in the report. 

Community Mapping: Moving, discovering, and learning across contexts

Katie will discuss digitally mediated learning and teaching or “learning on-the-move” with mobile, geospatial technologies–and collaborative capabilities. She’ll also discuss Mobile City Science and show how these mobile technologies support public-facing education. Public-facing means young people working together with other young people, shopkeepers, clergy, and neighborhood residents. In their collaborative work, the youth identify neighborhood assets and also held a public forum to present evidence-based recommendations for community development and preservation projects. 

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Classrooms as Digital Performance Spaces: Learning while doing in context

​Also in the webinar, Tom Moher will discuss some of his latest work, called RoomCast. In the Community Report, Tom discusses reorganizing classroom spaces to facilitate movement and interaction in ways that enhance learning.  You can watch Tom talk about RoomQuake in a talk given at the first Cyberlearning Summit that discusses Classrooms as Digital Performance Spaces. RoomCast builds on his work and creates a “Classroom of Things” for students and teachers to use.

Register to attend if you can join us on December 6th, 2017, 12-1:30 pm PT / 3-4:30 pm ET.  ​