| 15/05/2012 16:00 | SynergyNet: Multi-touch tables, classroom orchestration and collaborative learning | Steve Higgins | University of Durham | .. | | | |
| 06/03/2012 16:00 | Next generation facial expression recognition systems | Michel Valstar | University of Nottingham | .. | | | |
| 28/02/2012 16:00 | Analysing the playground: sensitizing concepts to inform systems that promote playful interaction | Stefan Rennick Egglestone | Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham | .. | | | |
| 31/01/2012 16:00 | Recognizing learning: a perspective from a social semiotic theory of multimodality | Gunther Kress | Institute of Education, London | .. | | | |
| 03/05/2011 16:00 | Digital content creation as a means for participatory user involvement in a museum setting | | Danish Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials | The presentation takes a closer look at a recent attempt to create a participatory learning environment in a museum setting using digital technologies. What happens when users are allowed to publish productions online and onsite? And in what ways do young museum users create, share and reflect?
The examples are from a Danish museum of media, with digital exhibits designed to illustrate the constructed nature of media content, but awareness around the actual publishing of content is also an important learning goal. Qualitative research indicates that there are both problems and opportunities in the current design of the digital participatory exhibits, and this presentation will comment on these. | Video | | |
| 15/03/2011 16:00 | Automatically data-mining learners' behaviour using CALL software to generate learning recommendations | | LSRI, University of Nottingham | Howler is a hypertextual, partly-collaborative Computer Assisted Language Learning system. It pervasively tracks user interaction with the system and uses this individual and group data to cluster similar learners by their behaviour. These clusters are then used to automatically generate tutor-style recommendations to resources, and to alterations in an individual's learning styles. I will discuss the motivation for the system, a bit about the design and implementation, and then focus on interesting uses of the system. | Video | Slides | |
| 08/03/2011 16:00 | High Fidelity Simulation as a Rich and Situated Learning Environment | | | This talk explores high-fidelity simulation, which is now being used fairly extensively in medical education and the allied health professions. Interestingly, though the use of these technologies in a situated learning setting is based primarily on similar use in industry (e.g., nuclear power plants, airline pilot training), little work has been done on the potential pedagogical value and underlying theoretical justification. This talk will explore the nature of the learning experience, and will tentatively explore some theoretical constructs that can help to further understand, frame, and direct empirical work for these settings. The notion of fidelity and how it can impact on the learner experience, for example, and the collaborative and situated nature of the experience, might provide a valuable complementarity in their approaches: the former addresses issues of design and representations, the latter is very much linked to how the simulation enhances learning. | Video | | |
| 22/02/2011 16:00 | Improvisation and Learning | Mike Sharples/Ruolan Wang | | We shall explore improvisation as an aspect of learning by children and adults. Improvisational learning involves 'making it up as you go along', through rapid alternation of planning and execution that draws upon the resources of a material environment. The combination of cognitive and material constraint provides a structure within which creativity and meaning making can occur. Ensemble improvisation requires mutual acceptance and an ability to build on the emerging performance of others. Learning can occur by exploring a space of possibilities, by developing new routines or coordinations, and by gaining an understanding of the function of improvisation within problem solving or innovation. Despite its analytic complexity, improvisation through imaginative play forms an essential part of early learning, as children explore imaginary worlds, distinguish fantasy from reality, and learn the rules of games and how to modify them. But an analysis of learning episodes by adults shows little evidence of such playful improvisation. Instead, they engage in improvisational learning a tool for problem solving or as a consequence of progressing a craft activity. Some forms of deliberate and skilful adult improvisation, in drama and music, are based around ensemble play. We suggest there is an opportunity to support a developmental progression of learning through improvisation from childhood play to adult ensemble performance, as a way to maintain young people's interest in learning, to engage them in constructive inquiry, and to develop skills of creative extemporization that will be required to prosper in a complex, changing world. | Video | Slides | |
| 15/02/2011 16:00 | Mobile Game Based Learning for PE (Peer Educators) of the MSM (Males having Sex with Males) Community in India | | LSRI, University of Nottingham | A SMS based game on mobile phones has been deployed with a marginalised group of Peer Educators in Kolkata, India. This group is called Males having Sex with Males (MSM) and are a core part of HIV prevention strategy in higher at risk groups in India. The SMS game endeavoured to simulate real life (outreach) work experiences of the MSM Peer Educators.
At the start of the project the research question was, "Can we design and evaluate an effective learning support for Peer Educators of the MSM community using mobile game based learning?" and the specific objectives of the study were:
1. To explore peer education and identify the key learning needs of the Peer Educators
2. To use a participatory process to design and pilot the game as a learning intervention
3. To implement the SMS based intervention amongst a group of Peer Educators.
4. To evaluate whether the SMS text based game had any impact on:
a. learning needs identified by the Peer Educators
b. processes and practices of peer education
5. To evaluate the SMS game
Has the project been able to achieve what it was set to do? | Video | Slides | |
| 08/02/2011 16:00 | Developing a Sustainable Seamless (Mobile) Learning Education Innovation in Singapore | | National Institute of Education, Singapore | Mobile computing technologies are becoming more and more pervasive, and affordable in our daily lives. Such technologies are suitable for one-to-one and seamless learning (learning everywhere and all the time). However, how to prepare young students for the new habits of learning that are sustainable is a big challenge. We embarked on a three-year research study to explore how to develop a sustainable seamless learning pedagogy in a primary school. We worked with one primary three experimental and mixed ability class (3X) since 2009. Each student in 3X was given a smart phone with unlimited Internet access, data plan and some educational software tools and he/she could use the phone 24/7. My presentation will focus on how we have integrated the affordances of mobile technologies to transform the existing primary three and four science curriculum, our multiple assessment modes, and some of the changes in the science teacher and the students (mainly the “formal” sub-group’s work; we also have a “informal” sub-group within the project team). I will also share some of our challenges we have faced. We hope the presentation becomes a means for our exchange of ideas in using mobile technology for 21st century learning. | Video | | |
| 01/02/2011 16:00 | Creating "Wales in a website" – Casgliad y Werin Cymru/People’s Collection Wales | | People's Collection Wales | Casgliad y Werin Cymru – The People’s Collection Wales is a collaborative and federated programme developed by national institutions to tell the story of a nation from the perspective of its people. Drawing upon the memories, photographs, video, audio and 3D resources of national, regional and local archives, as well as user-generated content from groups and individuals, the website is creating a resource that places heritage media in its temporal and spatial context, and encourages all users not just to view but to contribute and re-use this media in innovative ways.
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| 25/01/2011 16:00 | Towards a Field Toolkit for in-field construction of 3D surface models | | LSRI/Horizon, University of Nottingham | My research interests are centred around teaching and learning through model building in the field using mobile technology. My work encompasses a multitude of different techniques and disciplines including mobile learning, glacial reconstruction, mobile augmented reality and remote data collection. The presentation will showcase developments in my research including a prototype of a mobile field intervention designed for students to reconstruct glacial models in the field by picking out a glacial trim-line from field evidence. This will allow them to reflect and learn about the natural landscape with an inquiry based approach. | Video | | |
| 18/01/2011 16:00 | Africa... 'Development', Learning, Mobiles | | University of Wolverhampton | There is much activity, much discussion and much interest in the capacity of mobile devices to deliver, support and enhance learning for the disenfranchised, the disadvantaged and the developing communities and regions of the world especially in Africa. I argue that much of this discussion, interest and activity is however uncritical, simplistic and poorly synthesised.
In general the argument for using mobile phones or other mobile devices to address educational disadvantage is plausible, self-evident and straightforward: their ownership and acceptance are near-universal and cut across most notions of ‘digital divides’; their use is based around robust sustainable business models; they are, unlike other ICTs, found at the BOP amongst the next billion subscribers; they deliver information, ideas and, increasingly, images. And there are no other options!
There is furthermore a rapidly increasing ownership of more powerful handsets in the developing world, decreasing real costs of this hardware and connectivity, increasing coverage of higher specification networks in these regions and renewed activity of donors and of corporates representing publishing, handsets, services and infrastructure looking for sustainable business models based on the educational use of mobile devices in developing regions.
These various communities, necessary actors in facilitating successful learning using mobile devices and technologies, each come with considerable potential but often inappropriate contributions, partial understandings and flawed assumptions. This seminar will explore the extent to which their optimism is misplaced.
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| 11/01/2011 16:00 | An Internet of Things that Don’t Exist | | | The term 'internet of things' refers to the technical and cultural shift that is anticipated as society moves to a ubiquitous form of computing in which every device is 'on', and every device is connected in some way to the internet. However, many versions of the 'internet of things' rely upon one premise: that the thing remains in existence. This paper forecasts a near future when digital memories that have been associated with artefacts remain as the only reference to that thing, because that thing has been lost or disposed of. Remaining as entries in databases whilst its material instantiation has been crushed, burnt or tipped into a landfill, the immaterial artefact has the potential to live on within the networks society. Alive and well in the cloud, these ghosts will haunt their makers, distributors, vendors and owners forever, remaining as searchable artefacts that can be correlated against any other data from the past, present or future.
In this seminar Chris Speed will reflect upon recent research / art projects that evoke a sense of time and exhume personal memories of the past.
Chris Speed is Reader in Digital Spaces within the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. http://fields.eca.ac.uk | Video | | |
| 07/12/2010 16:00 | Games rooted in the player's context: An introduction to Hypercontextualized Game Design | | University Eastern Finland (formerly University of Joensuu) | A considerable amount of research focuses to cover the needs of a growing information society, aiming to gather data to be delivered to masses and growing markets. By following only the global trend, we neglect the richness in information and experience that is enclosed in particular locations. There exists a need to focus on small audiences and to support them to express themselves, futhermore to help individuals to create roots in their environments. The philosopher Weil mentions: "[t]o be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul."
In my talk I will present my research into Hypercontextualized Games (HCG). A HCG is a locally designed game with a specific purpose, which focuses on small audiences. HCG is strongly interwoven with the context where designers and players are embedded, by using physical resources available on site. Furthermore, HCG contains information about the subject matter of the game's purpose to promote the guidance of informal learning experiences on-site.
The seminar explains the HCG design concept, and the journey which helped us to derive it. The talk will make use of case studies in Finland and Tanzania. | Video | | |
| 30/11/2010 16:00 | Spaces in-between us: Understanding spatial practice in Second Life | Maggi Savin-Baden | Learning Innovation, Coventry University | This seminar will present a study that explored space and spatial practice in Second Life from the point of view of participants in higher education (lectures, developers and researchers) who had been Second Life or virtual world users for more than three years. It investigated uses of spaces, perceptions of space and participants’ views of them-selves in the Second Life space. The overarching methodology was narrative inquiry which was adopted as access to stories and experiences of space seemed a useful means of coming to understand space and spatial practice from staff perspectives. Methods adopted included an in-world discussion as well as interview-discussions with participants. The findings indicated that issues such as Spatial Practice, Second Life Proxemics, Symbolic Identities and Spatial Conventions were central concerns for those involved in using Second Life in teaching, development and research. Further it was evident that adopting Second Life in higher education could prompt in-depth consideration of the impact of issues such as territory, spatial interaction and identity on student learning. Yet the findings also indicated that areas such as learning design, proxemics and preparation of staff and students about spatial issues are concerns that bear further research. | | Slides | |
| 23/11/2010 16:00 | Metafora: learning to learn together through social orchestration | Yang Yang and Rupert Wegerif | | The aim of the project is for children to plan their gaming experience around the challenge by using a visual language to signify a scientific investigation process. In the game, children will be assigned different roles to tackle the challenge and to reflect and refine their plans across time. Moreover, to engage children in scientific debates with critical and creative reasoning, micro-process of online discussion will be orchestrated and guided. In this seminar, we will talk through the proposed structure of metafora system and invite a discussion, in order to refine the design. | Video | | |
| 16/11/2010 16:00 | Student as Producer: A Pedagogy for the Avant-Garde; or, how do revolutionary teachers teach? | | | Student as Producer aims to connect undergraduate teaching and learning and academic research so that students become part of the academic project of the university: as producers of knowledge and meaning. The paper sets out the intellectual ideas that lie behind the concept, and how Student as Producer is being developed across the sector and at the University of Lincoln. The theoretical basis for this work is derived from critical social theory grounded in avant-garde Marxism that developed in Soviet Russia after the Bolshevik uprising in 1917, before being suppressed by Stalin, and a group of modernist Marxists working in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. A key issue for Student as Producer is that social learning is more than the individual learning in a social context, and includes the way in which the social context itself is transformed through progressive pedagogic practice. This transformation includes the institution within which the pedagogical activities are taking place, and the society out of which the particular institution is derived. At a time when the market-based model for social development appears increasingly untenable, the creation of a more progressive and sustainable social world becomes ever more necessary and desirable. This work is currently being funded by the Higher Education Academy through the National Fellowship Project Scheme 2010-2013. | Video | | |
| 09/11/2010 16:00 | Constructionist learning by computing for construal | | | A construal is a physical object that supports sense-making through exploratory interaction and interpretation. This notion was elaborated by the historian and philosopher of science David Gooding in his account of Faraday's experimental methods. The advent of computing technology has liberated the making of construals, but construal-by-computer is not well-served by the focus in computer science on principles and tools for developing programs.
In this talk, I shall present a prototype environment for creating construals by computer that exploits model-building with dependency such as is represented in spreadsheets and dynamic geometry environments. Our construals are made up of definitions that express dependencies between observables. As will be illustrated with reference to construing human solving of Sudoku puzzles, many kinds of human agency can be expressed through modifying the current set of definitions. The construal serves as a shared artefact with which developers, teachers and pupils can all interact concurrently in essentially the same way, each according to their role and experience. Preliminary experiments with schoolchildren highlight potential for rich and radically new kinds of learning experience and unprecedented scope for recording, monitoring and intervening in support of constructionist learning.
Background sources
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| 26/10/2010 16:00 | Exploiting intelligent recommendation systems to scaffold independent learning with Web 2.0 tools and mobile devices | | Queensland University of Technology, Australia | Intelligent recommender systems can generate complex learner profiles by aggregating data from sources across a student’s personal learning environment. These data sources may include school-based sources such as grades, preferred learning methods, skill levels and learning goals; web-based sources such as digital social networks, RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, social bookmarks and internet search history; and mobile-based data such as location, motion, weather, connectivity options and proximity to others.
The value in aggregating data from a range of sources across a student’s personal learning environment is two fold. Firstly, it allows an intelligent system to build complex student profiles, opening up possibilities for the customisation of instruction. Secondly, it provides an opportunity to frame elements of a student’s personal learning environment, such as web 2.0 tools and mobile devices, as scaffolding for learning.
In this presentation I will be discussing how intelligent recommender systems can be applied to foster metacognition and inquiry-based learning by framing the use of web 2.0 tools and mobile devices. I will present initial design specifications for a new learning tool that seeks to put this theory into practice.
This seminar will be followed by a hands-on design workshop to be held the following day, October 27. Staff and students are very welcome to participate in both events. | Video | Slides | |
| 12/10/2010 16:00 | Education in the wild: contextual and location-based learning in action | | | In this talk, I will present my research into location-based contextual mobile learning. I will give an overview of, and background to, the field, particularly into work carried out by colleagues in Europe.
I will then explore the notion of informal learning about the landscape, through a couple of case studies: firstly, how visitors can engage with with the landscape through the use of mobile devices when visiting the Lake District and secondly what guidelines are useful for the design of location-based audio for mobile learning.
Lastly, I will present ongoing research into using crowd-sourced gelocated content for 'ad hoc' environmental education in situ. | | Slides | |
| 05/10/2010 16:00 | Requirements for mobile, web-based tools to support HE students on field trips | Giasemi Vavoula | | Focusing on students in the Arts and Humanities, the Study Visit project aims to understand what potential mobile, web-based tools have to support HE field trips. In this talk I will report a pilot study with Museum Studies students at the University of Leicester, which has enabled the scoping of requirements for such tools through an analysis of different perceptions of context and support. I will also report lessons learned from explorations of the interplay between pedagogical and technological design. | Video | Slides | |
| 28/09/2010 16:00 | The use of art and interactive designs to attract and disseminate research | | | By tradition, academic work has various communication routes ranging from journal and conference articles to presentations and posters. More recently the increasing emphasis on ‘impact’ presents the challenge of developing ways to communicate research to a wider audience. One possibility, that arguably has received limited attention, is the use of ‘art’, particularly interactive designs, as a medium to attract and disseminate work. If art does offer a productive communication medium, what efforts should be expected from researchers, in areas such as learning sciences, to develop such ‘skills’? This talk aims to ignite this heated debate by presenting some of the experiences and designs of ‘MakingStuff’. MakingStuff is a motley crew at the LSRI who have met somewhat haphazardly over the last year to discuss stuff like art, learning, and whose turn it is to make coffee. | | | |
| 27/07/2010 16:00 | A computer model of “how we write” | Rafael Perez y Perez | Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Mexico | MEXICA is a computer model that generates plots for short stories based on the engagement-reflection cognitive account of writing, described by Mike Sharples in his book “how we write” (Sharples, 1999). During engagement MEXICA generates material guided by content and rhetorical constraints, avoiding the use of explicit characters' goals or story-structures. During reflection the system breaks impasses, evaluates the novelty and interestingness of the story in progress and verifies that coherence requirements are satisfied.
In this talk I will give a brief introduction to automatic story-generators. Then, I will explain the main characteristics of the MEXICA system, I will show how a computational representation of emotions is employed to progress a story in a coherent way and generate novel situations, and how the dramatic tension of the story in progress might be employed to evaluate its interestingness. Finally, I will mention how we are employing MEXICA as starting point for new research projects. | Video | | |
| 08/07/2010 12:00 | Finding Common Ground: Enhancing Domestic-International Student Engagement in the Classroom | | University of Melbourne | The presentation showcases the results of an Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) funded project which involved three Australian Universities (University of Melbourne, RMIT University and Victoria University. Many Universities in Australia argue that one of the key benefits of having international students on campus is the potential for cross-cultural interactions between students. Yet, there is research that indicates that interaction levels are relatively low across disciplines. While much research has focused on their social interaction outside the classroom, this project looks at what might occur within the classroom environment (including teutorials, seminars, laboratories and online discussion). This project argued that interaction between domestic and international students need to be strategically planned for and encouraged within classrooms. The presentation highlights a range of strategies which academics might consider in trying to enhance engagement between diverse groups of students.
Presenter:
Dr Shanton Chang is a senior lecturer in Change Management and Social Impacts of Information Systems at the Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne. He completed his PhD in Competencies for Managing Multicultural Workforces at Monash University. His current primary areas of research include the Social Aspects of Broadband Technology Adoption, Online Behaviour and Online Prosumers, and Health and Education Informatics. He is also a recipient of a number of Awards for Excellence in Teaching from the University. Shanton has been involved in the international education sector in Australia for nearly two decades. His involvement started during his days as an international student in the early nineties. In 2000, he received the IDP award for outstanding contribution to the international education sector. In 2008, he received the ISANA Award for ongoing contribution to the International Education Association. (ISANA is the Australian counterpart of UKCISA). | Video | | |
| 05/07/2010 10:00 | Special ESRC Educational Futures Seminar Series: Methods and Tools for Educational Futures | Richard Slaughter, Giasemi Vavoula & Richard Sandford | Educational Futures Seminar Series | Speakers:
Richard Slaughter, Director, Foresight International: Integral futures for education: theory and methods
Giasemi Vavoula, University of Leicester: The future technology workshop method
Richard Sandford, Futurelab: A survey of methods for educational futures research
The day will be divided into speaker sessions and discussion sessions organised around the question - 'what constitutes a 'futures literate' education system?‘
No charge for attendance - limited places available on a first come, first served basis. To register, please email Barbara Ashcroft on b.ashcroft@mmu.ac.ukThe seminar is part of the ESRC funded 'Educational Futures Seminar Series', run jointly by the Education and Social Research Institute, MMU; Graduate School of Education, Exeter University; London Knowledge Lab; LSRI, Nottingham University; Futurelab
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| 29/06/2010 16:00 | Ensuring Personal Data Remains Personal in Next Generation Internet Computing Applications | | | The EU Framework 7 project TAS³ (Trusted Architecture for Securely Shared Services) aims to create a service infrastructure that will place the user in control of the use of their personal data in service orientated distributed computing environments at all times. The TAS³ implementation at the University of Nottingham is supporting a regional student placement scheme which will provide students with automated placement matching and management services from various service providers. The objective is to use TAS³ technology to allow users to track use of data extracted from their ePortfolios in other applications. We aim to allow users to be able to monitor how their data is used and by whom, and even to recall it.
The system is managed in real time using Policy Enforcement Points (PEP) and Policy Decision Points (PDP) linked to a user Dashboard via a specifically designed Audit Bus. This framework informs users about how their data is being used once it is extracted from the original data store (i.e. social networking site or ePortfolio). The rules of the framework are based on a trust model; separate services that manage trust in TAS³ work in tandem with service negotiation and discovery services. The results of the implementation were demonstrated to the European Commission at the formal project review in March 2010. The demonstrator showed successfully how a user can control the use of their personal data when it is extracted from the original hosted environment. The TAS³ framework is being applied in other domains, including Healthcare, and has the potential to revolutionise how personal data use on the internet is viewed. | Video | | |
| 08/06/2010 16:00 | TEL it to the People: Technology Enhanced Learning and the Making and Hacking Communities | | | Until recently, Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) tools that support embodied learning modalities have been locked away in academic and corporate research labs. But in the past few years, rich communities of creative exploration have grown, due to the ease of Internet communication, open-source hardware, and low cost components. Sharing their collected experiences and successes via social networking sites, groups of Makers and Hackers have made it easier to try out physical interactive devices. TEL researchers are starting to unlock the potential of these new tools.
I will present a brief survey of the Making and Hacking phenomena and the potential it has for TEL, followed by a short overview of recent research at the London Knowledge Lab, which explored embodied learning of mathematics and geometry. I'll also demo some of the quickly hacked together tools we used for this project. | Video | Slides | |
| 01/06/2010 16:00 | Supporting Collaborative Learning with Interactive Tabletops | Jochen "Jeff" Rick | | Interactive tabletops allow multiple users to interact with the same large horizontal display concurrently through touch input, pen input, or moving physical objects whose position and orientation can be tracked. Hence, there is growing excitement about this technology's potential to support small group work (2-4 learners per tabletop). For instance, SMART Technologies is already selling a commercial product aimed at the classroom.
In this presentation, I provide an overview of the major research to date on children's use of interactive tabletops. I provide concrete examples from my own research on developing tabletop applications and evaluating children's use of these applications. I will address several important questions: How does the age of the participants impact the use of the technology and the nature of the collaboration? What is the value of concurrent input? What models of collaborative learning apply? How can we alter a design to encourage a different form of interaction? What are the major barriers to interactive tabletops succeeding as widespread educational technology and how can research help to overcome these barriers? | Video | | |
| 25/05/2010 16:00 | A Design Toolkit for Emerging Learning Landscapes Supported by Ubiquitous Computing | Daniel Spikol | Linnaeus University, Vaxjo | The wide use of mobile devices and their integration in our everyday activities is changing the way we communicate, share information, and learn. For example, in populous African countries like Uganda and Nigeria more people have access to mobile phones than electricity in their homes (Kerr, 2010). Also in the OECD, the rapid adoption of powerful mobile devices offers new opportunities to support alternative types of education (Shuler, 2009; Johnson, Levine, Smith, & Stone, 2010). Yet, researchers, policy makers, teachers, and learners struggle to evolve educational theories and practice for meeting the demands of our network society. Mobile devices along with different types of computers are always connected providing a constant stream of digital content to and from people, thus adding new layers to our everyday information landscape. These emergent trends are changing our communication and collaboration patterns that are present in many aspects of our daily lives, but they have not been effectively harnessed for the field of education yet.
Almost twenty years ago, Kaput (1992) argued that the limitations of computer use in the coming decades are likely to be less a result of technological limitations than a result of limited human imagination and the constraints of old habits and social structures. Therefore, it can be argued that different strategies are needed to explore and promote innovative educational practices with new technologies and design can be argued is this catalyst. The main research question addressed in this thesis is formulated as following; what new design approaches can be developed for supporting emerging learning landscapes with ubiquitous computing? In order to investigate this question design thinking is used to bring together the different perspectives of ubiquitous computing, human-computer interaction, and learning. This is exemplified by Simon's (1996) classic definition of design; everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. More recently Morello (2000), has positioned design as a tool that can help predict the future when it anticipates experience. Yet, the practice of design in research, to develop and implement innovative education practices supported by mobile and ubiquitous technologies has not mirrored the widespread adoption outside of the field of learning.
The empirical work presented in this dissertation is based on the activities and outcomes that emerge from three projects that include educational games, inquiry based science learning, and mathematics activities. These projects are analyzed by comparing the different design approaches and by presenting their advantages and drawbacks. From this analysis, the most salient design approaches are identified in order to provide the foundations of a design toolkit. The technological components that are part of the learning landscape include, multiple devices ranging from sensors, mobile phones, & personal computers, to large interactive displays, and the software solutions to support seamless interactions. The orchestration of these pieces; namely people, activities, spaces, and technologies requires a toolkit approach where designers can choose the right course of action. The intention for creating and utilizing such a toolkit is to allow for a better flow between the requirements for learning and the interactions in the networked world. This improved flow is accomplished by the identification of different design factors and interaction modes that recognize the differences between physical, cognitive and social navigation across these emerging landscapes. Therefore, an expanded interaction design process is developed that recognizes the central role of the designer for supporting innovative research and practices in technology-enhanced learning. | Video | Slides | |
| 18/05/2010 17:00 | Critiquing research on children's learning of mathematics | | | Please note this seminar will be at 5pm (not 4pm as per usual). The seminar forms part of the MMES (Midlands Mathematics Education Seminars).
Research in mathematics learning is a diverse field, drawing on a large number of influences and disciplines. This interdisciplinarity seems like a good thing, until we come to try and make sense of questions that are either located at, or cross, disciplinary boundaries. A particularly difficult boundary to work at is that between ‘the individual’ and ‘the group’. A large number of theorists and commentators have between them established a rhetoric of cognitive v. sociocultural, acquisition v. participation and individual v. social. The starting point for this seminar will be a description of some of the difficulties that can be encountered when talking about children's learning of mathematics - focusing in particular on this boundary between individual and group learning.
The rest of the seminar will deal with the question: what happens if we reject the individual/group dichotomy? Can we develop an approach to the research of mathematics learning that is genuinely interdisciplinary? And would this be a useful thing to do?
This is very much a work in progress, and hopefully will stimulate some interesting discussion. Drawing together my own experience in psychology, philosophy, computer science and education, I'm looking forward to the opportunity to discuss the issues in this seminar with an LSRI audience.
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| 23/03/2010 16:00 | More than Pretty Pictures | | | Observe any group of scientists sharing ideas and information, and you will invariably see that, at some point, someone will take out a pen and paper, or a napkin over lunch, or walk up to a whiteboard and start drawing. One need not be an artist to communicate the scientific concept in the drawing. The purpose of the exercise is to visually represent and communicate an idea or information, nothing more. Intriguingly, we have found that there is a profound effect on the drawer in this exercise. That is, in addition to communicating, the person making the drawing achieves a better understanding of a concept through the process of thinking about how to visually explain it.
The judgment and decision-making required to render the visual clarifies the thinking. One must decide on a hierarchy of information—what must be included and what might be left out? What is the main point of the visual? Just as in writing an article or responding to an essay question, we must understand and then plan what we want to “say” in a drawing.
This talk will describe the National Science Foundation-funded program, "Picturing to Learn" ( www.picturingtolearn.org) for undergraduate students and will include a personal story of science photographer Felice Frankel's efforts (her successes and failures) in visually communicating science for journal submissions and for the public.
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| 16/03/2010 16:00 | Drawings as a means to support dynamic modeling activities | | | Dynamic modeling of scientific phenomena is seen as a promising approach to enhance the learning of science. By constructing an external executable representation of a domain, learners are expected to acquire a deeper understanding of the structure of the domain at hand.
Despite its benefits for teaching, modeling is a complex task for most learners. It requires integrating problem information and prior knowledge using a modeling language that is not always familiar.
In this presentation I will explore the possibility to use freehand drawings as a means to support modeling, especially for beginning modelers. Using drawings learners can express their prior knowledge in a way of their choosing, unbound by the formal representation required for modeling. Topics that will be discussed are the analysis of drawings, automatic recognition of drawing elements to support the use of the drawing as initial model, or even to the drawing becoming the model. | Video | | |
| 09/03/2010 16:00 | Is non-symbolic ‘number sense’ related to formal mathematics ability? | | | There is growing evidence that humans have an inbuilt `number sense' system, which supports approximate numerical operations. This system is present in infancy and adulthood, providing abstract approximate representations of numerosity, which can be compared and manipulated. Findings suggest that when we learn to deal with symbolic numerals, they may be mapped onto the pre-existing non-symbolic system. However, the relationship between 'number sense' and formal mathematics ability remains unclear. If symbolic arithmetic is aided by the use of a non-symbolic system, then children's understanding of number could be facilitated by improving mapping between systems.
Halberda, Mazzocco, & Feigenson (2008) measured the acuity of 14-year-olds' number sense in a non-symbolic comparison task and related this retrospectively to the children's performance on formal mathematics measures, which had been taken each year from the ages of five to eleven. They found a positive relationship between non-symbolic acuity and performance on symbolic mathematics assessments, controlling for various cognitive factors such as IQ and working memory.
In the present study, participants were assessed for non-symbolic acuity, formal mathematics ability and IQ, among other measures. In contrast to Halberda et al., we found no relationship between formal mathematics ability and accuracy in a non-symbolic comparison task with large numerosities when controlling for IQ. Several possible sources of this discrepancy are discussed. | Video | Slides | |
| 02/03/2010 16:00 | Emotion understanding and performance during computer supported collaboration | | | Computer supported collaboration is a powerful way to facilitate learning. In comparison with cognitive, social and design factors, little is known about affect and emotions in computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL). My PhD project investigated the relationship between the way that collaborators understand the emotions of each other and their performance during the use of collaborative technologies. I will explain the method and results of three studies that combine statistical techniques for group analysis with detailed qualitative descriptions. The first one assessed the relationship between the emotions of partners collaborating around a concept mapping tool and an educational computer game. The second study is an over-time investigation about the relationship between partners’ emotions and their performance during the use of a collaborative computer game. The third study assessed the benefits of supporting the awareness about the emotions of the partner during face-to-face collaborations and remote collaborations. Implications about the evaluation of collaborative learning technologies and the role of emotions in collaborative learning will be discussed. | Video | Slides | |
| 23/02/2010 16:00 | Understanding visual and multimodal learning | | | When people are learning complicated new ideas, interpreting and constructing visual or multiple forms of representation can bring unique benefits. In other words, representations are powerful tools for learning but like all powerful tools they need careful handling if learners are to use them successfully. Moreover, even after many years of active research, it is not clear how representations mediate learning nor which activities on what representations help specific learners in particular contexts. In this talk I will illustrate some of the many facets of learning with representations in order to try to move closer to an answer to these questions.
Due to technical problems the first 2 minutes of the video has no audio please keep watching and the audio does start. | Video | Slides | |
| 02/02/2010 16:00 | If learning mathematics requires a teacher, where did the teachers come from? | Aaron Sloman | | I shall try to show why we need to combine philosophy of mathematics, biology (evolution and epigenesis), developmental psychology, and AI/Robotics in order to understand how mathematical competences grow out of more general competences produced by biological evolution for dealing creatively with a rich and varied, but highly structured physical environment.
I suspect that there are deep implications for primary school education and how mathematics can be taught, as well as for the design of future intelligent robots. But the problems are hard and I am looking for clever collaborators and critics!
It may be of interest also to some philosophers, mathematicians, AI researchers, and researchers studying animal cognition, as well as people from the learning sciences and psychology.
| Video | | |
| 26/01/2010 16:00 | Auditory training to reduce the cognitive burdens that arise from hearing impairments | | | Difficulties communicating are common in everyday life. It is frustrating when you cannot understand someone at the pub or on a bad mobile phone connection. The education of children is hampered when they cannot understand the teacher because the classroom is noisy. The frequency and severity of these communication difficulties are increased for individuals with hearing impairments. Hearing loss distorts speech and likely increases the cognitive resources required for communicating.
This is a major problem because cognitive resources devoted to communicating cannot be used for other things (e.g., hearing-impaired children may devote more cognitive resources to understanding the teacher and therefore less cognitive resources to learning than normal-hearing children). There are a number of potential ways to compensate for the adverse effects of hearing loss. One of the most obvious ways is to change the acoustics (e.g., through hearing aid amplification and noise reduction). Another way, which could be used in conjunction with acoustic strategies, is to capitalize on our tremendous capacity to learn. This talk will focus on a training based intervention that is being designed to promote auditory perceptual learning as a means of reducing the cognitive burdens that arise from hearing impairments. | Video | | |
| 19/01/2010 16:00 | Development of Crowd Sourced System for Ubiquitous Language Learning | | | Ubiquitous technologies can provide great opportunities for learning. Learning in this way should not tie learners to specific places, times and situations as it is delivered through existing technologies already in use in the context of learners’ day-to-day activities. In particular, new generation of mobile devices with PC-like functionality, advance sensing and multimedia capabilities have great potential for supporting ubiquitous language learning.
This presentation focuses on the development of a collaborative mobile knowledge sharing system for language learners (CloudBank) that combines the characteristics of personal use, contextual use, informal learning, Web 2.0 ideas of user-generated content, content syndication and social networks, to build a mobile- and web-based crowed-sourced information system to help international students further their knowledge of local UK language and culture. An overview of the application design is given and technical architecture and implementation of the system is discussed. The paper concludes with a discussion of research and evaluation issues that arise in the context of crowd sourced systems for ubiquitous language learning. | Video | | |
| 08/12/2009 16:00 | Learning-through-Touring | | Goldsmiths College, University of London | How can touring urban buildings and their environs reinvigorate learning activities? Exploring this question is the focus for this seminar. Concepts and processes for learning through touring are presented in two forms:
1. As analytic investigations from different disciplines such as architecture, art, education, geography and urbanism in which notions of site-specificity and subjectivity are argued to be relevant in rethinking the relationship between learning and touring
2. As a series of site-specific design projects in which these ideas are explored in practice - Mudlarking in Deptford, Transitional Spaces at the V&A and Cracking Maps at the British Library
Discussion around a new design methodology – learning-through-touring – concludes the seminar. This methodology has relevance for those concerned with developing participatory practice in urban design and architecture, with education centres committed to delivering learning activities in and about the built environment, with educators who develop creative ways of engaging with the topography of the urban landscape, and with those researching mobile learning.
http://www.gold.ac.uk/design/staff/sprake/ | Video | | |
| 17/11/2009 16:00 | Adaptive cognition: How do we exploit images as a learning resource in modern technologies? | | | The argument can be made that, in the recent past, the use of images as communication and learning tools has been eclipsed by text. Recent developments in ICT have now redressed that balance and the growth of available visual information in fields as diverse as medicine, archaeology, fashion, and the media generally, is plain to see. How we adapt to this growth, and exploit it, is however unclear, and a symptom of this is clear evidence that image databases are ineffective and can be hard to use. In this talk I argue that one approach to take is to examine the natural ecology of tasks using images from where we can identify cognitive competences and opportunities for exploitation. From the applied side, we can use this approach to infer ways in which learning through visual media can be supported, and on the theoretical side it identifies areas of cognitive theory we need to explore further to make this possible. | Video | Slides | |
| 27/10/2009 16:00 | Orchestrating learning in a one-to-one technology classroom | | | One-to-one technology classrooms equip each child with a computing device that provides personalised learning tools. They offer promising environments to support individual and small group learning through the affordances of handheld devices such as portability, low cost and communication features. However, there are management problems in the technology-enabled classroom, for instance, lack of support for scaffolding collaborative and whole class working, design of lessons that switch easily from one to another activity, and difficulty in re-using lesson components.
The research investigates the development and evaluation of a software tool (SceDer) to enable a teacher to design and orchestrate learning in a one-to-one classroom. It begins with the studies: one-to-one classroom characteristics; currently available software tools and specifications in e-learning such as IMS LD, IMS LD compliant software tools and LAMS; research and practices in the area of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning such as CSCL Scripts; and the ideal of effective scenarios for one-to-one classrooms. A subset of the effective scenarios are then analysed to the level of activity and interaction in order to discover how technology can support the teachers and students when the lessons are mediated by the technology.
The results of the scenarios analysis, together with the requirements from relevant stakeholders such as students, teachers, researchers, and technologists captured from the literature review, are then brought together for developing the SceDer system to orchestrate learning with one-to-one technologies. SceDer consists of three main parts: SceDer Authoring, an authoring system for teachers to design lessons; an interchange language (COML), for describing lesson sequences and resources; and a delivery system based on Group Scribbles software, for enabling the teacher to deliver and manage the designed lessons in the one-to-one classrooms.
The talk relates to the design, development, implementation, and evaluation of the SceDer system which has been tested in school classrooms to assess its usability, usefulness and expressiveness. The results of usability demonstrate that the system provides intuitive designer and player tools, that can be easily used by teachers and students to achieve the lesson goals. The results of usefulness show that SceDer can manage fluid transitions between individual, group, and whole class learning activities. In term of expressiveness, SceDer is able to support teachers to rapidly design and conduct a wide range of scenarios. This includes the reflection on the work and possible approaches to further improve the system.
http://www.lsri.nottingham.ac.uk/Students/Jitti.php | Video | Slides | |
| 20/10/2009 16:00 | Towards an Interdisciplinary Design Science of Learning | | | A central problem with the study of learning is that it is inherently interdisciplinary. Understanding learning as a process of effecting permanent changes to the brain is an aspect of neuroscience; as the acquisition of skills and knowledge, learning forms part of cognitive psychology; as an activity of social and cultural development, it falls under social sciences; as a process of systemic adaptation to societal changes it could be part of history, business or economics. In addition, enabling people to learn more effectively brings in the disciplines of design and engineering.
We need to develop new methods to integrate this knowledge and to harness it for the benefit of learners and society. The suggestion is to build a design science of complex systems for teaching and learning. Such an enterprise needs be international, to build on expertise across many research centres. It should be cross-cultural, respecting and celebrating the diversity of settings and approaches to learning. It needs to be both practitioner-oriented and design-based, if it is to analyse how learning is currently achieved and also develop new methods for enabling and supporting productive learning. It must embrace multiple technologies, including digital media, traditional media and human knowledge, not just as resources for learning, but as integral parts of a complex learning system. It needs to be multi-level and multi-method, seeking to integrate the neural, cognitive, social and cultural aspects of learning.
Some immediate consequences of such an agenda are that this cannot be done be one researcher, or one lab, alone. Just as the Human Genome project required a cooperation of many research labs, a long timescale, a shared infrastructure and ethical framework, and a common set of tools, so the development of an Interdisciplinary Design Science of Learning needs a shared effort to integrate facilities for the co-design of technology-enabled learning and cross-cultural studies of learning effectiveness. Such studies are already underway. For example, the Group Scribbles technology developed at SRI ( http://groupscribbles.sri.com/) is being developed and tested across multiple sites in a worldwide collaboration. International research on educational design patterns is developing a shared notation and framework to analyse and guide productive learning.
The talk will be an exploration of the challenges and opportunities for a large-scale Design Science of Learning, some methods that might be appropriate, and examples of work already underway. | Video | Slides | |
| 13/10/2009 16:00 | Using facets to integrate knowledge, learning and communities | | | Traditional classification schemes, such as Dewey Decimal, categorize assets into mutually exclusive and hierarchically arranged categories. These taxonomies can usefully present information within a principled and informative model. However, critics such as Clay Shirky assert that "ontology is overrated", arguing that a taxonomy embodies a theory of a domain that is often unhelpful, biased or inflexible.
By contrast, Ranganathan's faceted classification schemes place categories at the intersections of two or more independent and orthogonal dimensions. Apples and radishes live in the set of things that are spherical, red and edible. By adding "flavour" as a fourth dimension we can distinguish radishes and tomatoes ("savoury") from apples and plums ("sweet"). By losing the "spherical" constraint, we get to strawberries and raspberries. Alternatively, we can explore "red" and "spherical" to discover red Giants, Dahlias and cricket balls. Where taxonomies assert a single point of view based on specialisation relationships, facets encourage exploration and discovery of content linked by shared properties. The reader can easily narrow down, broaden out or dog-leg through a hypercube of related concepts. Faceted schemes work well for computer-based repositories. Marti Hearst's Flamenco browser is an established design pattern for integrating faceted browsing and free-form search. For example, http://flamenco.berkeley.edu/demos.html illustrates the ability to explore exhibits in the fine arts museums of San Francisco by attributes such as colour, media and artist.
This session will discuss practical applications of faceted classification for organizing learning and knowledge. Drawing on his experiences while applying faceted models in public and private sector solutions, Paul we will share techniques for the integration of formal documentation, on-line learning, harvested knowledge, external resources and communities of practice. He will also review opportunities to integrate facets with social media within a learning management system.
| Video | | |
| 06/10/2009 16:00 | The Personal Inquiry (PI) project: lessons learned | | | The PI: Personal Inquiry project, a joint project between University of Nottingham and the Open University, is developing a new approach to ‘Personal Scripted Inquiry Learning’ as a learning experience where children are engaged in a scientific process of gathering and assessing evidence, conducting experiments, visualising rich information, and engaging in informed debate.
The seminar will focus on the second case study across a school classroom and the home of year 9 students of a local Nottingham school, using a first prototype of the personal inquiry toolkit. The main aim of the study was to incorporate inquiry learning activities within an extended school science environment in order to investigate opportunities for technological mediations and to extract guidelines for the design of personal technology to link inquiry learning across different settings. A set of evaluation activities will be carried out, the outcomes of which will be discussed in the seminar. We will also discuss our insights for the development of the technology to support their activities and how such technologies could be appropriated as tools for learning. | Video | | |
| 23/06/2009 16:00 | A pattern-based approach for Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) scripts | | | Learning design or scripting has drawn considerable attention in the field of CSCL (Computer Supported Collaborative Learning). Such an interest draws on research in flexible scaffolding of complex collaborative situations as well as on parallel research regarding Learning Design.
This talk will address a pattern-based approach to CSCL macro-scripts as a means to support teachers in the Learning Design process. Besides a presentation of prior work on Collaborative Learning Flow Patterns and the WebCollage tool, this talk will describe current research efforts that aim at interweaving learning and assessment patterns. | | Slides | |
| 09/06/2009 16:00 | The EPPE Research: combining methods to study the impact of pre-school | | School of Education, University of Nottingham | The Effective Provision of Pre-school and Primary School (EPPE3-11) research was a longitudinal study funded by the DCSF in England during 1997-2008. It adopted an educational effectiveness design and employed a mixed methodology. This included
- a large scale quantitative element involving the longitudinal tracking of a sample of approximately 3000 children from 141 different pre-school settings from age 3+ to 11 years, including multilevel analyses of pre-school centre effects.
- a focus on a broad range of child outcomes (cognitive progress and social behavioural development)
- the investigation of the impact of various processes eg measures of centre quality, and
- detailed qualitative case studies of selected pre-school centres identified as having positive effects on different child outcomes.
This session will discuss the EPPE research design and use of mixed methods and some of the key findings of the study and the implications for policy and practice.
| Video | Slides | |
| 02/06/2009 16:00 | Developing a computer game to aid behavioural, emotional and social education | | Computer Science, University of Nottingham | Computer games are often seen as at best a mindless distraction and at worst a way in which children and young adults are lured into bad behaviours. At the same time many children who are exhibiting behavioural disorders (violent behaviours, attention deficit etc.) end up excluded from school and have to be helped to deal with these symptoms of their underlying problems.
This treatment often involves a teacher in one to one and small group activities seeking to engage the children in discussion about their behaviour; the idea being to get the children to understand the relationship between their own and others behaviour, thoughts and feelings. Such children often find the activities difficult to engage with. However, computer games have already been shown to be useful tools in engaging such students in discussion. The talk details the development of a 3D, super hero themed role-playing adventure based on exploration, collection and interaction with in-game characters. The game aims to allow educators/workers to introduce and discuss important topics with the child in a non-confrontational way; To aid in development of the child/worker relationship by providing a fun activity where the child is afforded control; To provide education aimed at developing coping strategies through learning about the relationship between thoughts, feelings and emotions, and by exploring techniques for recognising and questioning faulty thinking patterns. | | | |
| 27/05/2009 12:00 | LSRI Research Day | | LSRI, University of Nottingham | On the fringes of the Learning Sciences there are disciplines like Social Neuroscience and Health Sciences. The aim of this research day is to explore the relations between these disciplines and the Learning Science and other disciplines: What can we learn from them, what can we offer them?
During this half day event, there will be talks from Social Neuroscience and Health Sciences addressing each field, their methods and their relations to the Learning Sciences. Subsequently there will be a group discussion on what the Learning Sciences can both offer to and take from these disciplines. The day will conclude with a panel discussion on the contribution of the Learning Sciences to its core disciplines.
Looking forward to seeing you all there!
Details of the two talks are as follows:
Learning from other people: brain systems for non-verbal social
interaction
Antonia Hamilton
School of Psychology, University of Nottingham
Brain imaging methods are providing important insights into the mechanisms underlying the human ability to interact with and learn from other people. In this talk, I will give a brief overview of some of the ways in which the field of social neuroscience is developing. One particular area of social neuroscience with relevance for learning sciences is the study of mirror neuron systems in the brain. These systems allow us to understand, imitate and learn from other people in a non-verbal, embodied fashion. I will outline current ideas about the mirror neuron system and present some of my own research into the role of this system in learning physical skills (e.g. dance) and in understanding other people's behaviour. Possible implications of mirror systems abnormalities for development and learning will also be considered. Finally, I will attempt to place this work in a broader context and will emphasise the growing interest in embodied cognition as way to make sense of the social world.
Collaborative approaches to support the creation of on-line learning environments in health sciences
Heather Wharrad
School of Nursing Educational Technology Group (SONET), University of Nottingham
Virtual environments have the potential to make a real impact on learning in the health sciences. In this talk I will provide an overview of some of the key areas of development in the field and outline some of the methods used to evaluate their effectiveness. I will then describe some of our work on the design and pedagogy of reusable learning objects, focusing on some of our projects involving collaborative approaches including student generated and client generated content.
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| 19/05/2009 17:00 | Assessment of learning in the 21st Century: An epistemic approach | | University of Wisconsin-Madison | What do children learn from playing computer and video games, and how do we measure it? Professor Shaffer discusses theories of learning in the digital age, and new techniques of measurement that assess what and how young people learn in virtual worlds. While the focus is on game-based learning, the concepts and techniques apply to learning in any domain where students engage in complex problem solving.
| Video | | |
| 12/05/2009 16:00 | Text Segmentation for On-Screen Foreign Language Authentic Text Reading | | LSRI, University of Nottingham | Text segmentation modifies a text’s surface appearance by placing breaks or spaces at the boundaries of a chosen linguistic unit. Text segmentation is deployed to support learners to develop reading fluency in their mother tongue. Text segmentation is also a feature of digital texts which appear in small screen displays. However, little is known about the effects of text segmentation in foreign language reading, particularly of authentic texts.
Two studies were conducted to explore the impact of text segmentation for foreign language reading. The Study I compared continuous text with paragraph segmentation. The Study II focused on comparing paragraph and phrase segmentation types. Both studies followed similar procedures. Data was gathered on online processes during reading, recall (after reading) and individual perceptions on texts and segmentation types.
Evidence found in the two studies suggests that the finer the segmentation of the text the more detectable the effect on construction processes during reading. Also, evidence found segmentation also can conflict or even hamper processes of integration. Segmenting texts also had an impact on the affective responses to text and reading in the foreign language. Finally, these findings are relevant in guiding some aspects of the introduction of authentic texts in the foreign language classroom. | Video | Slides | |
| 05/05/2009 17:00 | What Counts? Cognitive Factors that Predict Children’s Mathematical Learning | | Carleton University, Canada | Children’s early numeracy skills are excellent predictors of their performance on conventional mathematical tasks one to two years later. In this presentation, I will describe a model of the relations among cognitive precursors, early numeracy skill, and mathematical outcomes. The model includes three precursor pathways: quantitative, linguistic, and attentional, and specifies the distinct role that these forms of knowledge play in early numeracy acquisition. Using longitudinal data from 182 children (aged between 4 and 7 years), I will show that these three pathways relate differentially to performance on conventional mathematical tasks assessed two years later. The model may be useful in understanding how and why children’s mathematical abilities vary across domains such as numeration, calculation, geometry, and measurement.
| Video | Slides | |
| 28/04/2009 16:00 | Mobile Group Blogging in Learning: A Case Study of Supporting Cultural Transition | | LSRI, University of Nottingham | A mobile group blog is an example of a Web 2.0 social space, as well as a tool for the instant collection of contextual information , the immediate sharing of information and later reflection. Records in the form of multimedia created through mobile blogging can assist people to keep a versatile representation of artefacts they encounter on the move in everyday life. Overseas students are an example of a large group of people who could benefit from this technology. They could share contextual information and their own stories with other people currently experiencing the host culture, as well as people who do not have the opportunity to experience the host culture first-hand. This research explored the suitability and benefits of a mobile group blog in assisting overseas students to reduce culture shock. Four studies were conducted. The first two investigated the demands and needs of a mobile group blog application in culture transition. The third study investigated real and practical mobile blogging activities with a group of twelve newly arrived Chinese overseas students in Nottingham. The fourth study was conducted in China. In this study, a number of Chinese students who intended to study abroad were asked to evaluate the contents of the mobile group blog which was created by the twelve Chinese mobloggers in study three.
| Video | Slides | |
| 22/04/2009 17:15 | Q Methodology – a research technique combining the best of qualitative and quantitative methods | | Principal Educational Psychologist and Head of Inclusion Services, Nottinghamshire County Council | Q Methodology – the application of ‘by-person’ factor analysis to opinion data, was developed by British physicist and psychologist William Stephenson (Stephenson, 1953) and employed by a subsequent generation of American researchers (Brown, 1980). In the 1980’s it began to enjoy something of a revival in England, where it was adopted by social constructionist researchers as a rich technique for describing, in their own terms, how people see a complex topic (for example Kitzinger (1986) on lesbian identities; W Stainton Rogers (1991) on conceptions of illness; Stenner and R Stainton Rogers (1998) on jealousy; Stenner and Watts (2004) on conceptions of love.)
Q methodology provides the rich accounts normally found in qualitative enquiries, but uses factor analysis to delineate the range of viewpoints encountered. As Baker, Thompson and Mannion, (2006) put it ‘We argue that Q offers a means of exploring subjectivity, beliefs and values while retaining the transparency, rigour and mathematical underpinnings of quantitative techniques.’
This seminar will provide an overview of Q methodology illustrated with material from my research looking at how young people from Nottinghamshire’s former coalfield communities see the idea of ‘going to university’. There will be an opportunity to discuss how Q methodology could be employed in your research.
John Bradley studied at Brunel University, the Froebel Institute and the Tavistock Clinic qualifying as a teacher and educational psychologist. He has worked in England, Hong Kong and Brunei. He recently completed his doctorate in the Psychology Department at the University of Nottingham as a (very) mature student.
| Video | Slides | |
| 22/04/2009 16:00 | Growing a vocabulary | | School of Arts and Humanities, University of Swansea | This paper illustrates how some very simple models of lexical networks raise some very complex questions about how vocabularies grow in L1 and in L2, and how they might interact. The illustrations demonstrate the usefulness of simulations and modelling in Applied Linguistics research, and the importance of unpacking widely accepted metaphors like “lexical network”. | Video | Slides | |
| 22/04/2009 15:15 | What percentage of vocabulary in a text do you need to know in order to comprehend it? | | | This presentation reports on research into how text coverage (knowledge of the vocabulary in a written text) is related to the ability to comprehend the information in that text. | Video | Slides | |
| 22/04/2009 15:05 | CRAL Introduction | | | Introduction to CRAL at University of Nottingham | Video | | |
| 22/04/2009 14:40 | Is auditory learning dependent on feedback? | | | There is currently no consensus about the effects of feedback on perceptual learning. We have previously reported (Amitay et al., 2006) robust training effects on an impossible discrimination task where meaningless feedback was given to participants on a trial-by-trial basis such that they believed they had selected the ‘correct’ response on approximately 33% of trials. This learning was comparable to that induced by conditions where feedback was meaningful to performance. In this study we examined the effect of feedback on training on an impossible frequency discrimination (FD) task. Three groups of listeners trained on an ‘oddball’ discrimination task using three identical 1-kHz tones. One group received (meaningless) positive feedback on 90% of the trials. Listeners were informed positive feedback denoted a ‘correct’ response, whereas no feedback was given for an ‘incorrect’ response. A second group received positive feedback on 10% of the trials. A third group received no feedback. Learning on FD at 1 kHz was evaluated as the difference between the pre- and post-training thresholds. Only the group that received 10% feedback showed significant learning, with the 90% feedback and no feedback groups showing no overall learning. However, group means concealed interesting interactions between learning, individual abilities, and non-verbal intelligence quotient (IQ). Listeners were divided into subgroups based on whether performance improved, declined or did not change with training, and this factor was included in a model predicting overall performance on the FD task. Non-verbal IQ was included as a covariate in the model. Higher IQ scores were related to better performance on FD overall, but did so to a greater or lesser degree depending on the learning subgroup, with the greatest effect observed in the no feedback group where listeners whose performance declined tended to have lower IQ scores. These results suggest a complex relationship between perceptual performance and individual abilities and how feedback is used to drive learning. The results highlight the importance of tailoring training to individual needs and abilities.
References:
Amitay, S., Irwin, A. & Moore, D.R. 2006. Discrimination learning induced by training with identical stimuli. Nat Neurosci, 9, 1446-8.
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| 22/04/2009 14:30 | MRC Institute for Hearing Research (IHR) Introduction | | | | Video | Slides | |
| 22/04/2009 14:05 | Teachers, Technology and Collaboration: Teachers’ Perspectives on Failed Collaboration | | | This paper explores data from two exploratory practice studies investigating teacher collaboration using technologies in pre-service and in-service teacher development contexts. After a brief introduction of the aims and contexts of these two studies, this paper will focus on teacher participants’ accounts of why peer collaboration failed. Whilst the context (in-service or pre-service) determined the participants’ analysis of failed collaboration I will argue that both sets of teachers (to varying degrees) were unable to collaborate effectively in each of these contexts in part due to a lack of recognition of others and in part due to a perceived lack of agency. | Video | | |
| 22/04/2009 13:55 | Introduction to language research at CELE | | | Introduction to language research at CELE | Video | | |
| 22/04/2009 11:50 | Sensitivity to orthographic structure influences letter position encoding | | | We have been investigating if letter identification is influenced by the distributional regularities inherent to orthography. Specifically, if letter position encoding is sensitive to positional letter frequency (i.e. the frequency with which individual letters appear in particular positions within written words of a specified length). I shall report a series of studies with skilled (N=28) and dyslexic (N=29) adult readers of English and skilled adult readers of Greek (N=24) who were each given a letter search task that required identification of a prespecified letter target embedded within a random five-letter string. Stimuli were drawn from the reader’s native orthography and consisted of 25 English letters and 20 Greek letters. Response latencies to identify individual letter targets in each of the five string positions were correlated with positional letter frequency counts for the reader’s native orthography. Results showed significant negative correlations for each of the three participant groups for letters appearing in the initial string position, reflecting shorter response latencies for more frequently occurring letters. A significant negative correlation between response latency and positional letter frequency was also found for skilled readers of English for letters presented in the final string position. These results suggest that extraction of statistical regularities from orthographic input is a mechanism by which orthographic learning occurs. | Video | Slides | |
| 22/04/2009 11:25 | Introduction to Language Research in Psychology | | | Introduction to language research in Psychology | Video | Slides | |
| 22/04/2009 11:15 | Can L1 reading instruction affect L2 listening ability? | | School of Education, University of Nottingham | The answer to the question I have posed would seem to be an obvious ‘No’. How can the way you are taught to read in your first language possibly affect your ability in a different skill in a different language at a later date?
In terms of transfer from one skill to another, however, there does seem to be a connection between reading and the perception of sounds. Several studies have found that, on tests of phonological awareness, Chinese children who have learnt to read using the alphabetic pinyin system generally outperform those who have learnt to read using the traditional morphosyllabic system. In other words, those taught to read using pinyin tended to be better at perceiving, analysing and manipulating the sounds of L1 speech (especially at the phonemic level).
In terms of transfer from one L1 skill to a different L2 skill, research is admittedly sparse. However, there have been a few studies which suggest that learning to read an L1 using an alphabetic system may lead to improved phonological awareness or speech processing ability in an L2 (English).
In this talk I will report on some preliminary small-scale research in which mainland Chinese students (taught to read using pinyin) outperformed Hong Kong counterparts (taught to read using Chinese characters) when it came to recognising the initial and final phonemes of spoken English words. I will also outline plans for further investigation of the question I’ve posed, and for potential pedagogic support to help Chinese learners improve their ability to recognise spoken English words.
| Video | Slides | |
| 22/04/2009 11:05 | Second and Foreign Language Pedagogy Group: Introduction | | School of Education, University of Nottingham | Second and Foreign Language Pedagogy Group: Introduction. | Video | | |
| 22/04/2009 10:25 | Visual word recognition in Chinese-English bilinguals | | | Hanyu Pinyin is a romanisation system for Standard Mandarin that is used in schools in China to teach Mandarin pronunciation. Interestingly, some Chinese words written in Hanyu Pinyin are also correctly spelled English words, for example the Hanyu Pinyin word "gun" written without tone diacritics. In addition to these orthographic similarities between Chinese words written in Hanyu Pinyin and English words there are also phonological similarities, for example the Chinese word ? and the English word "buy" are pronounced similarly. In this talk I will present the results of a series of experiments in which we investigated the effects of such cross-linguistic orthographic and phonological similarities on word recognition in Chinese-English bilinguals. | Video | | |
| 22/04/2009 10:15 | BRG Introduction | | | | Video | | |
| 22/04/2009 09:50 | Training Novel Phonemic Contrasts: A Comparison of Identification and Oddity Discrimination Training | | | To date, the technique which has made the most progress towards achieving the goals of pronunciation training is High Variability Pronunciation Training (HVPT) (Logan et al., 1991). It has been demonstrated that this technique, in which learners are presented minimal pairs containing non-native phonemes in a forced-choice identification (ID) task with immediate feedback – high variability comes from the use of stimuli which vary in terms of phonetic context and talker, is effective in teaching the perception of non-native phonemic contrasts, and that this skill transfers to pronunciation and is retained long-term.
HVPT is, however, not very efficient. Discrimination training is an alternative to ID training, which focuses on the differences between speech sounds. It has the potential to enhance phonetic training by increasing the variety of tasks proposed to the learner. Discrimination training has, however, been neglected on the basis that it promotes fine-grained discrimination of speech sounds, which is inconsistent with what we know about speech perception. There are, however, variations of discrimination training, which promote classification in addition to discrimination. An example is oddity training. In oddity training,learners are presented three stimuli, two from one class of speech sounds and one from the other and asked to identify which stimulus was the odd one out.
I report a comparison of ID and oddity discrimination training in the context of training Mandarin-Chinese learners to perceive and pronounce the English /r/-/l/ contrast.
References
Logan, J., Lively, S., Pisoni, D. (1991) Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: A final report. J. Acousti. Soc. Am. 89 (2): 874-886
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| 22/04/2009 09:40 | LSRI Introduction | | | | Video | | |
| 22/04/2009 09:15 | Languaging Science in English through Project-based Learning: Reflections on a Successful Course | | Division of English Studies, UNNC | The linguistic and cultural diversity of tertiary classrooms today presents special challenges in course design and pedagogy for the teacher of academic writing in English. Some challenges include different levels of language proficiency within each classroom, and students coming from different writing traditions, with different cultural learning styles, and different understanding of genre conventions. This paper describes how an undergraduate academic writing course for life sciences students at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, dealt with these challenges by integrating a genre- and a project-based approach. It reflects on how a small group project focus offered flexibility to address the issues described, even as students were provided scaffolding in constructing the various parts of a conventional (western) scientific research report. Additionally, it explores how the course met the challenges of teaching writing to large groups in a multilingual setting, in particular, through a combination of traditional lectures, collaborative learning using an online project management tool, encouraging learner autonomy through reflective writing, and providing platforms for resolving problems through tutor-student conferencing and online forums. It is argued that such an approach, unlike more traditional forms of EAP writing instruction, empowers students with tools to appropriate and manipulate dominant scientific discourse conventions on their own terms, in their own voices, and for their own purposes. | Video | | |
| 22/04/2009 09:05 | CRAL at UNNC Introduction | | | Introduction to CRAL at UNNC | Video | | |
| 22/04/2009 09:00 | Language Research Day | | | With talks from:
Prof. Paul Meara, School of Arts, University of Swansea
and
Dr John Bradley, Principal Educational Psychologist and Head of Inclusion Services, Nottinghamshire County Council.
This interdisciplinary event aims to bring together researchers from across the University of Nottingham with interests in language, language acquisition, and language pedagogy from a variety of perspectives. It is an opportunity to broaden your network and identify collaboration opportunities.
A full programme is available at: http://www.lsri.nottingham.ac.uk/lrg/LanguageResearchDay.html
Details of the invited talks can be found below:
Growing a vocabulary
Prof. Paul Meara
School of Arts, University of Swansea
This paper illustrates how some very simple models of lexical networks raise some very complex questions about how vocabularies grow in L1 and in L2, and how they might interact. The illustrations demonstrate the usefulness of simulations and modelling in Applied Linguistics research, and the importance of unpacking widely accepted metaphors like “lexical network”.
Q Methodology – a research technique combining the best of qualitative and quantitative methods
Dr John Bradley
Principal Educational Psychologist and Head of Inclusion Services, Nottinghamshire County Council
Q Methodology – the application of ‘by-person’ factor analysis to opinion data, was developed by British physicist and psychologist William Stephenson (Stephenson, 1953) and employed by a subsequent generation of American researchers (Brown, 1980). In the 1980’s it began to enjoy something of a revival in England, where it was adopted by social constructionist researchers as a rich technique for describing, in their own terms, how people see a complex topic (for example Kitzinger (1986) on lesbian identities; W Stainton Rogers (1991) on conceptions of illness; Stenner and R Stainton Rogers (1998) on jealousy; Stenner and Watts (2004) on conceptions of love.)
Q methodology provides the rich accounts normally found in qualitative enquiries, but uses factor analysis to delineate the range of viewpoints encountered. As Baker, Thompson and Mannion, (2006) put it ‘We argue that Q offers a means of exploring subjectivity, beliefs and values while retaining the transparency, rigour and mathematical underpinnings of quantitative techniques.’
This seminar will provide an overview of Q methodology illustrated with material from my research looking at how young people from Nottinghamshire’s former coalfield communities see the idea of ‘going to university’. There will be an opportunity to discuss how Q methodology could be employed in your research.
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| 21/04/2009 16:00 | Beyond SatNav: Using the Global Positioning System as a tool for the behavioural sciences | | School of Psychology, University of Nottingham | Satellite tracking is currently used in many applications, from navigating a car journey to making calculations in land surveys. In this talk I will suggest how psychologists can begin to use this technology as a means to study human spatial behaviour. Whereas most experiments tend to take place in laboratory environments, GPS allows us to test in much larger open spaces, giving us a better picture of real-world behaviour. I will use two studies from my own laboratory as examples of this technology in action. The first addresses reorientation behaviour in children, and finds that younger children are more likely to use landmark information to reorient when tested in a natural environment, compared to laboratory studies. The second study examines path integration behaviour, the process by which we update spatial position from self-movement information. Here we compared athletes trained at large spatial scales (rugby) to those trained at smaller scales (martial arts) and found that rugby players were more accurate at calculating heading direction.
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| 17/03/2009 16:00 | Connecting the linguistic and cognitive aspects of mathematical proof: Can a non-proof prove? | |
Mathematics Education Centre, Loughborough University
| An ability to successfully deal with argumentation and proof is an important part of learning mathematics. Earlier researchers have noticed that students tend to have two simultaneous conflicting standards for judging arguments -- personal conviction and formal validity. However, researchers have had to use relatively complicated question-types to illicit these different conceptions from participants. which raises doubts about the practical significance of this theoretical observation. In this talk, I report some recent corpora analyses and experimental work which suggest that the distinction between conviction and validity may be of more practical importance than previously recognised. I will conclude by claiming that, in some cases at least, I have proved that non-proofs prove.
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| 10/03/2009 16:00 | Children’s School Related Learning with Social Software Out of school | | | With the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies, teenage children turn out to be savvy users of social software such as Msn Messenger or Bebo in their daily life, even when they are out-of-school. Therefore, children’s use of social software has the potential to re-shape the map of children's out-of-school activities. In addition, this may also lead to opportunities for harnessing children’s energy in using social software to have a learning purpose that emerges from children’s own interests and needs in an out-of-school context.
This seminar is based on my ongoing PhD research that has investigated British children’s authentic use of three different types of social software including a homework messageboard, a Mandarin learning social network site and an online SAT Maths revision chatroom/whiteboard. Instead of attempting an overview of all the various ways the social software could be used, the investigations have furnished an opportunity to capture children’s natural learning concerns and preferences out-of-school with technology. Furthermore, in order to reveal how the British children’s concerns and preferences were affected by their out-of-school context, Chinese children’s use of homework messageboard was investigated and interviews with both British children and Chinese children were taken. By involving two comparable groups of children different in culture, it might shed further light on how contextual factors constructed the British children’s experiences. These contextual factors would not be visible until the British children were understood together with their equivalent Chinese counterparts | Video | Slides | |
| 03/03/2009 16:00 | Exploring the impact of anonymity in classroom debates | | LSRI/School of Psychology | The advent of networked electronic voting and communication environments into the classroom is changing educational debates in many ways. This research addresses a significant opportunity provided by these environments
- anonymity - to explore its consequences when learners are adolescents, co-present in a classroom and anonymous only to peers not to teachers. We predicted anonymity should enhance these debates as it will encourage students to express their opinions authentically without fearing off-putting social consequences, but will not encourage negative behaviours such as deception, and insulting or irrelevant interactions. Three studies with
16-17 year olds used a vote-debate-vote scenario to explore anonymous voting and public oral debate Study 1 (n= 59), anonymous voting and public written debate Study 2 (n=78) and anonymous voting and debating Study 3 (n= 67).
Study 1 used a pen and paper prototype and Studies 2 and 3 the CoFFEE discussion support system. This talk will discuss how our results guided the design of the system and argue that in general, anonymity brings positive benefits to the classroom experience of debate.
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| 24/02/2009 16:00 | Collaborative working and learning with a multitouch table | | The Computing Department, Open University | There has been much recent interest in the potential of interactive multitouch surfaces to support collaborative working and learning.
However, we still know little about how these new technologies might influence the behaviour of those working around them. In this talk I will describe three sets of findings relating to collaboration around a tabletop which have emerged from ShareIT, an interdisciplinary project between researchers at the OU and the University of Sussex.
I will discuss a comparison of workspace awareness for adults working with a multitouch table or working with mice; an analysis of children's dialogue and participation when working with an interactive table in single or multi-touch mode; and differences in the embodied mechanisms that children use to prevent each other from accessing interface materials when using a multitouch surface and physical materials.
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| 17/02/2009 16:00 | Back to reality- using mobiles as an educational tool in the real world | Steve Gayler and Neil Bailey | | WildKnowledge is a two year old spinout company from Oxford Brookes University. Our central ethos is to enable users to receive and create information at the ‘point of inspiration’. For this to occur there can be no restraint on accessing educational content, both intellectually and physically. We achieve these objectives through the use of mobile devices with access to a Portal of shared content and information.
This presentation focuses on our experiences over the last five years and examines reality from two perspectives:
1) How the real world can match any virtual environment in terms of engagement
2) our experience in evolving from research concept to a business that has to deliver in the real world.
Real vs. Virtual Worlds
WildKnowledge has developed four applications that seek to engage students in the real word, these can be summarised as:
- WildKey –wildlife identification and recording tool
- WildForm – surveying tool to replace the traditional clipboard
- WildMap – interactive learning trials
- WildImage – multimedia learning objects
An examination of how mobile devices can be used as hook to engage pupils (and teachers alike) will be undertaken.
Academic vs. Business World
An examination of how a research concept has had to evolve to become a viable ‘product’ over the last five years. Whilst the development of WildKey was built upon strong research principles, this does not necessarily mean that widespread use (and successful commercialisation) will be achieved. A willingness to use mobility as an embedded part of the curriculum is affected by several factors, including:
- Perceptions’ (real and false) of teachers/lecturers, institutions and student pupils
- Technological capability
- Economic costs
An evaluation of trends in these factors over the last five years will be undertaken along with conclusions on the current and future prospects of mobile learning.
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| 10/02/2009 16:00 | Capturing 'thinking' with handheld computers | | La Trobe University, Australia | This session will present the use of handheld computer video capturing software, operating in the background, as a non-intrusive method of capturing representations used by students in demonstrating conceptual understanding in science and mathematics. 'Videosnags' obtained in this manner are able to provide insights into the thinking processes involved in creating these representations and the ways students demonstrate, individually and collaboratively, their understanding of science and mathematics concepts. Limitations on the use of the handheld computer as a pedagogical and a research tool will be discussed. | Video | Slides | |
| 03/02/2009 16:00 | Will immersive learning change how we learn? | | The Serious Games Institute | Through understanding the strengths of immersive and game-based learning a better understanding of how we learn is emerging, presenting new opportunities for future research addressing learning. This presentation will explore and outline research findings comparing game-based with traditional forms of learning. In particular findings arising from current research projects, including the Serious Games Engaging Training Solutions project part-funded by the UK Technology Strategy Board, will be considered in order to understand more about the nature of immersive learning approaches. The presentation will also introduce the exploratory learning model as a model for developing and 'choreographing' immersive learning experiences.
Biography for Professor Sara de Freitas
BA (Hons), MA, PhD
Sara de Freitas is Director of Research at the Serious Games Institute (SGI) – an international hub of excellence in the area of games, virtual worlds and interactive digital media for serious purposes, including education, health and business applications. Situated on the Technology Park at the University of Coventry, Sara leads an interdisciplinary and cross-university applied research group. Based as part of the largest commercial arm of any UK university, the SGI applied research group - with expertise in AI and games, visualization, mixed reality, augmented reality and location aware technologies - works closely with international industrial and academic research and development partners.
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| 27/01/2009 16:00 | Lies, damned lies and statistics: an evaluation of learning styles in AEH | | MRL, School of Computer Science | This talk examines the current state of AEH (adaptive educational hypermedia) research into explicit learning style modelling for user personalisation.
I will present two case studies of how learning styles have been used in this way, looking at different examples of users: undergraduate students and also primary school children. The learning styles used were visual/verbal and sequential/global, respectively.
No statistically significant benefits to users were found in any of these studies. I will discuss the significance of this and then critically analyse the use of learning styles in relation to AEH and also in the wider context. I will also be highlighting the problems and pitfalls associated with using quantitative methodologies when working in quasi-experimental conditions.
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| 20/01/2009 16:00 | The impact of task-based professional development on teachers' practices and beliefs - a design research study | | Shell Centre for Mathematics Education, University of Nottingham | In this talk I shall describe a design research study with experienced mathematics teachers of post-16 low-attaining students. The study explored the use of generic collaborative mathematics tasks in promoting professional development. I describe the theoretical basis for the design of the tasks, the tasks themselves and a professional development programme in which they were used by teachers drawn from 44 colleges.
Teachers that used many of the tasks reported profound changes to their practices and this was confirmed student reports and classroom observation. Teachers’ beliefs about mathematics, teaching and learning both constrained the ways the tasks were implemented and were challenged by the affective and cognitive outcomes.
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| 09/12/2008 16:00 | Different uses of technology to improve higher education pedagogy | | Centro de Innovacion en Educacion, Universidad Tecnologica de Chile | In this seminar the Center for Innovation on Education, CIEDU ( http://www.ciedu.cl), of the Technological University of Chile INACAP ( http://www.inacap.cl) will be presented along with several of its research project. In Chile, there is an increasing need for educational institutions to adapt and evolve in order to fit the needs of the XXI century student. In addition to this technological change, the INACAP University has to deal with two main issues: (1) INACAP is an inclusive technological university and students’ backgrounds are very despair. In consequence there is a need of remedial programs, especially in Math, basic sciences and Language, to prepare students to start with regular classes. (2) The majority of INACAP’s professors are technicians with no pedagogical background and averse to innovate in methodologies of teaching/learning and to the use of new technologies. In order to confront these issues, at the CIEDU center several projects are in progress and many conferences are being held. Current projects are oriented to use technology to support new strategies and methodologies to help professors to engage students in basic mathematics. Uses of PDAs, clickers, interactive software, e-learning, smart board, and repository of learning objects will be presented, as long with the experiments in course. | Video | | |
| 02/12/2008 16:00 | Using Similarity Metrics for Matching Lifelong Learners | | LSRI, University of Nottingham | The JISC-funded MyPlan project, hosted at the London Knowledge Lab, brought together stakeholders from a broad range of institutions committed to providing lifelong learning opportunities which enhance career development and widen participation, including the Linking London Lifelong Learning Network (L4N) which comprised over 25 institutions across London. MyPlan had three major aims: 1) To develop and evaluate user models that reflect the needs of the diverse population of lifelong learners; 2) To develop, deploy and evaluate personalised functionalities for the creation, searching and recommendation of learning pathways; 3) To evaluate current game-based applications for supporting lifelong learners with view to developing and integrating a game-based application into MyPlan.
The resulting L4All system provides an environment for the lifelong learner to access information about courses, personal development plans, recommendation of learning pathways, personalised support for planning of learning, and reflecting on learning. Designed as a web-based application, it offers lifelong learners the possibility to define and share their own timeline (a chronological record of their relevant life episodes) in order to foster collaborative elaboration of future goals and aspirations. A keystone for delivering such functionalities is the possibility for learner to search for ‘people like me’.
Addressing the fact that such a definition of ‘people like me’ is ambiguous and subjective, this talk will explores the use of similarity metrics as a flexible mechanism for comparing and matching lifelong learners’ timelines.
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| 25/11/2008 16:00 | Disability 2.0: Facebook, the Academy and Student (dis)Connections | | School of Education, University of Nottingham | For many young people, online social networks such as Facebook are an essential part of their student experience. Other social web-based services like Wikipedia and YouTube are also an important facet of everyday student life. New technologies have always been scrutinized for their capacity to support education and, as these social technologies become more pervasive, universities are increasingly seeking to appropriate them for teaching and learning. However, the educational impact of applying these Web 2.0 technologies for all users is unclear.
The experiences of disabled students crystallize many of the issues raised by the movement of the academy into the digital domain, disputing the notion of social networks as universally popular, transparent and inclusive. This seminar is based upon ongoing qualitative PhD research. Discussion will focus on data collected during 14 interviews with disabled students at different stages in their University studies. Interviews utilise screen capture, participatory and accessible methods to explore how the societal elements of disability transpire and transform online.
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| 11/11/2008 16:00 | Investigating multimodal interactions for the design of learning environments: A case study for science learning | | LSRI, University of Nottingham | The seminar will be based on my PhD research project which focused on multimodal interactions and their usefulness for the design of a learning environment. The process of designing such systems involves studying the benefits of multimodal interactions in learning. Therefore, I will talk about the structure of the interactive space between the learner and the content to be learnt, and a framework to structure this space. I will argue that multimodal interactions can encourage rhythmic cycles of engagement and reflection that enhance learners’ meaning construction in science concepts, such as ‘forces and motion’.
The framework was the outcome of an iterative process of analysis and synthesis between existing theories and three studies with learners of different ages. Through these theory-informed studies, the significance of physical manipulation is emphasised as a way to facilitate learners’ meaning construction, engagement and reflection.
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| 07/11/2008 17:30 | Fostering learning in the networked world | | Stanford University, H-STAR Institute | The combination of "always on" mobile computing, location-aware services, open platform technologies, participatory media culture, immersive worlds and games, and increasingly open educational resources provides an exciting horizon for the next decade of research on technology-enhanced learning at all age levels. Exceptional resources for human learning and action will become continuously accessible through networks of information, people, and services. I will argue for the value of re-conceptualizing the nature of learning- from its goals to its infrastructures, and highlight key major research and theoretical challenges. | Video | Slides | |
| 04/11/2008 16:00 | Using Graphic Symbols | | Speech and Language Therapy Division, De Montfort University | I will present a PhD research project investigating the use of graphic symbols in Foundation Stage school settings in an area of the East Midlands. The research is of a qualitative design and focuses on the experiences and attitudes of a range of practitioners in semi-structured interviews. Practitioners have been selected from three professional groups; speech and language therapists, teachers and other ‘Early Years Practitioners’ (Mroz, 2006), including teaching assistants and nursery nurses. Interview data will be analysed using an interpretive thematic model influenced by a phenomenological perspective. This presentation will introduce the topic of symbol use in schools and will focus on existing literature and early findings from the first stages of data analysis.
Please note:
This research focuses on the use of a range of graphic symbol sets used widely in the United Kingdom, including; Widgit Literacy Symbols, Makaton Symbols and Mayer-Johnson Picture Communication Symbols. Participants also referred to similar symbols from other sets or those that they had made in school. | Video | slides | |
| 28/10/2008 16:00 | Moblogging as method: Accessing personal perceptions of urban environments | | Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol | I will be presenting work from the Cityware project (www.cityware.org.uk), which has the goal of developing theory, principles, tools and techniques for the design, implementation and evaluation of city-scale pervasive systems as integral facets of the urban landscape. A cohort of thirty participants, living in and around Bath, was recruited for the three year duration of the project. In this seminar, I will talk about some of the activities that the cohort have been involved in, including a pair of studies designed to access participants' personal perceptions of their neighbourhoods and of Bath city-centre. A significant component of these studies was participants'
engagement in 'moblogging tours'; self-directed tours of an environment, using various functions of a mobile phone to document the experience. We were able to learn a great deal about our participants' relationships with their environments through the use of this method, but also found that perceptions of the environment often changed in interesting ways as a result of completing the moblogging tour. I will be concluding with some thoughts about the dual status of moblogging as method and as a learning experience.
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| 21/10/2008 16:00 | Designing 'Grid Algebra': beliefs, theories and practical considerations | | | This session will discuss some of the pedagogic considerations behind the design of a piece of software, Grid Algebra. It brings together epistemological considerations, theoretical perspectives and how the design tries to address some of the well-known difficulties that students can have with algebra. Consideration will be given to the general issue that all pedagogic images and metaphors have limitations and how there is a need to plan for the fading of such images and metaphors so that students are left working directly with formal symbols.
http://www.education.bham.ac.uk/staff/hewitt_dave.shtml
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| 17/06/2008 16:30 | Web 2.0 Technologies for Learning KS3/4: Using Web 2.0 to Support Learning | Rebecca Graber, Charles Crook, and Colin Harrison | LSRI, University of Nottingham | There is a perception that young people are increasingly engaging with collaborative, creative and participatory uses of the internet - so-called "Web 2.0". This social internet may be considered to encompass applications from instant messaging to podcasting; gaming to file-sharing; blogging to wikis; and seemingly pervasive social networking sites wherein users publicly play out their personalities and relationships. The challenge for educators and young people alike is in harnessing these technologies to support learning. How are young people currently using the internet - are they now boundary-challenging digital natives? How are schools exploiting the opportunities afforded by Web 2.0 to bring learners together in empowering, innovative ways? The Becta-funded Web 2.0 Technologies for Learning Key Stages 3 and 4 project has conducted in-depth analyses of 27 secondary schools across England and Wales to explore questions of how Web 2.0 is currently being used to support learning. In this presentation, we will touch upon the methodology of our research and the challenges of finding Web 2.0 innovation; highlight and discuss key findings from a variety of data sources, including case studies; and frame the opportunities (and challenges) that Web 2.0 offers to educators and learners. | Video | | |
| 10/06/2008 16:30 | Modelling Learning Design | | Institute of Education, University of London | If teachers are to be able to engage in the full exploitation and development of technology-enhanced learning (TEL) it is essential that we develop learning design tools that enable them to do this. This objective creates an intriguing research problem: how to model the learning design process in a way that is meaningful and acceptable to teachers, as well as being computationally executable. The representations of learning designs will need to reflect effective practice and learning theory, and must also be customisable to a teacher’s needs. The seminar will build on findings from the London Pedagogy Planner, the generative learning object (GLO) authoring tool at London Met, and the Phoebe pedagogy planner at Oxford.
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| 03/06/2008 16:30 | Early Years Learning with Digital Technologies: The Relationship Between Research and Design | Andrew Manches and Sarah Eagle | | The aim of this talk is to focus on the relationship between research and design of technologies for early years learning. Presentations will centre around two studies, one concerned with understanding the role that digital technologies play in shaping interactions between parents and young children in the home and the other with understanding the role of digital manipulatives in early years learning of numeracy in school. It will be argued that whereas a common theme emerging from these studies is the importance of shared physical and social interaction within early years learning, digital technologies for this age group tend to be designed for individual use. Participants will be invited to offer explanations for this emphasis on individual learning and discussion will focus on alternative approaches to design that might take into account the intimacy of the interaction between young children and adults. | Video | | |
| 27/05/2008 16:30 | From design research to large-scale impact: Engineering research in education | | MARS/Shell Centre, University of Nottingham | The growth of cognitive science since the 1960s and its application to research in more realistic learning environments has contributed much to bridging the gap between research and practice. The establishment of design research over the last decade represented the next step in this sequence. However, there is more to be done before teaching and learning in the majority of classrooms can possibly move to being research-based. How we may get there, and the progress so far, is the theme of this talk.
First, we need an established research-based methodology for taking the design research approach forward to produce processes and tools that work well in practice, when teachers, students and their circumstances of support are typical of the target groups. I shall argue that this methodology is already in place, and outline how it works. This research approach is characteristic of engineering disciplines, with new or better products and processes as the primary outcomes. Direct impact on practice is the main criterion of quality, though engineering research also delivers new insights – and journal articles.
Secondly, we need reliable models of the process of planned educational change. These we do not yet have. I will outline progress that has been made, giving reasonable hope that a research-based developmental approach can succeed here too.
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| 20/05/2008 16:30 | Integrating ICT into Teaching and Learning Mathematics | | Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol | Mathematics was one of the earlier subjects to make use of the computer in the classroom and there has been substantial research in this area at both primary and secondary level. The dynamic and symbolic nature of computer environments can provoke students to generalise and formalise and make links between their intuitive notions of mathematics and the more formal aspects of mathematical knowledge. However research has shown that these understandings do not develop spontaneously and there is a need for a teacher to support students to move between more informal knowing and the virtual world of mathematics. This presentation derives from the InterActive Education Project and is concerned with understanding how mathematics teachers and students can use digital tools for enhancing the learning of mathematics. The socio-cultural perspective which framed the research foregrounds the idea that all human action is mediated by tools, where tools are both material (for example, whiteboard, calculator, paper and pencil) and symbolic (for example, graphical representation, natural language). A socio-cultural perspective also recognises that students bring their own personal history of learning to any new situation and each students will appropriate particular mathematical tools differently. This diversity of student experience might appear to be an almost impossible challenge for the teacher, but I will argue that such diversity can be used to construct a classroom culture of inquiry in which students productively learn from each other as well as being orchestrated by the teacher. | Video | | |
| 22/04/2008 16:30 | Using Thunder to support innovative student presentations | Do Coyle, Brett Bligh, Andrew Coverdale | Visual Learning Lab / LSRI, University of Nottingham | This seminar is based upon a research project conducted jointly between the Visual Learning Lab and the School of the Built Environment in which the Thunder presentation system was used to support critical presentations. Critical presentations, or “crits”, a long-established and demanding feature of architectural education, involve small groups of students presenting posters and physical scale models of proposed work in front of a design jury composed of tutors, peers and external professionals.
The PolyVision Thunder system was conceived in the corporate environment as an interactive flipchart, effectively the “next generation” of interactive whiteboard. Interaction is possible by using a digital pen to draw or write on a large screen called the “easel”, while multiple pages are displayed on the wall simultaneously.
Student posters were displayed within the system as pages in the flipchart. Student groups used the electronic highlighter pens for the reinforcement and augmentation of information on the slides, to illustrate the points they made verbally, to expand upon information in a slide and to creatively draw in response to jury intervention. In these ways, the system was able to facilitate spontaneous interactions between the participants. Additionally, Thunder's system of allowing its users to organise slides on the wall using a simple drag-and-drop mechanism meant that the presentations were nonlinear and more responsive in nature than a formal PowerPoint presentation.
In this seminar, we consider how digital simultaneous display using Thunder can enhance more spontaneous interaction in crits. In particular, we focus on interaction between the student and their pre-prepared materials. Our research data is taken from critical incident analysis of video footage, questionnaires, focus groups and individual interviews. | Video | Slides | |
| 18/03/2008 16:30 | Empowering Pupils – What transformations in activity are required? | Edward Sellman | School of Education, University of Nottingham | This seminar utilises an activity theoretical framework (as in the work of Yrjo Engestrom and other 3rd generation activity theorists) to examine:
- the theoretical base for greater pupil engagement with the organisation of their schools and the role it plays in shaping their identity and opportunities for learning,
- pupil empowerment programmes as alternative models of activity,
- the contradictions inherent in traditional models of school based activity that may obstruct pupil empowerment,
- the transformations in traditional activities that may be required for alternative models of activity to be fully and meaningfully implemented,
- the obstacles such projects encounter, and
- the potential impact on identity and learning that occurs if these transformations take place.
The paper will draw upon two main areas of research. The first is completed PhD research concerning the implementation of peer mediation services in schools. The second concerns student researcher projects at two Nottingham special schools, one for students with severe learning difficulties and the other for children experiencing emotional and behavioural difficulties, funded by a small grant from the School of Education.
I will argue that pupil empowerment projects reconceptualise students as more active members of an educational community rather than merely objects of that activity. In making these illustrations, I will highlight that the concepts of activity theory are useful research tools for analysing obstacles to pupil empowerment and transformation in schools, yet benefit from further refinement to adequately describe the cultural phenomena encountered. | Video | Slides | |
| 11/03/2008 16:30 | GroupScribbles: Ink, Improvisation, and Interactive Engagement | | Centre for Technology in Learning, SRI International | Group Scribbles starts from the desire to maximize the power of ink, improvisation, and interactive engagement in a wireless, tablet-based learning environment. Improvisation is the central design goal: We intend Group Scribbles to be a platform that supports teachers in inventing and enacting new forms of collaboration and coordination in their classroom without resorting to additional programming. To support improvisation, Group Scribbles offers a powerful metaphor based on familiar physical artifacts from the classroom or office: adhesive notes, bulletin boards, whiteboards, stickers, pens, and markers. We will discuss the need for simple, flexible collaborative applications for the wireless classroom, theoretical roots of GroupScribbles from distributed computing, examples of how teachers have used GroupScribbles to engage students thinking. | Video | | |
| 29/02/2008 09:30 | LSRI PhD Research Day | LSRI PhD Students | University of Nottingham | We would like to invite you to attend a morning of LSRI PhD presentations on the 29th February. The event will start with coffee at 9.30, and conclude with a buffet lunch. It is a great opportunity for the students to showcase their research and to receive feedback from colleagues. Information is available on the LSRI website. | Video | Slides | |
| 04/12/2007 16:30 | A Theory of Learning for the Mobile World | | LSRI, University of Nottingham | We live in a world of increasing mobility of people and ideas. I shall propose a theory of learning for this mobile world that puts mobility and context as the objects of analysis. Drawing on Dewey, Pask and Engestrom, it describes mobile learning as the processes (both personal and public) of coming to know through exploration and conversation across multiple contexts amongst people and interactive technologies. Through exploration we build experiences and concepts into new knowledge; through conversation we connect learning across contexts. The role of technology in these explorations and conversations is to form a distributed system of meaning making. The human-technology system enables knowledge to be created and shared in a continual process of coming to know through the construction and distribution of shared external representations of knowledge. Proposing symmetry between people and technology, however, raises tensions concerning the legitimate place of technology in learning and the privileged role of human knowledge and activity. These demand to be explored, not only to claim a central role for the human teacher, but also to determine the ethics of mobile learning. | Video | Slides | |