The Effects of Mind Mapping Activities on Students\u27 Motivation

We examined how students‟ motivation differed when they participated in three different types of mind mapping activities: one activity that was completed individually outside of class time, one that was completed individually in class with the instructor available for help, and one that was completed in class with other students and the instructor available for help. Using the MUSIC Model of Academic Motivation (Jones, 2009) as a framework, we implemented a concurrent mixed methods design using identical samples whereby the quantitative component was dominant over the qualitative component. Participants included 40 undergraduate students enrolled in an educational psychology course at a U.S. university. After each of the mind mapping activities, study participants completed questionnaires that included open- and closed-ended items. Although the three activities had similar effects on students‟ motivation-related beliefs, some differences were documented in their preferences of mind mapping activities. Instructional implications are provided

Digital competencies and capabilities. Pre-adolescents inside and outside school

The investment on key-competences in last years was one crucial European strategy to face the new challenges of the knowledge society and of the digital convergence and to guarantee the active citizenship and social inclusion. The first answer has been given in Lisbon 2000’s, when eight main objectives have been presented; they were focused on the improvement of basic and "soft" skills in educational paths of the main agencies (i.e. school and family). Hence, the digital competence, included in Lisbon strategies, can be interpreted in a double meaning: as basic skill (focused on the digital literacy) as soft skill (focused on the digital learning). Starting from here, this proposal will construct a theoretical description of the digital competence and its impact to cognitive processes of the children, considering the influence and the strategies applied by agencies of the social capital, especially the family. This issue will be analysed through the re-reading the capabilities approach by Sen and Nussbaum (2011), according two perspectives: 1. the first is psyco-cognitive connected to the development of digital competences during the learning process of children; 2. the second is focused on the relational and communicative styles of their socializing agencies. In the digital skills, the generation gap is more evident: the youngsters acquire the digital literacy through their experiences; however their digital knowledge is often technical and linguistic, while it isn’t a lot oriented to the metacognition of the digital media, such as the critical thinking or the creativity; on the other side, the educators don’t have the same familiarity with media and for this reason they not always understand needs, values and references of youngsters. The consumption styles of parents, their prejudices and their competences influence the relationship of children with media starting from their first digital experience, with social and cognitive consequences

Digital Competence and Family Mediation in the Perception of Online Risk to Adolescents. Analysis of the Montenegro Case Study

Da diversi anni il dibattito scientifico e politico internazionale ha manifestato un interesse sempre più crescente sulla digital literacy e la digital education, quali strumenti di tutela del minore rispetto ai rischi derivanti dall’utilizzo incontrollato e inconsapevole di diversi mezzi di comunicazione. Contemporaneamente, diversi filoni della letteratura scientifica hanno approfondito i temi dei rischi e delle opportunità legate all’utilizzo della rete, da cui spesso sono stati promossi interventi territoriali politici, di sensibilizzazione o di formazione per arginare gli effetti potenzialmente nocivi e incrementare quelli positivi, legati soprattutto alle opportunità di crescita individuale e di inclusione socioculturale che le tecnologie possono contribuire a determinare. Il paper si inserisce all’interno di questo quadro per riflettere sul modo in cui il possesso o meno di alcune competenze digitali possa influenzare o meno il comportamento di fruizione mediale dei giovani, incrementando o meno il rischio di esposizione mediale all’interno di un contesto socioculturale circoscritto. Per intraprendere questo tipo di riflessione, il paper focalizza la propria attenzione sul caso di studio del Montenegro e analizza alcuni risultati della ricerca Eukids on line del 2016, per riflettere sulla relazione fra competenze digitali e livello di rischio espositivo dei bambini compresi fra i 9 e i 17 anni all’interno di aree territoriali socioculturali circoscritte.For several years, international scientific and political debate has shown increasing interest in digital literacy and digital education as tools to protect minors from the risks associated with the unmonitored and unaware use of various media. At the same time, various strains in the scientific literature have more deeply analyzed the themes of the risks and opportunities associated with using the web; this has often resulted in the promotion of political, awareness-raising, or educational interventions on the local level, to contain the potentially harmful effects and augment the positive ones linked especially to the opportunities for individual growth and sociocultural inclusion that these technologies can help bring about. This paper enters into this framework to explore how whether or not digital competence is possessed can influence young people’s media use behaviour, while increasing or not increasing the risk of media exposure within a circumscribed sociocultural context. To undertake this kind of reflection, this paper focuses its attention on the Montenegro case study and analyzes some results of the 2016 Global kids on line research work, to consider the relationship between digital competence and the exposure risk level of children between 12 and 17 years of age within circumscribed sociocultural areas

Proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET 2013)

"This book contains the proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET) 2013 which was held on 16.-17.September 2013 in Paphos (Cyprus) in conjunction with the EC-TEL conference. The workshop and hence the proceedings are divided in two parts: on Day 1 the EuroPLOT project and its results are introduced, with papers about the specific case studies and their evaluation. On Day 2, peer-reviewed papers are presented which address specific topics and issues going beyond the EuroPLOT scope. This workshop is one of the deliverables (D 2.6) of the EuroPLOT project, which has been funded from November 2010 – October 2013 by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) of the European Commission through the Lifelong Learning Programme (LLL) by grant #511633. The purpose of this project was to develop and evaluate Persuasive Learning Objects and Technologies (PLOTS), based on ideas of BJ Fogg. The purpose of this workshop is to summarize the findings obtained during this project and disseminate them to an interested audience. Furthermore, it shall foster discussions about the future of persuasive technology and design in the context of learning, education and teaching. The international community working in this area of research is relatively small. Nevertheless, we have received a number of high-quality submissions which went through a peer-review process before being selected for presentation and publication. We hope that the information found in this book is useful to the reader and that more interest in this novel approach of persuasive design for teaching/education/learning is stimulated. We are very grateful to the organisers of EC-TEL 2013 for allowing to host IWEPLET 2013 within their organisational facilities which helped us a lot in preparing this event. I am also very grateful to everyone in the EuroPLOT team for collaborating so effectively in these three years towards creating excellent outputs, and for being such a nice group with a very positive spirit also beyond work. And finally I would like to thank the EACEA for providing the financial resources for the EuroPLOT project and for being very helpful when needed. This funding made it possible to organise the IWEPLET workshop without charging a fee from the participants.

Mediated Authentic Video: A Flexible Tool Supporting a Developmental Approach to Teacher Education

You Tube now has more searches than Google, indicating that video is a motivating and, potentially, powerful learning tool. This paper investigates how we can embrace video to support improvements in teacher education. It will draw on innovative approaches to teacher education, developed by the Open University UK, in order to explore in more depth the potential of video. It will use case studies from three continents, and draw on research from different sources, in order to highlight the successes and the challenges. Looking across the examples presented, the paper will describe models of teacher learning and video use, and demonstrate that video can add value to teacher development activities provided that appropriate support and mediation, consistent with the pedagogy that is being promoted, is in place. Sustainable Development Goal 4 emphasizes the importance of improving the quality of the experiences that children have in school. This requires new models for teacher education, and has become an urgent issue. Video could be a significant part of the solution

The impact of technology: value-added classroom practice: final report

This report extends Becta’s enquiries into the ways in which digital technologies are supporting learning. It looks in detail at the learning practices mediated by ICT in nine secondary schools in which ICT for learning is well embedded. The project proposes a broader perspective on the notion of ‘impact’ that is rather different from a number of previous studies investigating impact. Previous studies have been limited in that they have either focused on a single innovation or have reported on institutional level factors. However, in both cases this pays insufficient attention to the contexts of learning. In this project, the focus has been on the learning practices of the classroom and the contexts of ICT-supported learning. The study reports an analysis of 85 lesson logs, in which teachers recorded their use of space, digital technology and student outcomes in relation to student engagement and learning. The teachers who filled in the logs, as well as their schools’ senior managers, were interviewed as part of a ‘deep audit’ of ICT provision conducted over two days. One-hour follow-up interviews with the teachers were carried out after the teachers’ log activity. The aim of this was to obtain a broader contextualisation of their teaching

Self-Expressive Creativity in the Adolescent Digital Domain: Personality, Self-Esteem, and Emotions

Background: Although self-expressive creativity is related to cyberbullying, it can also reinforce strengths that contribute to positive adolescent development. Our study concentrated on the relationships between personality traits and self-expressive creativity in the digital domain in an adolescent population. For this, we analyzed the effect of self-esteem and emotional intelligence as assets for positive development related to personality traits and self-expressive creativity. Methods: The study population included a total of 742 adolescents that were high-school students in the province of Almería, Spain. The following instruments were used: Big Five Inventory (BFI) to evaluate the five broad personality factors, Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSE), Expression, Management, and Emotion Recognition Evaluation Scale (TMMS-24), and the Creative Behavior Questionnaire: Digital (CBQD). Results: The cluster analysis revealed the existence of two profiles of adolescents based on their personality traits. The analysis showed that the group with the highest levels of extraversion and openness to experience and lowest levels of neuroticism were those who showed the highest scores in self-esteem, clarity, and emotional repair, as well as in self-expressive creativity. Higher scores in neuroticism and lower scores in extraversion and openness to experience showed a direct negative effect on self-expressive creativity and indirect effect through self-esteem and emotional attention, which acted as mediators in series. Conclusions: To counteract certain characteristics that increase adolescents’ vulnerability to social network bullying, a plan must be developed for adequate positive use of the Internet from a creative model that enables digital self-expression for acquiring identity and self-efficacy through the positive influence of peers, which promotes feelings of empowerment and self-affirmation through constructive tasks that reinforce self-esteem and emotional intelligence

Auto-Modernity after Postmodernism: Autonomy and Automation in Culture, Technology, and Education

Part of the Volume on Digital Young, Innovation, and the UnexpectedThis chapter argues that in order to understand the implications of how digital youth are now using new media and technologies in unexpected and innovative ways, we have to rethink many of the cultural oppositions that have shaped the Western tradition since the start of the modern era. To be precise, we can no longer base our analysis of culture, identity, and technology on the traditional conflicts between the public and the private, the subject and the object, and the human and the machine. Moreover, the modern divide pitting the isolated individual against the impersonal realm of technological mechanization no longer seems to apply to the multiple ways young people are using new media and technologies. In fact, this chapter argues that we have moved into a new cultural period of automodernity, and a key to this cultural epoch is the combination of technological automation and human autonomy

What learning analytics based prediction models tell us about feedback preferences of students

Learning analytics (LA) seeks to enhance learning processes through systematic measurements of learning related data and to provide informative feedback to learners and educators (Siemens & Long, 2011). This study examined the use of preferred feedback modes in students by using a dispositional learning analytics framework, combining learning disposition data with data extracted from digital systems. We analyzed the use of feedback of 1062 students taking an introductory mathematics and statistics course, enhanced with digital tools. Our findings indicated that compared with hints, fully worked-out solutions demonstrated a stronger effect on academic performance and acted as a better mediator between learning dispositions and academic performance. This study demonstrated how e-learners and their data can be effectively re-deployed to provide meaningful insights to both educators and learners