Innovative learning in action (ILIA) issue five: Learning technologies in the curriculum

Consideration of the papers and snapshots in this edition of Innovative Learning in Action, focused on learning technology, will provide the reader with insights into a range of excellent and innovative approaches to the application of learning technologies to enhance learning both in the classroom and at a distance. It also provides us with examples of how learning technologies can both stimulate and support partnership with staff and students and collaborative learning and working. This edition is particularly timely given the aim of the University’s 2005-2008 Learning Technologies Implementation Plan (LTIP), which is to enhance the quality of, and access to, learning, teaching and assessment by supporting and developing the curriculum through the appropriate and effective use of learning technologies. The LTIP is designed to help us to reach a situation where the effective use of appropriate learning technologies becomes part of our normal teaching, research and enterprise activities, and enhances access to our programmes by all our students whether they are learning on campus, at a distance, or in the workplace. The emphasis at the University of Salford has consistently been on the identification and creative application of the appropriate blends of ICT and traditional methods, shaped by pedagogical, rather than technological drivers, and acknowledging and reflecting different academic contexts and professional and vocational requirements. We have some excellent examples of how this has been achieved here, ILIA once again providing us with an opportunity to reflect on practice and student learning, to share experience and hopefully to identify future areas for collaboration in a key area of curriculum development

Blended Spaces: Reimagining Civic Education in a Digital Era

While traditional civic education in the United States is inextricably linked to notions of a public sphere, this paper argues that the digital era requires a reimagining of this premise. The opaque nature of digital spaces makes it difficult for young people to understand how large of an audience they are interacting with and to what extent a conversation that may feel private is rebounding across public contexts. In this conceptual paper, we (1) use semiotic squares to present publicly private and privately public as two ways to reinterpret traditional presumptions about the role of “the public” in civic education and (2) present the implications of these blended spaces for civic education and civic learning. The paper asks, what does it mean to prepare young people for interaction in the “public” sphere within our classrooms today? By drawing on a vignette of teacher practice, we articulate what civic education could be for students around the world in the 21st century

Designing A Supportive Blended Learning Experience: The Relationship Between Student Performance and Social, Teacher, and Cognitive Presence

This study sought to deconstruct the educational experience in a blended classroom (with both online and face-to-face instruction) in order to test for specific associations between elements of that experience and achievement (final course grade). The Community of Inquiry (CoI) (Garrison, 2011) framework considers a students educational experience as a combination of social, cognitive, and teacher interactions. Working with a large data set (n = 1,926) collected over three years (2011-2014) in 13 undergraduate, blended classrooms at a prominent Canadian university, this study examined how student perceptions of these interactions (with peers, course content, and instructors) related to grades. Using data modelling techniques, results showed a significant, and direct (path coefficient of 0.16, p<0.001) relationship between presence and grade, with results on the presence interrelationship [teacher social (0.23, p < 0.001), and social cognitive (0.45, p < 0.001)] highlighting the role of teacher presence in promoting achievement. Student adoption attitudes also presented as a key consideration in the presence-achievement relationship (0.41, p <0.001), as well as blend format (F=29.98, p < 0.001), where the more integrated, clear, communicative, and consistent a course was about expectations and assessments, the more presence students felt and in turn, the higher those formats performed

Cognitive Sociology

Cognitive sociology is the study of the conditions under which meaning is constituted through processes of reification. Cognitive sociology traces its origins to writings in the sociology of knowledge, sociology of culture, cognitive and cultural anthropology, and more recently, work done in cultural sociology and cognitive science. Its central questions revolve around locating these processes of reification since the locus of cognition is highly contentious. Researchers consider how individuality is related to notions of society (structures, institutions, systems, etc.) and notions of culture (cultural forms, cultural structures, sub-cultures, etc.). These questions further explore how these answers depend on learning processes (socialization, acculturation, etc.) which vary according to the position one takes on the role of language in cognition. It is from these positions that we operationalize a theory of human nature and construct a justification for the organization of the state of human affairs and the related conceptualizations of identity, self, and the subject. In this way, cognitive sociology seeks to establish the minimal model of the actor (the ontology) that underpins not only other subfields of sociology but also the human sciences in general. In this way, cognitive sociology analyzes the series of interpersonal processes that set up the conditions for phenomena to become “social objects,” which subsequently shape thinking and thought. In classical cognitive sociology, the historical traditions of the sociology of knowledge and phenomenology are emphasized, with the work of Bourdieu and Goffman given special treatment, given their contributions as precursors to many of the contemporary contingencies and consequences of debates in culture and cognition. The principle organizing the more contemporary literature are the paradigmatic assumptions concerning the locus of cognition, which have been organized into five ideal-types. These elucidate the points of agreement and disagreement in the field by addressing how thematic concerns (e.g., knowledge, rationality, embodiment, practices, discourse, etc.) highlight the priority of individuality in modeling society, to illustrate what makes cognitive sociology at once interdisciplinary yet contentiously distinct in addressing the politics of “tacit knowledge.

Enterprise engineering using semantic technologies

Modern Enterprises are facing unprecedented challenges in every aspect of their businesses: from marketing research, invention of products, prototyping, production, sales to billing. Innovation is the key to enhancing enterprise performances and knowledge is the main driving force in creating innovation. The identification and effective management of valuable knowledge, however, remains an illusive topic. Knowledge management (KM) techniques, such as enterprise process modelling, have long been recognised for their value and practiced as part of normal business. There are plentiful of KM techniques. However, what is still lacking is a holistic KM approach that enables one to fully connect KM efforts with existing business knowledge and practices already in IT systems, such as organisational memories. To address this problem, we present an integrated three-dimensional KM approach that supports innovative semantics technologies. Its automated formal methods allow us to tap into modern business practices and capitalise on existing knowledge. It closes the knowledge management cycle with user feedback loops. Since we are making use of reliable existing knowledge and methods, new knowledge can be extracted with less effort comparing with another method where new information has to be created from scratch

Interaction and Mechanics: Understanding Course-work Engagement in Large Science Lectures

Post-secondary institutions have developed several interventions to address what Chamblis’ (2014) calls the arithmetic of classroom engagement. Large lecture courses limit the potential for student/instructor interaction. Instead, large lecture courses have historically relied on an industrialized model of information delivery. Very little is known about how students develop their strategies for completing their course-work in this context. The aim of this study was to outline a conceptual framework describing how undergraduates become engaged in their course-work in large science lecture courses. Course-work engagement refers to the set of practices that are part of students’ efforts to successfully complete a course. Course-work engagement is goal oriented behavior, shaped by the beliefs that individual holds about their self and the course. In the framework, I propose that students’ initial beliefs states catalyze their behavioral engagement in the course which is conditioned through feedback from working with peers, from performance assessments, and through interactions with the instructor. This study was conducted in a large (n=551) undergraduate introductory physics course. The course was composed of three lecture sections, each taught by a different instructor. Based on a review of the literature, I posed the following research questions: 1. What are the relationships among students’ peer interactions, their digital instructional technology use, and their performance on assessments in a physics lecture course? 2. How does the instructional system shape students’ engagement in peer interactions and their use of digital instructional technologies in a course? In this study, I employed three methods of data collection. First, I observed instruction in all three sections throughout the semester to characterize similarities and differences among the three lecture sections. Second, I administered two surveys to collect information about students’ goals for the course, their expectations for success, their beliefs about the social and academic community in the course, and the names of peers in the course who the student collaborated with in out-of-class study groups. Surveys were administered before the first and final exam in the course. Third, I used learning analytics data from a practice problem website to characterize students’ usage of the tool for study preparation before and after the first exam. Through the stochastic actor based modeling, I identified three salient factors on students’ likelihood of participating in out-of-class study groups. First, being underrepresented in the course may have shaped students’ opportunities to participate in out-of-class study groups. Women and international students both attempted to participate at higher rates than men and domestic students, respectively. However, women and international students were unlikely to have their relationships reciprocated over the semester. Second, when study tools are incorporated into out-of-class study groups, social influence appears to play a significant role in the formation of course-work engagement. For example, students who were non-users of the practice problem website tended to adopt the use behavior of their higher intensity peers. Third, changes in students’ beliefs about the course were significantly related to changes in their course grade. In terms of performance, students who experienced changes to their course beliefs, or what attempted to form new out of class study groups in the lead up to the third exam, were likely to experience academic difficulty. This study highlights the important role of time and the dynamic role of social interaction on the development of course-work engagement in large science lecture courses.PHDHigher EducationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138776/1/mbrowng_1.pd

SocConnect : a social networking aggregator and recommender

Users of Social Networking Sites (SNSs) like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, or Twitter face two problems 1) their online social friendships and activities are scattered across SNSs. It is difficult for them to keep track of all their friends and the information about their friends online social activities. 2) they are often overwhelmed by the huge amount of social data (friends’ updates and other activities). To solve these two problems, this research proposes an approach, named “SocConnect”. Soc- Connect allows users to create personalized social and semantic contexts for their social data. Users can blend their friends across different social networking sites and group them in different ways. They can also rate friends and/or their activities as favourite, neutral or disliked. “SocConnect” also can recommend unread friend updates to the user based on user previous ratings on activi- ties and friends, using machine learning techniques. The results from one pilot studies show that users like SocConnect’s functionalities are needed and liked by the users. An evaluation of the effectiveness of several machine learning algorithms demonstrated that , and machine learning can be usefully applied in predicting the interest level of users in their social network activities, thus helping them deal with the “network” overload

Avatar Kinect: Drama in the Virtual Classroom among L2 Learners of English

This study presents a qualitative approach to exploring classroom behaviour using dramaturgical analysis of student interactions in relation with, and as mediated through, a gesture-based gaming software among L2 learners of English at two international branch campuses in the Arabian Gulf where face-to-face interactions between unrelated members of the opposite sex are generally discouraged. We investigated whether Avatar Kinect might provide a safe way for young males and females to interact while discussing social issues in a composition course. Data were collected through personal observation and survey. Five key themes emerged from the study. First, some participants chose to perform at front stage and others chose to remain back stage. Second, front stage participants chose avatars with gender and skin colour similar to themselves. Third, all participants appeared to be engaged in the interactive role play processes and with one another. Fourth, front stage actors appeared to act without inhibition. Finally, all participants expressed frustration with technology shortcomings

The Jatropha Biofuels Sector in Tanzania 2005-9: Evolution Towards Sustainability?

Biofuel production has recently attracted a great deal of attention. Some anticipate substantial social and environmental benefits, while at the same time expecting sound profitability for investors. Others are more doubtful, envisaging large trade-offs between the pursuit of social, environmental and economic objectives, particularly in poor countries in the tropics. The paper explores these issues in Tanzania, which is a forerunner in Africa in the cultivation of a bio-oil shrub called Jatropha curcas L. We trace how isolated Jatropha biofuel experiments developed since their inception in early 2005 towards a fully fledged sectoral production and innovation system; and investigate to what extent that system has been capable of developing ànd maintaining sustainable practices and producing sustainable outcomes. The application of evolutionary economic theory allows us to view the development processes in the sector as a result of evolutionary variation and selection on the one hand, and revolutionary contestation between different coalitions of stakeholders on the other. Both these processes constitute significant engines of change in the sector. While variation and selection is driven predominantly by localised learning, the conflict-driven dynamics are highly globalised. The sector is found to have moved some way towards a full sectoral innovation and production system, but it is impossible to predict whether a viable sector with a strong “triple bottom line” orientation will ultimate emerge, since many issues surrounding the social, environmental and financial sustainability still remain unresolved.biofuels, evolutionary theory, innovation systems, sustainability, stakeholder conflict, learning, Tanzania.