Whispers in the Classroom

Part of the Volume on Digital Young, Innovation, and the UnexpectedOnline backchannel chat rooms offer the potential to transform classroom learning in unexpected and powerful ways. However, the specific ways in which they can influence teaching pedagogy and learning opportunities are less well understood. Activities in a backchannel may include the dissemination of ideas, knowledge building, asking and answering questions, engaging in critical discourse, and sharing information and resources. This chapter describes a backchannel chat room that has taken place over multiple years in a large university student community. It explores unforeseen and exciting opportunities, as well as possible limitations, for designing teaching and learning practices to leverage this communication medium. With a deeper understanding of the opportunities and limitations of the backchannel, educators and instructional designers could transform the classroom experience from a passive lecture model to one of active, collaborative, and engaged knowledge production

Towards a framework for investigating tangible environments for learning

External representations have been shown to play a key role in mediating cognition. Tangible environments offer the opportunity for novel representational formats and combinations, potentially increasing representational power for supporting learning. However, we currently know little about the specific learning benefits of tangible environments, and have no established framework within which to analyse the ways that external representations work in tangible environments to support learning. Taking external representation as the central focus, this paper proposes a framework for investigating the effect of tangible technologies on interaction and cognition. Key artefact-action-representation relationships are identified, and classified to form a structure for investigating the differential cognitive effects of these features. An example scenario from our current research is presented to illustrate how the framework can be used as a method for investigating the effectiveness of differential designs for supporting science learning

High resolution dynamical mapping of social interactions with active RFID

In this paper we present an experimental framework to gather data on face-to-face social interactions between individuals, with a high spatial and temporal resolution. We use active Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) devices that assess contacts with one another by exchanging low-power radio packets. When individuals wear the beacons as a badge, a persistent radio contact between the RFID devices can be used as a proxy for a social interaction between individuals. We present the results of a pilot study recently performed during a conference, and a subsequent preliminary data analysis, that provides an assessment of our method and highlights its versatility and applicability in many areas concerned with human dynamics

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

Wicked Problems and Gnarly Results: Reflecting on Design and Evaluation Methods for Idiosyncratic Personal Information Management Tasks

This paper is a case study of an artifact design and evaluation process; it is a reflection on how right thinking about design methods may at times result in sub-optimal results. Our goal has been to assess our decision making process throughout the design and evaluation stages for a software prototype in order to consider where design methodology may need to be tuned to be more sensitive to the domain of practice, in this case software evaluation in personal information management. In particular, we reflect on design methods around (1) scale of prototype, (2) prototyping and design process, (3) study design, and (4) study population

Reflexions on Cultural Bias and Adaption

SvenskMud1 is an Internet-accessible Multi-User Domain (MUD) system. But, in contrast to 99% of all Internet-accessible MUDs, SvenskMud is not a global community. SvenskMud is instead the first vernacular (i.e. non-English speaking) MUD in the world, and the only Swedish-speaking MUD in Sweden today. This paper problematizes four questions regarding cultural attitudes and their relationship to CMC technologies. Moving from the historical and the general to the present and the specific I will in turn discuss the following questions: (1) how have American cultural attitudes (historically) shaped the development and use of CMC technologies? (2) how do cultural attitudes (today) shape the implementation and use of CMC technologies? (3) how do cultural attitudes manifest themselves in the implementation and use of MUDs? (4) how do cultural attitudes manifest themselves in the implementation\ud and use of SvenskMud