Learning within Digital Media: Investigating the Relationships Between Student Citation Networks, Assignment Structures, and Learning Outcomes

Students are comfortable sharing digital content with others, yet the effect of sharing of digital media for learning remains largely unexplored. Building on research in social network analysis and learning analytics, this research explores the use and sharing of digital media in learning activities, analyzing the effects of the design of the learning activities on the resulting networks of students and their cited resources, and exploring relationships between attributes of these citation networks and students’ perceptions of the learning outcomes. Results suggest that the extent to which an assignment is well-structured and converges towards a single solution positively influences the density and clustering coefficient of the resulting citation network, and that these network measures in turn have a positive influence on students’ perceptions of learning from the assignment

Towards a learning analytics approach for supporting discovery and reuse of OER: an approach based on Social Networks Analysis and Linked Open Data

The OER movement poses challenges inherent to discovering and reuse digital educational materials from highly heterogeneous and distributed digital repositories. Search engines on today?s Web of documents are based on keyword queries. Search engines don?t provide a sufficiently comprehensive solution to answer a query that permits personalization of open educational materials. To find OER on the Web today, users must first be well informed of which OER repositories potentially contain the data they want and what data model describes these datasets, before using this information to create structured queries. Learning analytics requires not only to retrieve the useful information and knowledge about educational resources, learning processes and relations among learning agents, but also to transform the data gathered in actionable e interoperable information. Linked Data is considered as one of the most effective alternatives for creating global shared information spaces, it has become an interesting approach for discovering and enriching open educational resources data, as well as achieving semantic interoperability and re-use between multiple OER repositories. In this work, an approach based on Semantic Web technologies, the Linked Data guidelines, and Social Network Analysis methods are proposed as a fundamental way to describing, analyzing and visualizing knowledge sharing on OER initiatives

The Theoretical Learning Impact of a Summer Engineering Program Curriculum for Underrepresented Middle School Students

This mixed methods, exploratory and confirmatory study was designed to evaluate the theoretical learning impact of a innovative summer engineering program curriculum would have on its audience, middle school minority students. Several theories were used to develop the innovative curriculum including Human Constructivism, cultural learning styles of African Americans, visual spatial learning and graphic design learning. This study was completed in two phases: evaluation of existing middle school summer engineering program curriculum for best practices and development of innovative curriculum and expert evaluation of the innovative curriculum. Three existing programs from across the country participated in this study. Five engineering education experts evaluated the innovative curriculum. The innovative curriculum is composed of three extensive units that include forces and motion, earth and space science and energy topics. A mixed methods design was used in data collection and analysis to provide a complete view of the theoretical impact of the curriculum. The resulting qualitative and quantitative data indicated the innovative program would enhance its target audience by providing a strong foundation in the fundamental understanding of science and engineering topics and spatial visualization. The qualitative narratives proved that many of the existing programs provide very similar learning environments that do not necessarily include cultural learning, meaningful learning and visual spatial learning. The expert evaluators collectively determined that the innovative program would have a positive and enriching academic impact with the chosen theoretical components. They believed that there was overwhelming evidence (3.7 rating average out of a 4.0) that the theoretical components existed in the curriculum and would provide middle school minority students with the proper knowledge to increase their interest which would inherently increase the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics career pipelines. They also strongly agreed (4.875 rating average out of 5) that the program differed from other program, has relevant learning theories for the target audience exceeded expectations and all the participants of the future program to “see themselves as engineers.

A fresh look at introductory data science

The proliferation of vast quantities of available datasets that are large and complex in nature has challenged universities to keep up with the demand for graduates trained in both the statistical and the computational set of skills required to effectively plan, acquire, manage, analyze, and communicate the findings of such data. To keep up with this demand, attracting students early on to data science as well as providing them a solid foray into the field becomes increasingly important. We present a case study of an introductory undergraduate course in data science that is designed to address these needs. Offered at Duke University, this course has no pre-requisites and serves a wide audience of aspiring statistics and data science majors as well as humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences students. We discuss the unique set of challenges posed by offering such a course and in light of these challenges, we present a detailed discussion into the pedagogical design elements, content, structure, computational infrastructure, and the assessment methodology of the course. We also offer a repository containing all teaching materials that are open-source, along with supplemental materials and the R code for reproducing the figures found in the paper

Abstracts: HASTAC 2017: The Possible Worlds of Digital Humanities

The document contains abstracts for HASTAC 2017

Steps to an Ecology of Networked Knowledge and Innovation: Enabling new forms of collaboration among sciences, engineering, arts, and design

SEAD network White Papers ReportThe final White Papers (posted at http://seadnetwork.wordpress.com/white-paper- abstracts/final-white-papers/) represent a spectrum of interests in advocating for transdisciplinarity among arts, sciences, and technologies. All authors submitted plans of action and identified stakeholders they perceived as instrumental in carrying out such plans. The individual efforts led to an international scope. One of the important characteristics of this collection is that the papers do not represent a collective aim toward an explicit initiative. Rather, they offer a broad array of views on barriers faced and prospective solutions. In summary, the collected White Papers and associated Meta- analyses began as an effort to take the pulse of the SEAD community as broadly as possible. The ideas they generated provide a fruitful basis for gauging trends and challenges in facilitating the growth of the network and implementing future SEAD initiatives.National Science Foundation Grant No.1142510. Additional funding was provided by the ATEC program at the University of Texas at Dallas and the Institute for Applied Creativity at Texas A&M University

Reshaping the Museum of Zoology in Rome by Visual Storytelling and Interactive Iconography

This article summarizes the concept of a new immersive and interactive setting for the Zoology Museum in Rome, Italy. The concept, co-designed with all the museum’s curators, is aimed at enhancing the experiential involvement of the visitors by visual storytelling and interactive iconography. Thanks to immersive and interactive technologies designed by Centro Studi Logos, developed by Logosnet and known as e-REALâ and MirrorMeä, zoological findings and memoirs come to life and interact directly with the visitors in order to deepen their understanding, visualize stories and live experiences, and interact with the founder of the Museum (Mr. Arrigoni degli Oddi) who is now a virtualized avatar, or digital human, able to talk with the visitors. All the interactions are powered through simple hand gestures and, in a few cases, vocal inputs that transform into recognized commands from multimedia systems