Documenting and Assessing Learning in Informal and Media-Rich Environments

An extensive review of the literature on learning assessment in informal settings, expert discussion of key issues, and a new model for good assessment practice. Today educational activities take place not only in school but also in after-school programs, community centers, museums, and online communities and forums. The success and expansion of these out-of-school initiatives depends on our ability to document and assess what works and what doesn't in informal learning, but learning outcomes in these settings are often unpredictable. Goals are open-ended; participation is voluntary; and relationships, means, and ends are complex. This report charts the state of the art for learning assessment in informal settings, offering an extensive review of the literature, expert discussion on key topics, a suggested model for comprehensive assessment, and recommendations for good assessment practices.Drawing on analysis of the literature and expert opinion, the proposed model, the Outcomes-by-Levels Model for Documentation and Assessment, identifies at least ten types of valued outcomes, to be assessed in terms of learning at the project, group, and individual levels. The cases described in the literature under review, which range from promoting girls' identification with STEM practices to providing online resources for learning programming and networking, illustrate the usefulness of the assessment model

Generics, Race, and Social Perspectives

The project of this paper is to deliver a semantics for a broad subset of bare plural generics about racial kinds, a class which I will dub 'Type C generics.' Examples include 'Blacks are criminal' and 'Muslims are terrorists.' Type C generics have two interesting features. First, they link racial kinds with ​ socially perspectival predicates ​ (SPPs). SPPs lead interpreters to treat the relationship between kinds and predicates in generic constructions as nomic or non-accidental. Moreover, in computing their content, interpreters must make implicit reference to socially privileged​ ​ perspectives which are treated as authoritative about whether a given object fits into the extension of the predicate. Such deference grants these authorities influence over both the conventional meaning of these terms and over the nature of the ​ objects ​ in the social ontology that these terms purport to describe, much the way a baseball umpire is authoritative over the meaning and metaphysics of 'strike'/​ strike ​. Second, terms like 'criminal' and 'terrorist' receive default ​ racialized ​ interpretations in which these terms conventionally token racial or ethnic identities. I show that neither of these features can be explained by Sarah-Jane Leslie's influential 'weak semantics' for generics, and show how my own 'socially perspectival semantics' fares better on both counts. Finally, I give an analysis of 'Blacks are criminal' which explores the semantic mechanisms that underlie default racialized interpretations

It's the Society, Stupid! Communicating Emergent Climate Technologies in the Internet Age

Emergent or unproven technologies occupy a central role in post-Paris debates about climate change goals and their feasibility. New technologies have often faced major political and social challenges and the way they are communicated is changing as technical experts and scientists play a greater role in communicating directly online. We review the scope and key characteristics of communications on carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) technologies presenting data from a comprehensive survey of websites compiled to assess the state of global CCS communications. Our key empirical finding is that existing communications are techno-centric in their framing, overlooking economic, political and institutional aspects of CCS as a societal arrangement. We also find an overrepresentation of traditionally less trusted actors from business and government (resulting in a pro-CCS bias), rather than by independent academic researchers or NGOs. We offer some recommendations for how CCS and similarly emergent climate technologies might be better communicated in the age of the Internet, not just in terms of their technical features but also in terms of their societal impacts and the role they might play in a wider social and political context

Learning analytics and psychophysiology : understanding the learning process in a STEM game

This study focuses on the exploration of player experience in educational games and its potential impact on predicting learning outcomes. Specifically, the research aims to investigate the connection psychophysiology data, obtained through a summative study involving nine participants, and the results of a learning analytics model derived from a larger field test. The study incorporates eye tracking and electrodermal activity data to gain insights into the predictive power of this data. Through the analysis of player experience data, the study sheds light on the factors that contribute to effective educational game design. By examining the eye tracking and EDA data, the researchers explored the participants' engagement levels, attention patterns, and emotional arousal during gameplay. These findings revealed a connection between spikes of visual attention and EDA during interactions with character faces as well as in game cinematics. In conclusion, the outcomes of this study provide valuable insights for future educational game designers. By understanding the relationship between user experience indicators and learning analytics, designers can tailor game elements to enhance engagement, attention, and emotional arousal, ultimately leading to improved learning outcomes. The integration of eye tracking and EDA data in user experience studies adds a new dimension to the evaluation and design of educational games. The findings pave the way for future research in the field and highlight the importance of considering user experience as a crucial factor in educational game design and development.Includes bibliographical references

Improving Hybrid Brainstorming Outcomes with Scripting and Group Awareness Support

Previous research has shown that hybrid brainstorming, which combines individual and group methods, generates more ideas than either approach alone. However, the quality of these ideas remains similar across different methods. This study, guided by the dual-pathway to creativity model, tested two computer-supported scaffolds – scripting and group awareness support – for enhancing idea quality in hybrid brainstorming. 94 higher education students,grouped into triads, were tasked with generating ideas in three conditions. The Control condition used standard hybrid brainstorming without extra support. In the Experimental 1 condition, students received scripting support during individual brainstorming, and students in the Experimental 2 condition were provided with group awareness support during the group phase in addition. While the quantity of ideas was similar across all conditions, the Experimental 2 condition produced ideas of higher quality, and the Experimental 1 condition also showed improved idea quality in the individual phase compared to the Control condition

Literacy for digital futures : Mind, body, text

The unprecedented rate of global, technological, and societal change calls for a radical, new understanding of literacy. This book offers a nuanced framework for making sense of literacy by addressing knowledge as contextualised, embodied, multimodal, and digitally mediated. In today’s world of technological breakthroughs, social shifts, and rapid changes to the educational landscape, literacy can no longer be understood through established curriculum and static text structures. To prepare teachers, scholars, and researchers for the digital future, the book is organised around three themes – Mind and Materiality; Body and Senses; and Texts and Digital Semiotics – to shape readers’ understanding of literacy. Opening up new interdisciplinary themes, Mills, Unsworth, and Scholes confront emerging issues for next-generation digital literacy practices. The volume helps new and established researchers rethink dynamic changes in the materiality of texts and their implications for the mind and body, and features recommendations for educational and professional practice

From FAIR data to fair data use: Methodological data fairness in health-related social media research

This is the final version. Available on open access from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this recordThe paper problematises the reliability and ethics of using social media data, such as sourced from Twitter or Instagram, to carry out health-related research. As in many other domains, the opportunity to mine social media for information has been hailed as transformative for research on wellbeing and disease. Considerations around the fairness, responsibilities and accountabilities relating to using such data have often been set aside, on the understanding that as long as data were anonymised, no real ethical or scientific issue would arise. We first counter this perception by emphasising that the use of social media data in health research can yield problematic and unethical results. We then provide a conceptualisation of methodological data fairness that can complement data use principles such as FAIR by enhancing the actionability of social media data for future research. We highlight the forms that methodological data fairness can take at different stages of the research process and identify practical steps through which researchers can ensure that their practices and outcomes are scientifically sound as well as fair to society at large. We conclude that making research data fair as well as FAIR is inextricably linked to concerns around the adequacy of data practices. The failure to act on those concerns raises serious ethical, methodological, and epistemic issues with the knowledge and evidence that are being produced.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)Alan Turing InstituteEuropean Research Council (ERC

Digital Marketing and the Culture Industry: The Ethics of Big Data

Instead of the steady march of the one percent growth in ecommerce as compared to total retail revenues in the last decade (to comprise about nine percent of the industry at the close of 2019), we have witnessed leaps now to over twenty percent in just the last year. Scott Galloway marks the pandemic as an accelerant not just of digital marketing posting a year of growth for each month of quarantine but as an accelerant of each major GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple) firm from market dominance to total dominance (Galloway 2020). Viewing these trends from the standpoint of critical marketing requires revisiting first-generation critical theorist reflections on the American dominance of the global culture industry. Insofar as GAFA digital marketing practices highlight their transition from mere neutral platforms to shapers, creators, and drivers of cultural content, we need to complement marketing’s praiseworthy achievements in statistical modeling (like SEM) with a sufficiently critical and theoretical contextualization. In this sense, while my investigation of big data will certainly countenance and explore its statistical (as algorithmic) innovations, what I capitalize as Big Data connotes the manners in which these large reserves of behavioral exhaust shape culture—domestic and global, home and workplace, private and public. The focus on ethics in each of these three articles follows not just moral norms, social practices, and associated virtues (or vices), but also the important ethical domains of compliance, basic rights, and juridical precedent. In the first article, I focus most exclusively on the manners in which GAFA algorithmic personalization tends to employ the alluring promise of individual tailoring of service convenience at the social costs of echo chambers, filter bubbles, and endemic political polarization. In the second article, I seek to devise a data theory of value as the wider context for my proposal to advance a new marketing mix. My tentative argument is that the classical subject as constructed by these platform domains has now juxtaposed the consumer and firm relationship. The true value creators of the workforce of the digital marketplace are its users as prosumers: an odd mixture of consumer, producer, and product. While the production era took nature as the collateral damage to its claims upon mining limited raw materials, the onset of a consumption driven economy harvests psychic and behavioral data as its new unlimited raw material with its own trails of collateral damage that constitute the birth of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019). In the third article, I turn to systemic racism in American sport with the focus on the performative rituals sanctioned, censored, and sold by the NFL as its foremost culture industry. In this last article, I also seek to develop a revamped epistemology for critical marketing that places a new primacy on the voices and experiences of those most systemically marginalized as the best lens from which to advance theories and practices that can disclose forms of latent domination often hidden behind otherwise an uncritical acceptance of the NFL culture industry as fundamentally apolitical leisurely entertainment