Digital Media & Learning

Highlights findings from MacArthur's digital media and learning initiative about changes in how youth learn, play, socialize, and engage in civic life; in learning environments and institutions; and in the guidance needed from parents and teachers

Students' perspectives on the nature of mathematics

This paper reports on one small component of a much larger study that explored the perspectives of students towards mathematics learning. Students were asked “What do you think maths is all about?” Some students responded in terms of mathematical content. Others commented on learning in general, or on problem-solving in particular. Some students talked about the usefulness of mathematics for everyday life. An overwhelming number of students answered the question by talking about the importance of mathematics for the future

Meet Our Bloggers

Just how different is college today? There are computers, cell phones, the Internet and Web. There are numerous little electronic devices for tweeting, talking, teaching, playing and learning. There are also still classes, laboratories, cramming at the library, all nighters, and discussions about dreams and goals. Take a peek inside the life of today’s college students as four incoming freshmen spend some time each month telling us about college life

Hell of a Life

This paper reflects on the work completed for the Storytelling and the Life of Faith Colloquium. It reflects on the author\u27s time in college, time abroad, life, and the course itself. It includes not only introspections on the course readings but also the larger course themes including the use of memory, and universal truths — be there any. It’s about struggle, the internal and the external, it’s an overview of a lot of realizations the author had during her college career. It’s about learning to be ok with the fluctuation called life

Waking up to the Present: Vipassana Meditation and the Body

Using ethnographic methods I examine the process of learning vipassana meditation, a form of meditation in which the practitioner focuses on their bodily sensations, and the ways in which learning this form of meditation affects the practitioner\u27s daily life. I employ reflexivity alongside an ethnography of the particular to capture my experiences as the student of a Thai Theravada Buddhist monk who teaches at a temple in Portland, Oregon. Through this process I have found that learning vipassana meditation pervades numerous aspects of daily life, extending beyond direct instruction and meditation practice, bringing about perceptual changes in reality as learned concepts become embodied through both meditation and lived experience

Measuring Possible Future Selves: Using Natural Language Processing for Automated Analysis of Posts about Life Concerns

Individuals have specific perceptions regarding their lives pertaining to how well they are doing in particular life domains, what their ideas are, and what to pursue in the future. These concepts are called possible future selves (PFS), a schema that contains the ideas of people, who they currently are, and who they wish to be in the future. The goal of this research project is to create a program to capture PFS using natural language processing. This program will allow automated analysis to measure people's perceptions and goals in a particular life domain and assess their view of the importance regarding their thoughts on each part of their PFS. The data used in this study were adopted from Kennard, Willis, Robinson, and Knobloch-Westerwick (2015) in which 214 women, aged between 21-35 years, viewed magazine portrayals of women in gender-congruent and gender-incongruent roles. The participants were prompted to write about their PFS with the questions: "Over the past 7 days, how much have you thought about your current life situation and your future? What were your thoughts? How much have you thought about your goals in life and your relationships? What were your thoughts?" The text PFS responses were then coded for mentions of different life domains and the emotions explicitly expressed from the text-data by human coders. Combinations of machine learning techniques were utilized to show the robustness of machine learning in predicting PFS. Long Short-Term Memory networks (LSTM), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), and decision trees were used in the ensemble learning of the machine learning model. Two different training and evaluation methods were used to find the most optimal machine learning approach in analyzing PFS. The machine learning approach was found successful in predicting PFS with high accuracy, labeling a person's concerns over PFS the same as human coders have done in The Allure of Aphrodite. While the models were inaccurate in spotting some measures, for example labeling a person's career concern in the present with around 60% accuracy, it was accurate finding a concern in a person's past romantic life with above 95% accuracy. Overall, the accuracy was found to be around 83% for life-domain concerns.Undergraduate Research Scholarship by the College of EngineeringNo embargoAcademic Major: Computer Science and Engineerin

An Experience-Connected e-Learning System with a Personalization Mechanism for Learners’ Situations and Preferences

This paper presents an “experience-connected” e- Learning system that facilitates users to learn practical skills of foreign language by associating knowledge and daily-life experiences. “Experience-Connected” means that the users of this system receive personalized and situation-dependent learning materials automatically. Knowledge associated to users’ daily-life has the following advantages: 1) provides opportunities to learn frequently, and 2) provides clear and practical context information about foreign language usage. The unique feature of this system is a dynamic relevance computation mechanism that retrieves learning materials according to both preference relevance and spatiotemporal relevance. Users of this system obtain appropriate learning materials, without manual and time-consuming search processes. This paper proves the feasibility of the system by showing the actual system implementation that automatically broadcasts the media-data of foreign language learning materials to smart-phones

Dimensions of the Learning Organization

{Excerpt} If organizational learning is still seeking a theory, there can be no (and perhaps cannot be) agreement on the dimensions of the learning organization. Even if the dimensions were understood, the connection between learning (or lack thereof) and performance remains unclear. However, regardless of the disputed state of the art, a multilevel, practical but necessarily exploratory and simple framework of common and individual variables associated with learning and change follows. Here as elsewhere, experimentation has an important role to play. Individual and collective learning are not about finding out what others already know, even if that is a useful first stage—it is about solving problems by doing, reflecting, connecting, and testing until a solution forms part of organizational life. There is no stock answer nor is there a single best approach

The influence of online problem-based learning on teachers' professional practice and identity

In this paper we describe the design of a managed learning environment called MTutor, which is used to teach an online Masters Module for teachers. In describing the design of MTutor pedagogic issues of problem-based learning, situated cognition and ill-structured problems are discussed. MTutor presents teachers with complex real-life teaching problems, which they are required to solve online through collaboration with other teachers. In order to explore the influence of this online learning experience on the identity and practice of teachers, we present the results from a small-scale study in which six students were interviewed about their online experiences. We conclude that, within the sample, students' engagement with online problem-based learning within their community of practice positively influenced their professional practice styles, but that there is little evidence to suggest that online identity influences real-life practice

From cognitive capability to social reform? Shifting perceptions of learning in immersive virtual worlds

Learning in immersive virtual worlds (simulations and virtual worlds such as Second Life) could become a central learning approach in many curricula, but the socio‐political impact of virtual world learning on higher education remains under‐researched. Much of the recent research into learning in immersive virtual worlds centres around games and gaming and is largely underpinned by cognitive learning theories that focus on linearity, problem‐solving and the importance of attaining the ‘right answer’ or game plan. Most research to date has been undertaken into students’ experiences of virtual learning environments, discussion forums and perspectives about what and how online learning has been implemented. This article reviews the literature relating to learning in immersive virtual worlds, and suggests that there needs to be a reconsideration of what ‘learning’ means in such spaces