Digital, material and networked: some emerging themes for SET education

Boundaries between the digital and material worlds are becoming blurred as the internet increasingly connects us to things as well as people and information. This is increasingly relevant to education as initiatives which significantly combine digital and material elements in networks are becoming a reality for Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) learning. Our paper reports on the initial findings of a project to carry out a ‘state of the art’ review of literature to establish the key themes, opportunities and obstacles that are emerging from the development and use of these ‘hybrid’ systems in learning. We wanted to explore the extent to which this new domain of study is being reported in the literature and to identify work representative of this area. Our aim was to investigate the depth of research in this area by going beyond the technologically descriptive to focus on pedagogical and organisational issues raised in the literature. To identify the state of current research in the area we carried out a systematic search of databases of Science, Engineering and Technology education literature. We found 808 papers relating to the hybrid learning initiatives we are interested in, of which the majority, 81%, involved the Engineering and Technology disciplines while 6.8% related to Science. The vast majority of papers referred to remote laboratories and most of these were concerned with describing the technologies involved. In order to explore issues emerging from the research, we carried out an in-depth text review of a particular subset of the papers found that focussed on pedagogical issues. The three main themes that emerged were: the importance of real data and authenticity in learning; the importance of a sense of presence (e.g. telepresence, social presence and/or immersion) and the locus of control in, and responsiveness of, a hybrid system. We conclude that these new digital ‘hybrid’ pedagogies offer a lens with which to view both the more traditional material pedagogies, e.g. laboratory-based learning, and purely digital pedagogies, e.g. virtual labs. Finally, issues of authenticity, presence and control/responsiveness will be of increasing pedagogical importance to other ‘hybrid’ systems, such as those involving ubiquitous computing

From Social Simulation to Integrative System Design

As the recent financial crisis showed, today there is a strong need to gain "ecological perspective" of all relevant interactions in socio-economic-techno-environmental systems. For this, we suggested to set-up a network of Centers for integrative systems design, which shall be able to run all potentially relevant scenarios, identify causality chains, explore feedback and cascading effects for a number of model variants, and determine the reliability of their implications (given the validity of the underlying models). They will be able to detect possible negative side effect of policy decisions, before they occur. The Centers belonging to this network of Integrative Systems Design Centers would be focused on a particular field, but they would be part of an attempt to eventually cover all relevant areas of society and economy and integrate them within a "Living Earth Simulator". The results of all research activities of such Centers would be turned into informative input for political Decision Arenas. For example, Crisis Observatories (for financial instabilities, shortages of resources, environmental change, conflict, spreading of diseases, etc.) would be connected with such Decision Arenas for the purpose of visualization, in order to make complex interdependencies understandable to scientists, decision-makers, and the general public.Comment: 34 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c

Bots as Virtual Confederates: Design and Ethics

The use of bots as virtual confederates in online field experiments holds extreme promise as a new methodological tool in computational social science. However, this potential tool comes with inherent ethical challenges. Informed consent can be difficult to obtain in many cases, and the use of confederates necessarily implies the use of deception. In this work we outline a design space for bots as virtual confederates, and we propose a set of guidelines for meeting the status quo for ethical experimentation. We draw upon examples from prior work in the CSCW community and the broader social science literature for illustration. While a handful of prior researchers have used bots in online experimentation, our work is meant to inspire future work in this area and raise awareness of the associated ethical issues.Comment: Forthcoming in CSCW 201

Epidemic space

The aim of this article is to highlight the importance of 'spatiality' in understanding the materialization of risk society and cultivation of risk sensibilities. More specifically it provides a cultural analysis of pathogen virulence (as a social phenomenon) by means of tracing and mapping the spatial flows that operate in the uncharted zones between the microphysics of infection and the macrophysics of epidemics. It will be argued that epidemic space consists of three types of forces: the vector, the index and the vortex. It will draw on Latour's Actor Network Theory to argue that epidemic space is geared towards instability when the vortex (of expanding associations and concerns) displaces the index (of finding a single cause)

What did the Romans ever do for us? ‘Next generation’ networks and hybrid learning resources

Networked learning is fundamentally concerned with the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to link people to people and resources, to support the process of learning. This paper explores some current and forthcoming changes in ICT and some potential implications of these developments for networked learning. Whilst we aim to avoid taking a technologically determinist stance, we explore the potential for future practice and how some educational and pedagogic practices are evolving to exploit and shape the digital environment. We argue that we can change both the ways in which connections between people (learners and other learners; learners and tutors) are made and the nature of the resources that learning communities (particularly distributed communities) can engage with. In doing this we draw on two strands of work. Firstly, we draw on the ‘IBZL Education’ a UK Open University initiative to develop new scholarship in the context of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) through which educators are encouraged to think about technological change in the next five to ten years and ways in which we can intervene and shape these developments. We use problem-based learning as an example of a learning experience that can be difficult to implement in a networked learning environment. IBZL identified two broad strands of significant technological development. 'Superfast' broadband networks that are capable of supporting novel applications are being rolled in the UK (and elsewhere). Also, boundaries between the real and virtual worlds are becoming blurred as in the ‘internet of things’ where, for example, RFID tags enable information about the real world to be brought into the virtual one. We use the term ‘artefact’ to describe designed components, whether entirely digital, such as a computer forum, or material, such as a tablet PC. Networked ‘hybrid’ technologies of virtual and material components have may great potential for use in education. Secondly, we illustrate how these changes may be beginning to happen in distance education using the example of TU100 My Digital Life, a new introductory Open University. . TU100 Students use an electronics board in their own homes to work on a programming problem in collaboration other students through a tutor-led tutorial in a web conferencing system. We also note some of the evident complexity that establishing such resources as part of wider infrastructures of networked learning would be likely to involve