The Picture of Smartphones at School is Not a Dire One and the Picture of Student Competence is a Bright One

In the United States, where I am based, one would get the impression that smartphones are a dangerous drug. Adults worry about smartphone addiction, the correlation of depression with smartphone usage, and an excess amount of screen time (e.g., Elhai, Levine, Dvorak, & Hall, 2016; Duke & Montag, 2017; Škařupová, Ólafsson, & Blinka, 2017). News headlines appear about technology moguls who will not allow their own children to have their own mobile device despite they themselves being the leaders in smartphone products and services. This then evokes guilt and causes anxiety for all the other American adults who are not multimillionaires from the tech industry yet allow their own children to use mobile devices. These alarmist headlines appear in regard to smartphone use in discretionary time. One could imagine the fear and angst that might result from headlines about research on permitted mobile phone use in the classroom. Fortunately, various researchers from Nordic countries have done some of that research and provided empirically grounded arguments for what happens when smartphones are actually used in classrooms. They did so across two countries and with clever instrumentation that could capture what students were seeing on their phones in a way that gave options for students to choose what not to disclose to the research team. Americans can breathe a sigh of relief and look to this special issue for signs of what happens

What\u27s Happening in the Quantified Self Movement?

Rapid adoption of wearable tracking devices and motion sensitive apps has led to the development of the “Quantified Self” movement (QS). Some in the learning sciences community have begun to take notice and incorporate ideas from QS into the research and design of new learning environments. Yet the QS movement is still new enough that very little is known about it, and there are many open questions about how QS might be of value to the learning sciences. This paper provides some history of the movement and through a qualitative analysis of a public video corpus of QS presentations, identifies the variety of participants, the reported motivations driving individuals to self-quantify, and the data analysis activities of some individuals active in the movement. Opportunities for future research and design efforts in the learning sciences are also discussed

Personal Analytics Explorations to Support Youth Learning

While personalized learning environments often include systems that automatically adapt to inferred learner needs, other forms of personalized learning exist. One form involves the use of personal analytics in which the learner obtains and analyzes data about himself/herself. More known in informatics communities, there is potential for use of personal analytics for design of instruction. This chapter provides two cases of personal analytics learning explorations to demonstrate their range and potential. One case is of a high school student examining how sleep influences her mood. The other case is of a sixth-grade class of students examining how deviations from typical walking behavior change distributional shape in plotted step data. Both cases show how social support and direct experience with data correction are intimately involved in how youth can learn through personal analytics activities

Misconstruals or more? The interactions of orbit diagrams and explanations of the seasons

This paper examines a “misconstrual hypothesis” regarding diagrams of the Earth’s orbit around the sun and how middle school students explain the cause of the seasons. Drawing from 24 semi-structured interviews, I present qualitative analyses of students’ explanations of why temperatures vary in summer and winter and how those are influenced by the elliptical shape of perspective drawings of the Earth’s orbit, common to many science textbooks. The results of the analysis suggest that diagram interpretation does not necessarily follow what has been often predicted in the literature and that conceptualizations can shift quite rapidly as different diagram features are noticed. A knowledge-in-pieces approach for understanding diagram interpretation is ultimately recommended through specific examples

Quantified recess: Design of an activity for elementary students involving analyses of their own movement data

Recess is often a time for children in school to engage recreationally in physically demanding and highly interactive activities with their peers. This paper describes a design effort to encourage fifth-grade students to examine sensitivities associated with different measures of center by having them analyze activities during recess using over the course of a week using Fitbit activity trackers and TinkerPlots data visualization software. We describe the activity structure some observed student behaviors during the activity. We also provide a descriptive account, based on video records and transcripts, of two students who engaged thoughtfully with their recess data and developed a more sophisticated understanding of when and how outliers affect means and medians

Measuring electrodermal activity to capture engagement in an afterschool maker program

In this paper, we describe a new approach for exploring individual participants\u27 engagement in youth maker activities. Participants were outfitted with wearable first person point-of-view still-image cameras and wrist-based electrodermal sensors. The researchers analyzed the recorded electrodermal data stream for surges in skin conductivity and compared them with the corresponding photographs based on their time-stamp. In following with prior work, these surges were interpreted as moments of engagement. A comparison sample was created to look at moments that lacked this psychophysiological marker. Results indicated that the two participants had both shared and divergent engagement with activities such as soldering, assembling, and programming

Physical Activity Data Use by Technoathletes: Examples of Collection, Inscription, and Identification

The proliferation of physical activity data monitoring devices had led to an increase in technoathletes—individuals who combine athletic training and performance with the collection and evaluation of personally-relevant data in an effort to better understand their own abilities. We interviewed 20 technoathletes who were actively involved within either cycling or running communities. Qualitative vignettes of technoathletic engagement with data and the practice of data logging, in specific, are discussed and illustrated. Individual relationships that technoathletes have with their data are also examined. Through the examples, we highlight some commonalities in the data that were obtained and how various athletes represented that information. We also consider some of the tensions that technoathletes have with respect to the data they can obtain and how they saw themselves in light of their data and consider some implications for instruction

An Exploration of Computational Text Analysis of Co-Design Discourse in a Research-Practice Partnership

In combination with contextualized human interpretation, computational text analysis offers a quantitative approach to interrogating the nature of participation and social positioning in discourse. Using meeting transcript data from the development of a co-design research-practice partnership, we examine the roles and forms of participation that contribute to an effective collaboration between a multileveled school system and researcher partners. We apply computational methods to explore the language of co-design and multi-stakeholder perspectives in support of educational improvement science efforts and our theoretical understanding of partnership roles. Results indicate participation patterns align with documented roles in co- design partnerships and highlight the space dedicated to process reflection, context sharing, and logistical coordination

Phase soliton and pairing symmetry of a two-band superconductor: Role of the proximity effect

We suggest a mechanism which promotes the existence of a phase soliton -- topological defect formed in the relative phase of superconducting gaps of a two-band superconductor with s+- type of pairing. This mechanism exploits the proximity effect with a conventional s-wave superconductor which favors the alignment of the phases of the two-band superconductor which, in the case of s+- pairing, are pi-shifted in the absence of proximity. In the case of a strong proximity such effect can be used to reduce soliton's energy below the energy of a soliton-free state thus making the soliton thermodynamically stable. Based on this observation we consider an experimental setup, applicable both for stable and metastable solitons, which can be used to distinguish between s+- and s++ types of pairing in the iron-based multiband superconductors.Comment: New references, added discussion about self-consistency of the GL description of a phase soliton in the presence of a proximity patc