Are CSCL and Learning Sciences research relevant to large-scale educational reform?

This Symposium includes 4 papers: Paper 1 - From e-Learning Pilot Scheme to Scalable e-Learning Innovations: Wishful thinking or reality? (pp. 573-574 Nancy Law and Yeung Lee, University of Hong Kong) Paper 2: Restoring “how people learn” as the core of educational reform in Japanese classrooms (pp. 574-575 Naomi Miyake, University of Tokyo) Paper 3: Scaling up rapid collaborative practices in Singapore schools (pp. 575-577 Chee-Kit Looi, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University Paper 4: eTwinning: a European Network Community for Teachers to support cross-border school collaboration (pp. 577-579 Riina Vuorikari, European Schoolnet)CSCL 2013 Proceedings: v. 1 - Full Papers & Symposia - http://www.isls.org/cscl2013/Volume%201%20Final%20CSCL%202013%20Proceedings.pdf ; v. 2 - Short Papers, Panels, Posters, Demos, & Community Events - http://www.isls.org/cscl2013/Volume%202%20Final%20CSCL%202013%20Proceedings.pdfConference Theme: To see the world and a grain of sand: Learning across levels of space, time, and scaleMany scholars have contributed efforts to improve education in schools. A major motivation for learning scientists to develop design research as a methodology is to contribute to theory and educational practice through rigorous research without avoiding the complexities and messiness in authentic educational settings. There are many examples of successful implementation of collaborative, knowledge-construction oriented pedagogies using socio-cognitive and socio-metacognitive tools in formal and informal educational settings as well as in teacher professional development. However, there are many challenges to scaling up such innovations beyond small-scale implementation, including that of developing into “fatal mutations” (Brown, 1992). This symposium provides an opportunity for discussion and reflection on the impact that CSCL and Learning Sciences researchers have made on large-scale education reform and what, if any, may be done to extend this impact by bringing together a set of papers describing some large-scale education innovation initiatives in Asia and Europe.published_or_final_versio

Studying Tag Vocabulary Behaviour of Social Tagging Systems in Learing Object Repositories

In the field of Technology-enhanced Learning (TeL), social tagging has been applied to Learning Object Repositories (LORs) mainly as a means:(a) to offer an alternative way of classifying the Learning Objects (LOs) based on the tag vocabulary created by the end-users of the LOs, and (b) to facilitate the enhancement of LOs’ descriptions via collaborative tagging. However, in order to be able to understand how a social tagging system performs and whether it can deliver the aforementioned goals, it is important to be able to investigate the evolution of the tag vocabulary, which constitutes the core component of a social tagging system. Within this context, research has focused on different facets of social tagging systems such as the growth of the tag vocabulary, the frequency and reuse of tags, as well as the stability of the tag vocabulary but there are only sporadic studies for investigating these issues in the field of LORs. This paper aims to contribute in studying how social tagging systems perform in the context of LORs by investigating the evolution of the tag vocabulary in OpenScienceResources Repository, a science education domain specific repository with a rich dataset operating in Europe for 5 years