Global Climate Exchange: Peer collaboration in a “Global classroom”

This paper reports on student peer collaboration in an online environment in an international shared curriculum, the Global Climate Exchange. Four cohorts of students (age 16 -19) from Canada, China, Norway and Sweden (n=157) were engaged in four wiki-based activities where they collaborated with peers locally and internationally. Previously, impact from Global Climate Exchange on students’ conceptual understanding was analysed, indicating a positive impact which might be explained by the amount of interactions with peers and international peer collaboration. This paper looks further into the details of the students’ peer interactions in terms of how they communicate in the online Global Climate Exchange learning environment. The study revealed that communication between international peers might be more constructive than when communication is limited to national peers. This might be a possible explanation for our previously findings indicating that international peer collaboration may well be an approach to enhance students’ conceptual understanding of climate change. Published in NorDiNa https://www.journals.uio.no/index.php/nordina/article/view/53

Collective Inquiry and Knowledge Building

This page, from the The Center for Innovative Research in Cyberlearning (CIRCL), offers information on technology designs for collective inquiry and their application in the classroom in order to help students "participate in a classroom community that builds knowledge and develops shared practices." The overview page includes information on how technology can "[provide] structures for organizing and interconnecting studentsâ contributions in a format that supports the inquiry process." An issues sections discusses the challenges of bringing collective inquiry technology to the classroom, including design and scaling. The site also offers substantial lists of further readings for those interested in the topic

Curriculum design for social, cognitive and emotional engagement in Knowledge Building

Abstract Knowledge Building has been advanced as a pedagogy of engaged learning where students identify as a community whose purpose is to advance their shared ideas. This approach, which has been studied for three decades (Scardamalia & Bereiter, in: K. Sawyer (ed) Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences, Cambridge University Press, 2014), includes cognitive, social constructivist, and emotional elements (Zhu et al. in User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, 29: 789–820, 2019b). This paper investigates how refining Knowledge Building activities based on students’ feedback impacts their social, cognitive, and emotional engagement. Using a design-based research method, we refined successive course activities based on feedback from 23 Masters of Education students. With successive iterations, we found that the density of students’ reading networks increased; they theorized more deeply, introduced more authoritative resources, and made greater efforts to integrate ideas within the community knowledge base. As well, their level of negative affect decreased. These findings suggest that soliciting students’ input into course design can benefit their engagement and disposition toward learning, with implications for curriculum design

Abstract New Roles for Students, Instructors, and Computers in a Lab-based Introductory Programming Course

This paper describes our efforts to develop a new lab-based course format for computer science instruction. Building on learning science research, we created a flexible new technology platform to support students and their instructor as they participated in this new form of instruction. Students work collaboratively on Web-based activities while the instructor interacts with students in a tutorial role. The paper describes our system in detail, outlines the organization of the course that used it, and reviews and evaluates the pilot results. We then discuss th

Scripting science inquiry learning in CSCL classrooms. Symposium conducted at the 10th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS 2012)

Research on scripting computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) has recently received a lot of attention. However, most findings within this research grew out of studies focusing scripting online collaborative learning activities that often had an asynchronous nature and were conducted in artificial settings. This symposium includes an international set of presenters from Belgium, Canada, Germany, and the USA and brings together four studies that focus on scripting face-to-face “classroom” activities, seeing the “classroom” as a formal physical learning environment. The common denominator of the contributions is that they are all field studies focusing on computer-supported science inquiry learning, aiming to investigate the optimal conditions for organizing these inquiry learning environments. Each paper will present the research context, method, data, and conclusions on how scripting can be implemented to support science inquiry learning. Broader implications of the findings of these studies will be discussed with the audience.status: publishe

Scripting science inquiry learning in CSCL classrooms

Research on scripting computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) has recently received a lot of attention. However, most findings within this research grew out of studies focusing scripting online collaborative learning activities that often had an asynchronous nature and were conducted in artificial settings. This symposium includes an international set of presenters from Belgium, Canada, Germany, and the USA and brings together four studies that focus on scripting face-to-face “classroom” activities, seeing the “classroom” as a formal physical learning environment. The common denominator of the contributions is that they are all field studies focusing on computer-supported science inquiry learning, aiming to investigate the optimal conditions for organizing these inquiry learning environments. Each paper will present the research context, method, data, and conclusions on how scripting can be implemented to support science inquiry learning. Broader implications of the findings of these studies will be discussed with the audience