Proceedings. EdMedia2014--World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications

In 2014, edMedia welcomed delegates to the wonderful city of Tampere in Finland for its 26th conference. It is the second time that the edMedia World conference on educational Media and Technology has been held in Tampere, and the return visit in 2014 was again an excellent meeting of minds in a beautiful and inspiring setting

Teachers\u2019 digital culture: the horizon of Italian participants in a TFA course. Proceeding of EMEM Conference

What emotional experience can students live in digital mediated learning processes? In this paper we connect Learning analytics and Grounded theory to analyse the emotional presence of students in 1 1 courses within EduOpen (www.eduopen.org) MOOCs\u2019 platform. Namely, we analysed through a bottom up process and Nvivo 1 1 Plus software the forum dedicated to the students\u2019 self-presentation from all of the courses. By going ahead with the analysis, we defined a set of categories composed by a three-levels system. At a more general level we have the macrodimensions \u201cSentiment about EduOpen\u201d and \u201cEmotions toward topics\u201d. Each of these dimensions is composed by a number of child\u201d categories and subcategories (which are the nodes to Nvivo\u2019s language). After defining the entire set of categories and categorizing all the texts (which was a circular process), we run some graphs on Nvivo showing the hierarchical structure of dimensions, the relations among dimensions and sources, and the clusters of dimensions by coding similarity. Results show how some courses are more composed by negative or positive sentiments (both toward the topic or the logistic arrangement of the course) and how the motivations dimension heavily characterizes the broad emotional dimension of students. In an evidence based action-research perspective, these results give interesting suggestions to personalize the learning activities proposed to students by EduOpe

Assessment of transversal skills in STEM: from theory to practice in a large scale research project

This paper presents an overview of a large scale research project involving teachers and students across eight European countries and involving eleven partner organizations. The project was focused on helping equip students with key transversal skills and competencies. We used integrated STEM as a site to ground the development of these interdisciplinary ways of thinking, being and doing and digital tools as ways to help teachers deepen and enhance their formative assessment practice. We present here an out line of research conducted to develop a framework for conceptualising integrated STEM skills and their assessment via digital tools. This framework identified a number of core competencies and ways to both design and assess for these skills using digital t ools. We also give an account of subsequent professional development with teachers and the piloting of developed teaching methods in schools. The next phase was the conduct of evaluations of our work according to a research methodology which aimed to ident ify best practices for scalable teaching. Some emergent findings and lessons learned along the way from two countries, Ireland and Sweden, are presented as examples here as we complete the analysis stage of the project. This paper aims to contribute to the conversations around interdisciplinary and integrated STEM skills, how they can be digitally assessed and to give an account of the workings of the associated large scale research project. Keywords: STEM, Integrated STEM, inservice teacher education, transversal skill