The Sciences and Technologies of Learning

The Ninth International Conference on Networked Learning in Higher Education, Lifelong Learning and Professional Development will be hosted by the University of Edinburgh, at the John McIntyre Conference Centre in Edinburgh, on the 7th. 8th & 9th April 2014.

Keynote Speakers: Professor Neil Selwyn & Professor Steve Fuller

This conference is considered a major event in the international 'technology enhanced learning' conference circuit, and provides a friendly, collegiate context for meeting researchers and practitioners in networked learning.

All submissions are peer reviewed, and accepted papers published in conference proceedings

Further details on submission at:
http://www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/call/themes.htm
(Full papers must be submitted for peer review by Friday 4th October, 2013)

PRE-CONFERENCE ONLINE HOT SEATs will run from September 2013 to March 2014: Details of Hot Seat hosts can be found at: http://networkedlearningconference.ning.com/

Full Conference Details can be found at: http://www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/

Post-doctoral fellowship (one or more) in LETStudio at University of Gothenburg

The LETStudio is a strategic initiative for promoting interdisciplinary research within the Learning Sciences at The University of Gothenburg. It addresses issues of knowledge, learning, communication and expertise in contemporary society and the research is conducted through interdisciplinary projects.

Closing date: 17th June 2013

Further info

Join us on the 22nd of May for a CoCo Seminar by Dr. Chwee Beng Lee titled “Empowering pre-service teachers’ problem solving using adaptive scaffolding within a systems dynamic learning environment”.

The focus of this presentation is based on a recent submitted ARC discovery project proposal by three institutions, University of Western Sydney, Sydney University and Nayang Technological University-Singapore on the topic of developing pre-service teachers’ problem solving skills through situating them in a web-based learning environment.

When: 22 May, 11.00am - 12.30pm. (Arrive at 10.45am for refreshments.)
Where: Education Building (A35), Room 230.
More information at the University events' webpage.
This seminar will be available live online at http://webconf.ucc.usyd.edu.au/seminar-room2

Join us on the 15th of May for a CoCo Seminar by Joanne Arciuli titled “Statistical learning: What is it and why might it be of interest to clinicians and educators?”.

Statistical learning (SL) refers to the brain’s capacity to detect and learn from statistical regularities present in the environment. A substantial body of research demonstrates that SL is a powerful form of implicit learning, one that is present in young infants, is multi-modal, and operates across a variety of stimuli (including, for example, natural speech, musical tones, and geometric shapes). It is thought that SL may contribute to a wide range of mental activities including language acquisition and object recognition.

Dr Arciuli is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Health Sciences at The University of Sydney and a cognitive scientist with research expertise across the areas of language, literacy and learning. She enjoys interdisciplinary collaborations and has published in journals representing the disciplines of Psychology, Linguistics, Neuroscience and Speech Pathology.

When: 15 May, 11.00am - 12.30pm. (Arrive at 10.45am for refreshments.)
Where: Education Building (A35), Room 230.
More information at the University events' webpage.
This seminar will be available live online at http://webconf.ucc.usyd.edu.au/seminar-room2

Join us on the 8th of May for a seminar by Andy Dong titled “The Five Cognitive Strategies of Design Thinking and Their (Potential) Contributions to Learning by Design”.

The concept of design thinking exceeds the field of design studies. In addition to the practical, technical tools of design, many scholars view design thinking as underpinned by a particular set of cognitive strategies.

In this talk, I will discuss the five cognitive strategies associated with design thinking: framing, abduction, analogising, prototyping, and mental simulation. I will also relate them to hypothesised cognitive behaviours that are at the heart of design thinking, based upon research in animal innovation and early childhood cognitive development, and discuss of how insights from cognitive design research on design thinking could contribute to learning by design.

Andy Dong is the Warren Center Chair of Engineering Innovation in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies and an ARC Future Fellow. His research addresses the structure and function of design knowledge and the causal importance of the structures and processes of design knowledge production to design-led innovation.

When: 8 May, 11.00am - 12.30pm. (Arrive at 10.45am for refreshments.)
Where: Education Building (A35), Room 230.
More information at the University events' webpage.
This seminar will be available live online at http://webconf.ucc.usyd.edu.au/seminar-room2

Hearty Congratulations to:

Mary-Helen Ward - who submitted her PhD last week

Carlos Gonzalez (PhD 2009) - who has just been promoted to Associate Professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

The University of Sydney Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Scheme is open for applications until 31 May 2013.

These Fellowships allow outstanding researchers within 1-6 years of the award of their PhD to undertake research in any School at the University of Sydney. Applicants must have an outstanding track record relative to opportunity in order to be short-listed and the scheme attracts highly talented researchers from around the world.

If you work in the field of learning technology/learning sciences we’d be pleased to hear from you. The deadline for applications is Friday 31st May 2013 but you're strongly advised to contact one of the Sydney STL team as soon as possible in order to meet the deadline.

More information on the scheme can be found here (offsite).

For readers based outside Australia, in the next few weeks you can see STL lead researcher, Professor Michael Jacobson, present in various cities around the globe on virtual learning environments and the use of technology for learning in science.

Michael will be in Beijing on 23 April giving an invited talk - Beyond Serious Games: Virtual Learning Environments for Understanding Complex Knowledge and Skills - at Tsinghua University. He will also be having meetings on collaborative research projects at Beijing Normal University 24-25 April.

He then travels on to San Francisco, and the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association from 27 April – 1 May, where he will present a paper; Computational Scientific Inquiry with Virtual Worlds and Agent-based Models: new Ways of "Doing" Science to Learn Science. In addition, he will serve as a discussant for a paper session Facilitating Learning in Science Through Technology.

Join us on the 24th of April for a CoCo seminar by Simon Crook titled “The Digital Education Revolution: Initial data analysis of teacher and student reported use of laptops in year 10 science”.

In Australia, since 2008, 1:1 laptops have been introduced into all secondary schools through the Federal Government’s Digital Education Revolution. This study examines survey responses from 1245 science students and 47 science teachers from 14 secondary schools in Sydney in 2010.

When: 24 April, 11.00am - 12.30pm. (Arrive at 10.45am for refreshments.)
Where: Education Building (A35), Room 230.
More information at the University events' webpage.
This seminar will be available live online at http://webconf.ucc.usyd.edu.au/seminar-room2

Join us on 17 April for a CoCo seminar by Roberto Martinez titled “Interactive Tabletops for Learning: can they help teachers support face-to-face collaboration?”.

There have been many promises and expectations about the role of technology to "solve" many educational problems. Although there is substantial research work on automatic support of collaborative learning through networked systems, there is still little research on enhancing teachers awareness when learners perform small-group face-to-face activities in the classroom.

Interactive tabletops offer new possibilities to enhance teaching and learning in the classroom, but they also impose new challenges. The prices are coming down but the question remains, can Interactive Tabletops be successfully implemented in a regular classroom?

Are you planning to revise an existing course, create a new unit of study, or (re)design a learning space? Will you work on this collaboratively in a team? If so, we invite you to consider using our state-of-the-art design space in the Education Building (A35).

The Educational Design Research Studio (EDRS) is equipped to support small teams (2-10 people) working on existing or new course development projects. The EDRS offers multiple projectors, interactive whiteboards, and plenty of space on the whiteboard walls to develop your ideas. There are audio, still image and videorecording facilities, so that you can take away a record of your work. Your team can use the EDRS just once, or as many times as needed to develop your project. Potential users might include academics (from any discipline), instructional designers, eLearning specialists, etc.

The EDRS has been created as an educational design research facility. You can use the space at no cost and without any obligation to be involved in our research. If, after viewing the space, you think you’d like to help with our research program, we would be happy to discuss opportunities with you.

In the first instance, please contact Dr. Beat Schwendimann [beat.schwendimann@sydney.edu.au].

On April 10th, Professor Sten Ludvigsen of the University of Oslo will present "Learning with, and coordination between, representations in science and mathematics: “What should I do next?”".

In science and math, learning involves the development of the capacity to use and follow procedures and understand specific concepts and conceptual systems. In areas like DNA analysis and geometry (surface/volume ratio), representations are a key resource for learning new concepts. To develop an understanding of concepts, students must unpack the meanings inscribed in the representations and select and coordinate between such meanings in order to perform tasks and solve problems. Such unpacking is not cognitively trivial and is contingent upon how the knowledge becomes framed and talked about in the activities. In a series of studies in the Science Created by You (SCY) project, we investigated how students developed a conceptual understanding of specific concepts in science and math (e.g., DNA and geometry). In SCY, we designed four missions to study this issue. Overall, we asked one guiding research question: How does students understanding of concepts change during an SCY-Mission?

When: 10 April, 11.00am - 12.30pm. (Arrive at 10.45am for refreshments.)
Where: Education Building (A35), Room 230.
This seminar will be available live online at http://webconf.ucc.usyd.edu.au/seminar-room2

According to Associate Professor Rafael Calvo we may be entering an era of “positive computing”, in which technology will be designed specifically to promote wellbeing and human potential. He has been in the news recently discussing how we can use advances in online technology to develop innovative programs and tools that support mental health and promote well-being.

The University of Sydney profiled his cross-disciplinary work in harnessing technology to improve mental health with Professor Ian Hickie, Director of the Brain and Mind Research Institute and the Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre (Young and Well CRC). The researchers and the Young and Well CRC are engaging in multidisciplinary approaches that bring software specialists together with psychologists and other mental health experts to create new technologies, specially designed to support mental health and well-being.

The three-year project will develop of a range of online interventions to be mapped and available free to the Australian school curriculum including:

• a Wellbeing Hub where young people can download tools and applications to improve their wellbeing


• a semi-automated triage system


• an online clinic to provide direct support to young people experiencing a mental health difficulty.

In his article on The Conversation, "We could be superheroes: the era of positive computing", he discusses the project in more detail, as well as how technologies that foster the factors correlated to psychological well-being are likely to become more common.

If you'd like to see Rafa discuss positive computing, and you live in the UK, you can catch him at University College London on 12 April when he will present seminar on learning technology and positive computing at 1pm. For more info, see their website.

A Call for Participation has been opened for the CSCL 2013 invited pre-conference workshop, How will Collaborative Problem Solving be assessed at international scale, organised by Chee-Kit Looi of the National Institute of Education, Singapore, and Pierre Dillenbourg of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. This workshop seeks to create awareness in the CSCL community of the international efforts to assess Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS).

The workshop will be held on Sunday June 16th from 9:00am to 12:30pm. More details can be found in the Call for Participation pdf, or on CSCL generally on their website.

The inaugural Digital Rural Futures Conference, addressing the themes of building networks and raising awareness of challenges and opportunities across a broad range of fronts, has opened for registration and submission of abstracts.

A national broadband communications network offers enormous opportunities for Australia’s agricultural sector. In turn, connected farms, and their supporting industries will play a significant role in Australia’s digital economic future.

The conference will take place on 26 - 28 June 2013 at UNE Campus, Armidale NSW. It encourages the submission of abstracts designed to introduce research, groups or institutions, businesses or activities to other conference delegates. Abstracts addressing aspects of the conference themes of data and information management, smart technology, and smart services and decision support systems are due by the 28th of March.

The next ASELL Schools Science workshop will be held on Friday 26 April 2013 at SHORE School in North Sydney.

ASELL Schools Workshops are designed to help teachers improve experiments run in their classrooms and to improve students' experiences. This workshop will include a mixture of discussions and laboratory-based activities. We invite interested teachers to attend and/or submit an experiment for evaluation. You are also invited to bring two students from your school as well as another teacher from either your school or another Sydney school. This is a great opportunity to view a range of practicals in a 'hands on' format that your colleagues at other schools use in their teaching, share ideas as well as to network and build your existing community. More importantly, ASELL and the workshop will be a way that teachers and academics can work together in improving science experiments and experiences for high school students.

For more information see the website.

• Date: Friday 26 April 2013
• Venue: SHORE School, Blue Street, North Sydney, NSW, 2060
• Time: 8:30am-4pm
• Registrations due: 5 April 2013.
• Cost: Free

On April 2, 2013, STL co-sponsor the Human Centred Technology (HCT) workshop "Harnessing Unobtrusive Sensing
to Understand Human Behaviour for Lifelong Goals".

Emerging technologies are creating ways to unobtrusively sense and capture data about various aspects of people's lives. This data can be combined with Persuasive and other personalised interfaces to help people achieve their most important diverse long term goals. For the first time, it has become feasible for people to easily capture evidence about their actual behaviour.

This data can serve many valuable purposes. It can be transformed into a dashboard that help people monitor their progress. It can drive personalised applications that help people remember their intended goals. It can also drive personalised information delivery that gives the right information at the right time.

This all day workshop event is sponsored by the Sciences and Technologies of Learning (STL) Network and Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies at the University of Sydney, and organised in conjunction with Persuasive 2013. It is is free to attend - register online by March 31st, 2013.

The ASELL National Science workshop will be held at the University of Sydney on Tuesday 2 April - Friday 5 April 2013. The ASELL project aims to improve the quality of learning in undergraduate science laboratories by making available student tested, peer reviewed experiments which are scientifically and educationally sound.

Universities are invited to send 2-person teams (one academic and one student). The workshop includes a mixture of discussions and laboratory-based activities. Disciplines to be addressed include biology, chemistry, physics and allied disciplines.

• Registrations due: 18 March 2013.
• Cost: AUD$660 (GST inclusive) per team (includes food)
• Contact: Dr Alexandra Yeung at 02 9351 8715
• Email: alexandra.yeung@sydney.edu.au

For more information and to register, see their website.

STL associate researcher, Beat Schwendimann, was recently invited to give a guest lecture at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. The title of his lecture, presented on March 4th, was “Visualizing central connections in biology – a learning sciences perspective”.

The slides (in German) are available online in slideshare and you can find more information about Beat and his research here. Beat is a postdoctoral research associate in the Laureate team at CoCo. His research interests include science education, technology-supported learning environments, inquiry-based learning, collaborative learning, and knowledge visualizations.

American Behavioral Scientist’s upcoming special issue (edited by Caroline Haythornthwaite, Maaren de Laat and Shane Dawson) will feature articles by some of the leading scholars in the field of learning analytics, including one written by Kate Thompson, David Ashe, Lucila Carvalho, Peter Goodyear, Nick Kelly and Martin Parisio. This is an important article for the laureate team, as it brings together work creating an analytical framework to identify and represent key elements of complex learning environments (Carvalho and Goodyear), with the issues involved in collecting and pre-processing large datasets (Ashe and Parisio), such as those generated using the Design Studio, and the methods of collecting, visualizing, and analyzing multiple streams of data (Thompson), using automated and manual learning analytics techniques (Kelly).

Processing and Visualising Data in Complex Learning Environments
Kate Thompson, David Ashe, Lucila Carvalho, Peter Goodyear, Nick Kelly & Martin Parisio

Abstract
The ability to capture large amounts of data that describe the interactions of learners becomes useful when one has a framework in which to make sense of the processes of learning in complex learning environments. Through the analysis of such data, one is able to understand what is happening in these networks; however, deciding which elements will be of most interest in a specific learning context and how to process, visualize, and analyze large amounts of data requires the use of analytical tools that adequately support the phases of the research process. In this article, we discuss the selection, processing, visualization, and analysis of multiple elements of learning and learning environments and the links between them. We discuss, using the cases of two learning environments, how structure affects the behavior of learners and, in turn, how that behavior has the potential to affect learning. This approach will allow us to suggest possible ways of improving future designs of learning environments.

You can access this article via OnlineFirst