Facilitators:

Andreas Lingnau & Andreas Harrer

COLLIDE Research Group

University Duisburg-Essen, Germany

lingnau@collide.info

Nikoleta Yiannoutsou

University of Athens, Greece

Collaborative Learning Workshops at CSCL 2003

Workshop Summary

From our experiences in the European project SEED we will provide interactive demonstrations and welcome contributions from participants (e.g. software demos). Evaluating innovative learning scenarios, creating and supporting educational communities and foundational issues of IT-supported learning groups and communities should be a topic for discussion. Particularly teachers are invited to participate.

Workshop Description

The workshop will focus on computational tools as media for infusing innovative scenarios and new practices in educational communities. Computational tools refers to exploratory software which instantiates concepts of a scientific subdomain in an implicit form (e.g. computer code, graphic representations) so that the learner will engage in exploring these concepts through the interaction with the software (Edwards, 1998). Our emphasis is the investigation in the role and the characteristics of those tools that can offer the potential to design custom made pieces of software in a specific setting to the educational communities (teachers, researchers, developers) reflecting personal pedagogies and classroom context. The aims of the workshop will not be restricted to transfer technical expertise or knowledge, they rather will involve the role of tools to support the goals of teaching practices and pedagogies. We will attempt to present the features and experiences with mind-tools that are in practical use for educational purposes, offer a set of basic ideas and principles concerning customisation of educational software and engage non-technical end-users in customisation of educational software. Reflection and discussion on pedagogies, teaching practices and epistemologies with respect to usability of mind-tools can be a topic. We invite people interested/working in educational activity design, component based educational software development, collaborative modelling tools, designing micro worlds for specific learning domains and designing and orchestrating innovative learning scenarios.

References:

Edwards, L. (1998) Embodying mathematics and science: Microworlds as representations Journal of Mathematical Behaviour 17 (1) pp. 53 – 78.

Format

The workshop will be held as a full day event. In the morning it will be a blend of presentations and interactive demonstrations. Participants are invited to contribute with short presentations and demonstrate their own tools. In the afternoon attends can make hands-on experience, work with the tools and discuss experiences from practice in school and other settings. The workshop will end with a discussion session. After the workshop a portal providing the chance to continue discussion and elaborate ideas from the workshop will be set up. We expect participation from researchers, e.g. of other European projects, and teacher trainers. Particularly teachers are also welcome.