ABSTRACT: All too often, designers assume that complex science and cycles of inquiry are beyond the capabilities of young children (5-8 years old). However, with carefully designed mediators, we argue that such concepts are well within their grasp. In this paper we describe two design iterations of the BeeSign simulation software that was designed to help young children learn about honeybees collect nectar from a complex systems perspective. We summarize findings from two studies that suggest that this design has been successful in teaching and motivating these young children and demonstrates how activity theory can guide design.

ABSTRACT: New technologies have enabled students to become active participants in computational simulations of dynamic and complex systems (called Participatory Simulations), providing a “first-person” perspective on complex systems. However, most existing Participatory Simulations have targeted older children, teens, and adults assuming that such concepts are too challenging for younger age groups. This paper, by contrast, presents a design for a Participatory Simulation, called BeeSim, which makes use of wearable computers and targets young children (7-8 years old) to model the behaviors of honeybee nectar collection. In our preliminary user studies, we found that BeeSim contributed to systems understanding and more easily managed group dynamics.

I use Evernote for almost everything at this point.  On the work front, I'm using it to keep track of design decisions and brainstorming (including images of the whiteboards), take notes in meetings, track my to-do lists for everything, and keep a list of readings and technologies to follow up with (to name a few).  On the personal side of things, I keep track of other to-do lists, travel information, recipes, and my grocery list.

Evernote is also Free, though there are some bonuses for those willing to get the premium account, and I find it is well worth it.

Evernote is also extensible, and a number of 3rd party developers have put together some pretty neat solutions.  My favorite at the moment is EgretList for the iPhone.  EgretList is a to-do list manager that pulls in anything that has a checkbox from your Evernote library into a set of easily organized to-do lists that can be grouped by urgency, location, project, or whatever you can think of. 

For this representation to make any sense, you will definitely want to click on the image and see it enlarged.

This week we read about digital storytelling (Hull and Katz, 2006), fanfiction (Black, 2006), and some of the tensions with applying Web 2.0 practices in education (Dohn, 2009). While there are a number of incredibly important issues being raised by each of these authors, there were three big ideas that struck me that I wanted to include in this response: 1) the role of these various tools in helping individuals to express and shape their identity; 2) the relative absence of discussion of specific tools; and 3) the different relationships with other individuals that were suggested by each of these. In looking at these, I have intentionally simplified the 3 models in ways that some viewers may take issue with (if so, I hope you will comment!). I have also made some potentially contentious choices about when to give individuals complex identities or not. Those choices reflect what I perceived as the relative importance of discussing those identities in the various papers, not a belief on anyone’s part that individuals in certain contexts lose or flatten their identities.

More than ever, given this week’s theme, I hope you will all post comments, suggestions, and critiques below.

• Black, R. W. (2006). Language, Culture, and Identity in Online Fanfiction. E-Learning, 3(2), 170-170.
• Dohn, N. B. (2009). Web 2.0: Inherent tensions and evident challenges for education. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 4(3), 343–363.
• Hull, G. A., & Katz, M.-L. (2006). Creating an Agentive Self: Case Studies of Digital Storytelling. Research in the Teaching of English, 41(1), 43-81.

This week we talked about Virtual Worlds. The content of this image is related primarily to a paper about the spread of the WhyPox outbreak in Whyville (you can see a host of Whyville-related research at http://kafai-whyville.blogspot.com). However, I think that all of the papers that we read this and in the previous unit on games discuss both the power of virtual experiences to situate learning, and also raise a question about how and when that learning moves out of the virtual world.

I’m struggling this week with how to make the full range and scope of a literacy visible to students in the context of computational literacy as inspired by diSessa’s (2000) book, Changing Minds. It seems that most people either “get it” and therefore don’t need a description, or would need quite a bit of exposure to truly grasp the implications. It feels similar to trying to explain to a 5 year-old why literacy is so much more powerful than their understanding the storybook in front of them, long before they have even begun to appreciate all of the powerful ways that the ability to read and write can transform their daily life. This drawing, therefore, attempts to sidestep the issue by focusing on some of the underlying assumptions of what it might mean to reach a point where computational literacy is accessible to all, as Wing (2008) and diSessa (2000) would encourage us to strive for.

This post is in response to the chapter on Cognitive Information Processing (CIP) theories of learning. There were many directions this could have gone, but a lot of the forum discussions this year seem to be about memory with a focus on encoding and recall. That inspired the library theme. The references to radiation and General are a nod to the famous Glick and Holyoak transfer study. For some reason, they came to mind when I was trying to think about a topic to search for in memory. If you are wondering why… ask the librarian!

This dtg is a response to:
Colella, V. (2000). Participatory simulations: Building collaborative understanding through immersive dynamic modeling. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 9(4), 471-500.

This was inspired by several of this week’s readings that all focused on how various kinds of computational software can make complex science concepts more accessible to students of all ages. Notably:

White, B., & Frederiksen, J. R. (2000). Technological tools and instructional approaches for making scientific inquiry accessible to all. In M. J. Jacobson & R. B. Kozma (Eds.), Innovations in science and mathematics education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc.

Wilensky, U., & Reisman, K. (2006). Thinking Like a Wolf, a Sheep, or a Firefly: Learning Biology Through Constructing and Testing Computational Theories—An Embodied Modeling Approach. Cognition and Instruction, 24(2), 171-209.

Sandoval, W. A., & Reiser, B. J. (2004). Explanation-Driven Inquiry: Integrating Conceptual and Epistemic Scaffolds for Scientific Inquiry. Science Education, 88(3).

Note: the formula on the whiteboard came from the Wikipedia page for Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.