KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

 

The conference organization is proud to announce an all-star line-up of keynotes. The  conference will be going with a combination of single and double keynotes so as to present as many different views on the use and importance of the learning sciences in a changing and interconnected world.

 

The opening keynote will be given by Yrjö Engeström - Director of the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research at the University of Helsinki. The title of his presentation is: Beyond design experiments: interventions for expansive learning

 

Yrjö Engeström, University of Helsinki, Finland

Professor of Adult Education, University of Helsinki

Professor Emeritus of Communication, University of California, San Diego

 

From Design Experiments to Formative Interventions

Human learning takes place in increasingly complex, continuously changing activity settings which makes traditional well controlled experiments difficult and render their ecological validity questionable. On the other hand, various modes of action research typically lack in methodological and theoretical rigor. Design experiments are an increasingly popular attempt to resolve this dilemma. However, I will show that the notion of design experiments reproduces crucial limitations of traditional research design and fails to address the foundational issue of agency of the research subjects. This limitation was, albeit embryonically, overcome by Vygotsky’s idea of double stimulation.

Based on Vygotsky’s original work on formative experiments and Davydov’s path-breaking experiments in the teaching of theoretical concepts, as well as on the development of this legacy in the Change Laboratory interventions we have conducted in workplaces since 1995, I will suggest six principles for the emerging methodology of formative interventions: (1) contradiction and breaking away as starting point of intervention, (2) building up agency by means of double stimulation, (3) concept formation by means of ascending from the abstract to the concrete, (4) making textures of spatially distributed interweaving cognitive trails, (5) anchoring up, down and sideways in the generation of activity-level visions and action-level decisions, and (6) longitudinal processes with breaks and bridges between intensity and withdrawal.

I will discuss these six principles using data and findings from two intervention studies my research groups have recently carried out in Finland with the help of the Change Laboratory toolkit. This first study concerns the formation of a new mode of working in the central surgery unit of the Oulu University Hospital. The second study concerns the formation of a new model of service provision in the home care for the elderly in the health centre of the City of Helsinki.

 Link to powerpoint presentation

 

Interspersed throughout the conference are three keynote panels on Knowledge Acquisition and Construction in Cultures and Societies, namely:

 

 

 

Mark H. Overmars, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Department of Information and Computing Sciences

 

The Game of the Future

Games play an increasingly important role in many aspects of our lives. Not only are games used for entertainment, but serious games rapidly find their use in such diverse fields as education, training, decision support, communication, marketing, and art. Also the economic relevance of (serious) games is rapidly increasing.

In the Netherlands in general and Utrecht in particular there is a strong focus on games, both for entertainment and serious applications. The GATE project is a 19 million Euro research programme focusing on game technology and innovative applications of games. Also there is an incubator program for new (serious) game companies and an expertise centre is created to guide and support organizations that are interested in the use of serious games.

In this keynote we take a look at the different initiatives. Although somewhat speculative we will look at the various possible applications of games in particular in the education and training domain. Also we will investigate current research developments in game technology and how they will affect the game of the future. In particular we will look at developments in the construction of virtual worlds, virtual characters, interaction techniques, and adaptability of games to individual players.
Link to powerpoint presentation

Constance Steinkuehler, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Pop cosmopolitanism, cognition, and learning on the virtual frontier.
There is a great generational divide on the matter of videogames. For those older than 35 or so, games are, at best, an unfortunate waste of time and, at worst, Trojan horses introducing our youth to violent, misogynistic themes. For those younger, they are a (if not the) leading form of entertainment, a resource for creativity and innovation, and a new campfire around which to socialize. While public figures such as Hillary Clinton urge concerned parents to effectively boycott such media that “offend their values and sensibilities”, their popularity with children and young adults only continues to increase, with more than eight out of every ten kids in America having a videogame console in the home, and over half having two or more. The National Endowment for the Arts (Bradshaw and Nichols, 2004) bemoans the huge cultural transformation of “our society’s massive shift toward electronic media” (videogames given as the quintessential example) that purportedly “make fewer demands on their audiences, … require no more than passive participation, … [and] foster shorter attention spans” than do print media; yet, the gamers we research engage in rich intellectual practices that rival those found in contemporary classrooms, build social capital through participation in online communities, and report on the transformative role that videogames play in their social and intellectual lives.

American schools largely remain locked within a Ford type factory model of industry and efficiency; games, on the other hand, are forward leaning, recruiting intellectual practices, dispositions, and forms of social organization that are aligned with many of today’s “new capitalist” workplaces. Games are incubators of a new pop cosmopolitanism – a Discourse (Gee, 1999) or “way of being in the world” marked by a willingness and ability to navigate an increasingly globalised and therefore diverse, networked, socio-technical world. If our world is indeed increasingly “flat” (Friedman, 2005), then gaming communities – particularly the massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) discussed in this presentation – are, in some respects, our proverbial canaries in the coalmine.

While mainstream media commonly revert to a rhetoric of “addiction” to explain the time and intellectual labor players invest into MMOs, they all too often ignore the most obvious and important function such virtual worlds play in the everyday lives of those who inhabit them: a social one. MMOs provide spaces for social interaction and relationships beyond the workplace/school and home, thereby functioning as third places much like the pubs, coffee shops, and other hangouts of old. More crucially, however, in so doing, they foster social relationships with a more diverse array of people than we might encounter otherwise.

MMOs have the potential to function as sandboxes for the reconstruction (perhaps, reinvigoration) of a new form of twenty-first century citizenship – a cosmopolitan disposition marked by the willingness to engage in an increasingly globalised and therefore diverse socio-technical world and the development of intellectual practices crucial to successful navigation within it. Research on such contexts, then, has the potential to help us formulate new educational means and ends, ones that lean forward, toward what the world is becoming, rather than backward, toward what the world was like when we were growing up.

 

 

 

Nancy Law, University of Hong Kong
Centre for Information Technology in Education (CITE) - Professor & Head of Division of Information and Technology Studies of the Faculty of Education
 

Ecologies that foster intentional learning for the pursuit of excellence in the 21st century

Everyday we learn, both as individuals and as members of different communities. There are some learning tasks that are generally found to be more difficult than others. In the learning of academic subjects, how to help students to move from naïve, intuitive understanding to accepted disciplinary conceptions is a research area that is still challenging learning scientists. In the area of teacher learning, a major challenge is how to help pre- and in- service teachers to become reflective practitioners who autonomously engage in continuous cycles of pedagogical innovation and inquiry in order that their students achieve better and/or new learning outcomes. In both cases, a pre-requisite for those kinds of learning to take place is not cognitive or metacognitive, but an epistemological one. I will illustrate this from the discourse data we collected from students and teachers engaged in the Learning Community Projects that were started in our Centre since 2001. I will further illustrate from the research literature on promoting conceptual change and our work with school principals on e-leadership development that the kind of epistemological commitment required is best fostered through intentional learning. Drawing on case studies of pedagogical innovation and large scale survey data collected from two modules in SITES (Second Information Technology in Education Study), an international comparative study of pedagogy and ICT use, it is proposed that an approach which focuses on creating appropriate ecological conditions for intentional learning would be most effective in addressing the key challenges identified in school and teacher education.

 

 

Theo Wubbels, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Professor of Education, Associate Dean, Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences

 

Pedagogical benchmarks: Does the homo zappiens need anything more than just good teaching?

Wim Veen used the term “Homo Zappiens” to typify a new student generation. He suggested that this generation possesses certain living and learning behaviours that are fundamentally different from those of previous generations. Regardless of whether this is true, teachers have the obligation to insure that their teaching fits or is adapted to possible changes in the students’ characteristics and to advance students’ learning so that learning can be achieved as effectively and as efficiently as possible. In the 1980s my research group studied how to adapt physics education to the needs of females and developed teaching materials that were judged more attractive by them than existing materials. We observed classes and administered questionnaires on students’ motivation and preferences for teaching. More recently we investigated how teachers can build good relationships with students who come from ethnic minorities. Many hours of video tapes of classes in many subjects and many hours of teacher interviews were analyzed. In the studies we concluded that catering to the needs of specific students required teaching strategies that every good teacher possesses, but which, unfortunately, many teachers do not always appropriately use. Good teaching for specific purposes did not appear to be very different from generic good teaching.

Nowadays, with students who some see as being born with computers in their hands, the question has become: Does the homo zappiens need more than just good teaching? When one observes classrooms, it is clear that students have changed over the years while in many countries the way courses are taught has not changed with the same speed nor in an adequate way. Teacher talk still is the dominant format in many secondary classrooms. Classroom activities almost never invite students to use their capacity for multitasking. Fortunately, however, we are beginning to see more and more classrooms where teaching has been adapted to the many technological tools and new student skills and characteristics that are currently available / present. The questions are, thus: Do teachers who use information and communication technologies have dramatically different ways of teaching or pedagogical relations with their students? Does their way of teaching require a new and different teaching competence?

Reviewing the literature on effective teaching and teacher education and studying exemplary teaching and teacher education programs yields some ingredients for answers to these questions. This keynote will present benchmarks for pedagogical use of information and communication technologies in modern teaching. A comparison of these benchmarks with information about generic teaching competence will shed light on the answer of whether a hunt for new teachers is necessary.

Link to powerpoint presentation

 

 

Shelley Johnson, Utah State University, USA

Research Scientist, Center for Open and Sustainable Learning

 

The Folksemantic Web:  Tools for a Human-Centered Approach to the Semantic Web

 

The emergence of key innovations in technology has enabled legitimate online human interaction in new ways. Systems that support user-generated content and social commentary (blogs, wikis, media sharing sites, etc) are connecting learners with new ideas, supporting reflective activity, and bringing learners together. Content syndication (RSS, Atom, etc) has loosened content from the grasp of unnecessary or unwanted styling, navigation, and website shells. Collaborative user categorization of online content, or folksonomic tagging, is making it easier than ever for learners to locate relevant, meaningful learning resources that can be shared, discussed, argued over, and remixed.

The uptake of these technologies for education has been immense. With younger, digital natives entering the ranks of teachers and faculty their use is practically inevitable. Understanding this landscape and its implications for learning is crucial for educators and researchers alike. Ignoring their impact on the learner's context and the learning landscape will only serve to make educators and researchers increasingly irrelevant. Conversely, educators and researchers who are aware of this environment can greatly influence the learner experience. When these "small pieces loosely joined" (Weinberger, 2002) are combined with tested learning theory, they can exponentially increase meaningful learning opportunities. This session will provide an overview of these emerging technologies, and current research regarding their use in educational settings. Link to powerpoint presentation

 

 

Frank Fischer, Department of Psychology, University of Munich

Professor of Education and Educational Psychology

 

"Internal and external scripts: Studies on the interplay of discourse, cognition, and instruction in computer-supported collaborative learning"

This keynote addresses the interplay of self-regulation and other-regulation in the context of computer-supported collaborative learning. Knowledge construction in small groups can be seen as guided by internal collaboration scripts, that is: knowledge on collaboration represented in the individual participants' minds. External collaboration scripts can be seen as scaffolding strategies for guiding groups through complex patterns of interaction. Such external scripts often specify activities and roles and assign them to individuals in a group. An overview on a series of studies that explore the interplay of internal and external scripts in computer- supported collaborative learning will be presented. The methods used include think-aloud protocols during asynchronous collaboration as well as discourse analysis. In one study, for example, we investigated cognitive processes during collaborative argumentation in an asynchronous discussion scenario. In another study, we explored how differently structured internal scripts interact with differently structured computer-supported scripts with respect to both discourse and learning. In a series of intervention studies, the effects of different types of external scripts on discourse processes (e.g., argumentation) and learning outcomes (e.g., acquisition of subject-matter knowledge) were investigated and compared. Based on main concepts and findings, a framework has been developed that can guide the design of effective external collaboration scripts. Link to powerpoint presentation

 

 

There will also be an exceptional closing duo-keynote on the effects of learning and education on society.

 

 

 

1.     Is Educational Investment in the Poor a Good Public Investment?

 

Hank Levin, Columbia University, USA

 

The concern of most societies for educational equity, generally, and improving the educational status of children from poor families, specifically, is motivated by social justice and fairness. But, one of the recurring concerns is the high cost of effectively redressing such inequities. For example, Dutch researchers find no positive impact on educational outcomes of additional expenditures on schools with high immigrant populations. This presentation will describe a formal analysis of the returns-to-investment question by examining the costs and benefits to society of specific investments in the U.S. designed to reduce the educational disadvantages of those populations that are least well-off. More specifically, this presentation will report on the public investment returns to increasing high school graduation rates in the U.S. using a range of interventions that have been validated by strong evaluations of educational results.

Both economic analyses of costs and benefits are addressed. Public benefits include increased tax revenues and reduced public expenditures on health, criminal justice, and public assistance. What is particularly unique about this study is that it provides concrete cost estimation for specific interventions that have been shown to improve high school graduation for the poor. Further, the statistical analysis of benefits is based upon unique data sets that address each of the relations between education on the one hand and the generation of income, tax revenues and savings of public health costs, criminal justice costs, and public assistance costs. Each type of benefit is estimated separately and combined to provide an overall benefit-cost analysis of investments to improve the educational status of the poor. Our studies show that the benefits to the taxpayer that are generated by these investments exceed substantially the costs. That is, beyond the moral argument for improving the education of the least-advantaged populations, there is a strong economic argument.

 

 

2. “Key elements for a framework to understand and conceptualise the social outcomes of learning”.

 

Richard Desjardins, Danish University of Education, Denmark
Associate Professor in the Economics of Education
Programme for Comparative Education Policy Research
Department of Educational Sociology

The presentation will focus on theoretical and empirical issues relating to the links between education and social outcomes. Education has effects that are far reaching, beyond measures such as labour market earnings or GDP growth. The importance of a well functioning economy however, has ensured that these two latter economic outcomes have received due attention and that a decent evidence base has been built up. But a range of other educational outcomes, which are arguably equally important, are not as well supported by a rigorous knowledge base, nor are they necessarily well understood. Researching the links between education and social outcomes is plagued by a number of serious shortcomings. Firstly, the nature and purpose of education is ill-defined. Secondly, the impact of education on economy and society is complex. Thirdly, many of the relevant variables are difficult to assess using precise quantitative measures. All of these combine to make it more difficult to build up an adequate knowledge base which is needed to inform the debate on what education should achieve and how. Despite the complexity involved and the limitations associated with available measurements and other observations, educational research has an important role to play in building up a well balanced knowledge base.

Starting with the premise that education constitutes an ill-defined problem, the first part of the presentation discusses the importance of theory for understanding better the relationships between education and social outcomes, for gathering and synthesizing what we know and what we want to know; and for drawing out their implications for research, policy and practice. The main part of the presentation discusses three overarching alternative mechanisms that link education and social outcomes, namely the ARC (absolute, relative and cumulative) set of models. These are anchored in the political science literature but references are made to similar counterparts in the economics literature. Some evidence is presented to provide an overview of what is known empirically about these alternative explanations. But it should be noted that we in fact have little empirical knowledge, which is robust, on the nature and range of such effects, nor on the conditions needed to secure positive effects or avoid negative ones. Finally, there is a concluding discussion on some of the empirical limitations and challenges to building up a robust evidence base in this area.