In 1831 Michael Faraday built a small generator that produced electricity, but a generation passed before an industrial version was built, then another 25 years before all the necessary accoutrements for electrification came into place—power companies, neighborhood wiring, appliances (like light bulbs) that required electricity, and so on. But when that infrastructure finally took hold, everything changed—homes, work places, transportation, entertainment, architecture, what we ate, even when we went to bed. Worldwide, electricity became a transformative medium for social practices. In quite
Virtual communities have been extensively examined -- including their history, how to define them, how to design tools to support them, and how to analyze them. However, most of this research has focused on adult virtual communities, ignoring the unique considerations of virtual communities for children and youth. Young people have personal, social, and cognitive differences from adults. Thus, while some of the existing research into adult virtual communities may be applicable, it lacks a developmental lens. Based on our work of designing and researching virtual worlds for youth, we describe
Both in common parlance and within the academy, the word “learning” has broad and varied meanings. On the street, we apply the same term to a child who, as a result of bitter experience, will no longer tease an older, tougher peer, and to those who achieve the highest Latinate degrees after many years of study at the University. In the field of psychology, “learning” was the major topic in America for fifty years, before it was replaced and almost consigned to oblivion, courtesy of the “cognitive revolution” of the 1960s (Gardner 1985). Now, with study becoming a lifelong enterprise, and with
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Margaret WelgelCarrie JamesHoward Gardner
Silence of the Lands enables participants to annotate and map the soundscape of wild and urban natural environments. Participants can record and collect ambient sounds, create and share individual and collective cartographies, and use them as conversation pieces of a social dialogue on natural quiet. The result is a virtual museum in which natural quiet is transformed into a living and affective geography that changes over time according to participants' perceptions and interpretations of their natural environment.
In this article we report assessment results from two studies in an ongoing design experiment intended to provide a single school system with a sequence of secondary school level (ages 14–18) computer technology courses. In our first study, we share data on students’ learning as a function of the required introductory course and their pre-course history of technological experience. In order to go beyond traditional assessments of learning we assessed two aspects of students’ “ learning ecologies”: their use of a variety of learning resources and the extent to which they share their knowledge
Over the next 10 years, we anticipate that personal, portable, wirelessly-networked technologies will become ubiquitous in the lives of learners — indeed, in many countries, this is already a reality. We see that ready-to-hand access creates the potential for a new phase in the evolution of technology-enhanced learning (TEL), characterized by "seamless learning spaces" and marked by continuity of the learning experience across different scenarios (or environments), and emerging from the availability of one device or more per student ("one-to-one"). One-to-one TEL has the potential to "cross
Knowledge and learning exist as byproducts of social processes such as those that take place in communities of practice. We describe two frameworks for understanding and building online knowledge-building communities, or online communities of practice that enhance collective knowledge. First, the C4P framework is described as a way of understanding how knowledge is created and disseminated by participants in a community of practice. Second, we discuss ways in which technology provides added value for learning in these environments using the DDC (Design for Distributed Cognition) framework, and
There is limited literature describing the ethical dilemmas that arise when conducting community-based participatory research. The following provides a case example of ethical dilemmas that developed during a multi-method community-based participatory action research project with youth in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Several ethical dilemmas emerged during the course of the study related to the community in which the research was being undertaken, the recruitment of participants, and the overall research process. As important are possible harms that may arise when the researcher is no longer
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Christine WalshJennifer HewsonMichael ShierEdwin Morales
What information are virtual visitors looking for on museum Web sites? This paper is a first step in a larger investigation into the informational value of museum Web sites. Scholars, teachers, students, museums staff, and museum visitors are the main categories of visitors examined in this study. Questions were asked of these museum audiences about their use of museum Web sites, museum databases, and other aspects of virtual visits.
This article reports on a study which used results from 119 scenario–based evaluations of 36 museum Web sites to develop a conceptual framework for analyzing the usability flaws of museum Web sites. It identifies 15 unique dimensions, grouped into five categories, that exemplify usability problems common to many museum Web sites. Each dimension is discussed in detail, and typical examples are provided, based on actual usability flaws observed during the evaluations. The availability of this conceptual framework will help the designers of museum Web sites improve the overall usability of museum
To date, the major emphasis of educational technology researchers has been the development and use of educational technologies within school settings. Noticeably absent has been research and considerations that focus on the home as a computer-based learning environment and potential connections between school and home learning. Given the increasing prevalence of computers in homes, the authors argue for an explicit research focus on the various ways that computers in homes can be used to create rich learning environments or extend school-based learning environments. To that end, this article
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Yasmin KafaiBarry FishmanAmy BruckmanSaul Rockman