January 30, 2009

Workshop

SRA/L3D Workshop: New Developments in "Design, Learning, and Collaboration"

Abstract

Remarks

• we will have 4 researchers from SRA / SRA-KTL / University of Tokyo visiting us on Friday (with whom we have collaborated for a long time)
• we will organize a workshop to inform each other about recent developments of mutual interest
• we will organize this workshop as a discussion-intensive meeting with short presentation to seed the discussion (the schedule will be kept as flexible as possible)

Schedule:

9:30 - 10:00: Opening Statement and Brief Introductions (Gerhard)

10:00 - 11:15: Kumiyo Nakakoji, Yasuhiro Yamamoto, Matsubara Nobuto, Yunwen Ye: "Research and Development Activities in SRA-KTL and SRA" (see Abstract below)

11:15 - 11:45: Leysia Palen: "Disaster Informatics"

12:00 - 2:00: Talk by Michael Eisenberg -- location: ICS Conference Room, Refreshments Served (see Abstract below)

2:00 - 2:45: Jonathan Ostwald and Tammy Summer: "Current Work in Digital Learning Sciences" (see Abstract below)

2:45 - 5:00: Presentation Organized by Time, Demand, and Interest:

• Clayton Lewis: "Computational systems are representational systems"
  
• Jim Sullivan and Meredith Banasiak: "Social-technical tools for sketching and sense making"
  
• Holger Dick, Hal Eden: "Next Generation Wikis--Assessments and New Developments"
  
• Hal Eden: "New Developments in the EDC"

5:00 - 6:00: Final Discussion

6:00 - ...: Dinner (will be catered and will take place in DLC 170)

Individual Abstracts

Kumiyo Nakakoji, Yasuhiro Yamamoto, Matsubara Nobuto, Yunwen Ye

Research and Development Activities in SRA-KTL and SRA

After giving an overview of the recent R&D activities in SRA-KTL and SRA, we
will focus on the following 3 areas:

1. Design Principles for Developer-Centered Collaborative Software Development. Communication is an essential activity for the development of software systems. We argue that we need to differentiate two types of communication during software development: coordination communication and expertise communication, and that different strategies are needed to support expertise communication.
2. Annotate This and Annotate That. We will describe tools that we have developed to annotate texts, movies and html documents in computer, as well as physical actions and things in the real world.
3. Search-Driven Software Development. We are developing a socio-technical platform that helps software developers locate, understand and learn to reuse existing source code. It differs from previous reuse efforts in that, in addition to search, the platform also facilitates learning by supporting annotation, code management and peer discussion.
   

Michael Eisenberg

Rethinking Educational Technology: Some Early Steps

Friday, January 30, 2009, MUEN D428/430, 12:00 noon - 2:00 p.m, Refreshments Served

The field of educational technology has long been influenced by underlying (and often unconscious) metaphors. Computers are seen as "artificial tutors"; the flat screen, like a page, is seen as the primary medium of presentation of instructional material; and peripherals are ... well ... peripheral.

Problematic metaphors such as these give rise to overly narrow philosophies of design in educational technology. An alternative way of thinking about educational technology is to focus on education, development, and children's lives through a more anthropological lens: How do children develop lifelong interests? How do they spend their time? What opportunities for technological innovation do we see in the major elements of children's culture? These are questions that lead to relatively unexplored themes for the design of educational technology.

In this talk I will outline a number of anthropological themes that suggest novel possibilities and projects in educational technology. Some of the examples will build on projects currently underway in our Craft Technology Lab at CU; others will look toward future projects, not yet begun.

Jonathan Ostwald and Tammy Summer

"Current work in Digital Learning Sciences"

We will give an overview of activities within Digital Learning Sciences with an emphasis on:

• Developments in digital library architecture and infrastructure in the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) project
• The Curriculum Customization Service prototype that builds upon NSDL infrastructure
• Research on "using computational thinking to connect people to content in educative ways"

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