Rebecca Cober’s research while affiliated with University of Toronto and other places

In this symposium we consider the physical space of the classroom in order to understand how location can be used as an input or information source for knowledge- building activities. Five posters encapsulate several projects, addressing the role of physical or locational elements within our work, including their role in the pedagogical design, the specific measures collected, and representations employed. The first two projects instrument the classroom with location-specific technologies (e.g., RFID tags), enabling learners to explore location-dependent phenomena (e.g., an earthquake zone, squirrel food patches). The third project maps classroom inquiry discourse (i.e., digital notes) to spatially meaningful locations though out the classroom for collective knowledge mapping. The fourth and fifth projects require learners to consider the physical properties of their learning environment in order to make decisions concerning where they will place motion-activated cameras for wildlife field investigations, allowing learners to instrument the learning environment themselves.

Teachers are not typically involved as participatory designers in the design of technology-enhanced learning environments. As they have unique and valuable perspec- tives on the role of technology in education, it is of utmost importance to engage them in a participatory design process. Adopting a case study methodology, we aim to reveal in what ways teachers work as participatory designers and define conditions that support teachers in that. Two initiatives of participatory design in Canada and Singapore were investigated. Design materials, transcripts of design meetings, and interviews with teachers were qualitatively analyzed. Case study 1 (Canada) showed that two teachers participating in software design for an astronomy curriculum contributed by suggesting new design fea- tures, introducing pedagogical requirements, and providing feedback on prototypes or design ideas. It appeared essential that teachers feel that their ideas were valued and respected in the entire process. In case study 2 (Singapore), six teachers contributed to the design of a mobile learning trail through: Theorizing and bridging knowledge building principles, collaborative prototyping, contextual inquiry of activity relevance and activity execution, and collaborative evaluation of technology integration. Teachers valued case study discussions with similar cultural contexts and visiting the learning site to design with contextual knowledge. From our case studies, it can be concluded that teachers contribute to the design processes by engaging in theoretical discussion, active participation in a design partnership, reflection about pedagogy and practice, and experimenting with enactment. Conditions that support teachers include support in emergent processes and an atmosphere of trust and inclusion.

Learners' physical performances can serve as focal objects for reflection and insight across a variety of contexts and content areas. This session brings together a set of projects that leverage the physical performances of learners, construct concrete and abstract representations of those performances, and investigate how learners reflect on and understand the relationships between their performances and target content-physics, health and fitness, data literacy and navigation, animal foraging, and climate change. The session will share findings and design principles from each of the studies around constructing technological scaffolds for physical performance reflections. The symposium highlights the various ways performance can be used to engage learners, and how different settings and learning goals affect the designs of performance representations.

This research seeks to understand how embodied interactions that are enacted within a digitally-augmented learning environment can support collaborative knowledge construction. In particular, I want to discover how learners use motion- and gesture-based forms of input to make contributions to a community knowledge base. Throughout the duration of an investigation, students continually add to and draw upon the knowledge base and use it to support scientific reasoning. My doctoral work is part of a larger program of research known as Embedded Phenomena for Inquiry Communities. Following a design-based research approach, the learning materials, activities, and software applications that are created to support embodied interactions within this context will be implemented in upper elementary school science classrooms.

We present two case studies of scientific inquiry with Embedded Phenomena, where two middle school science classes participate in whole-class investigations of phenomena that are embedded within their classroom. Students share observational data with their peers using networked handheld devices. Student-contributed data is collected, aggregated and re/presented in coherent visualizations, designed to guide students in their investigations. We examine the forms of these collective representations with a view towards understanding their efficacy in scaffolding learners and resolving their driving inquiry questions. We analyze the patterns of discourse and of use surrounding these aggregate visualizations during teacher-led, whole class discussions. For each case, we report three trends based on a visual analysis of the coded discourse, followed by a discussion of the patterns of use surrounding the display of aggregate screens. We conclude with a synthesizing discussion of the two cases.

This study reports on the continued development of Common Knowledge (CK) - a pedagogical and technological innovation that supports knowledge building blended discourse. Students use handheld tablets to contribute notes to a community knowledge base, which is publicly displayed on the classroom's interactive whiteboard (IWB). This aggregate display provides students with a powerful visualization of the community's idea flow. The IWB display further provides teachers with "at-a-glance" formative assessment of students' thinking and supports spontaneous adjustments to their orchestration of inquiry activities and blended discourse. This paper presents a study of how CK supports student and teacher discourse in inquiry science.

In this poster we trace the discovery and initial design phases for a digital museum guide for visitors who are blind, for use at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto. Our design goal was to create a prototype for a handheld device that would provide contextual, descriptive, and historical information about artifacts in the museum's permanent collection. First, we reviewed existing assistive technologies. Second, a participatory design approach was identified as a useful methodology to understand the specific characteristics of the context of use and the unique perspectives of the users in this study. Third, in collaboration with participants who are blind and museum staff, we developed a medium-fidelity prototype. Using a simulation technique with participants in situ, we created rapid iterations of our prototype. Here, we present our key findings and recommendations.

The work presented here is a product of a collaborative effort to develop a knowledge community and inquiry curriculum for elementary science, where students engage in extended investigations of simulated scientific phenomena presumed to occupy the physical space of their classrooms. By their immersive nature, these "embedded phenomena" lend themselves to a collective epistemology, and hence to new forms of learning and instruction that depart from the conventional didactic approach. The symposium centers on the design and enactment of a seven-week elementary school ecosystems unit, WallCology, developed in close collaboration with partner teachers and school administrators during summer and fall of 2011. Six posters highlight different facets of our effort, including descriptions of the immersive environment, the instructional narrative, the inquiry support technologies, the role of aggregate representations, discourse processes, and the classroom experiences of the 37 students and two teachers who participated in the unit.