We held the 4th What the Research Says event at the LKL on Friday 20 July and all went well. We had 75 attendees comprising of the usual mix of academic and non-academic attendees folk. This was particularly encouraging given the change of date due to the Olympics. The talks were a mix of academic and business presenters and the demos were mixed, but more academic than commercial, the debate was lively and the panel was 2 academics (Mike and Shaaron) and 2 commercial reps (Cisco and TSL) - full details below.
Some of the feedback from non-academic attendees:
"Just a quick note to say thanks for organising and running the event. As a first timer I found it was run smoothly, with some great speakers and interesting discussions." SME
"very busy and an excellent meeting" Broadcaster
Speakers
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Solutions Group, Cisco. Title - Can learners really now have choice?
Kaska Porayska-Pomsta - Senior Lecturer, The London Knowledge Lab Title - Adaptive environments for learning of social communication skills
Ann Mroz, Digital Publishing Director at TSL Education. Past. Editor at Times Higher Education. Title: Shared purpose: how teachers are doing it for themselves
Joshua Underwood - Researcher, The London Knowledge Lab Title: Exploring personal, mobile and social vocabulary learning and opportunities for adaptive support
Ed Baker - Director and CEO, Educational Games Network
Manolis Mavrikis - Senior Research Fellow, The London Knowledge Lab. Title - Nudges, Hints and Spoilers: what the research says about feedback and help-seeking in intelligent learning environments
Susan Bull - Senior Lecturer, University of Birmingham. Open Learner Models
Demos
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Demo Descriptions
REDEEM Shaaron Ainsworth
The REDEEM authoring environment was developed to allow educators with no programming knowledge to design learning environments (simple Intelligent Tutoring Systems) for their students in a time-effective manner. The basis of the approach is that authors import existing domain material (webpages, PowerPoint or other courseware) and use the REDEEM tools to add interactivity, -micro-adaptivity and macro-adaption The success of this approach depends on two key factors. Firstly, on the extent to which the authoring tool is usable by its intended author population (classroom teachers, university lecturers, adult trainers), and secondly, whether the resulting systems are effective at supporting learning.
A seven year programme has evaluated the extent to which REDEEM has met these goals in settings as diverse as secondary schools, universities and military training. The conclusion of the research is that in many ways REDEEM has exceeded the initial expectations for it, but that improvements to its design could further enhance its functionality. Furthermore, the benefits for learning may rest less on its adaptive features than on its interactive ones.
MiGen ( Alex Poulovassilis, Manolis Mavrikis, and Sergio Gutiérrez)
The MiGen team will demonstrate the intelligent microworld expresser and the associated Teacher Assistance (TA) tools. In the eXpresser microworld students are challenged to construct animated figural patterns and find their representative algebraic rules. Underlying this surface goal, the main objective is to enhance students' appreciation of the power and flexibility of algebra. The team will act as guides for the participants who will be able to make and modify patterns and see the possible types of feedback that the microworld offers. In parallel participants will be able to see the TA tools and how they can support the teacher's role in the classroom. Participants will also get a taste of on-going work in the context of the Metafora project and its computer-supported collaborative tools that help students plan, share and discuss their work in eXpresser with other students.
ECHOES (Kaska Porayska-Pomsta, and Sara Bernardini)
ECHOES is a virtual learning environment designed for typically developing children and children with Autism Spectrum Conditions to allow them to learn and exercise social communication skills such as initiating and responding to bids for interaction and turn taking. ECHOES is influenced by interdisciplinary research and design perspectives and incorporates insights from Participatory Design, Artificial Intelligence, Psychology and Education. The system was evaluated in 4 schools in the UK. The evaluation highlighted the potential of technologies such as ECHOES not only as tools for social communication intervention, but also as a window for teachers and parents through which to observe children's abilities that may be hidden from view in everyday classroom contexts.
ECOLAB (Katerina Avramides)
The Ecolab is a software microworld that helps learners develop metacognitive thinking skills and self-awareness. Research has shown that metacognitive skills are a better predictor of learning achievement than IQ and that they are important for the learning process. Ecolab helps children learn about food chains and webs (ages 8-10) through a learning environment that adapts the help it gives learners based on a dynamic software learner model. Evaluated with primary school learners it has been shown to improve learning experiences and could be applied to many curriculum areas. The underpinning ‘adaptive engine' powered by a learner model based upon continuous evaluation of learner potential could be used to inform the design of other adaptive software and games. https://sites.google.com/a/lkl.ac.uk/ecolab
NUMBER SENSE GAMES (Diana Laurillard)
The Number sense Games are educational games developed at the LKL to deal mainly with Special Educational Needs. They are based on teachers' experiences, ideas and practices and tried out by school children. The project benefited greatly from the discussions of problems and the exchange of ideas between researchers, teachers and pupils in order to find solutions. Recently, we converted one of these games into commercial application. The Numberbonds is a game that mixes education with great fun as it teaches youngsters all the way up to adults the relation between size and numbers. Developed as a join effort project between IdInvest, Wougglers and London Knowledge Lab. This game is available now in the AppStore as ‘Number Bonds by Thinkout'.
CORNERSTONE (Phillip Kent)
Cornerstone Mathematics is a technology-enhanced learning project with a difference. It seeks to be innovative not in the technology itself, but to work with research-proven education technologies to develop a methodology for the effective implementation of the technology in classrooms: to provide robust support to teachers to use it for enhanced learning outcomes, in ways that are sustainable in the long-term, and scalable from an initial small group of research schools to being anaccessible, everyday technology for mathematics teachers in hundreds of schools.
NEARPOD (Brock Craft)
Nearpod enables teachers to use their iPads to manage content on students' devices. It combines presentation, engagement and real-time assessment tools into one integratedsolution.
SIMILE (James O'Toole)
SIMILE is a joint project conducted by the MIT Libraries and MIT CSAIL. SIMILE seeks to enhance inter-operability among digital assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, metadata, and services. A key challenge is that the collections which must inter-operate are often distributed across individual, community, and institutional stores. We seek to be able to provide end-user services by drawing upon the assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, and metadata held in such stores.
SIMILE will leverage and extend DSpace, enhancing its support for arbitrary schemata and metadata, primarily though the application of RDF and semantic web techniques. The project also aims to implement a digital asset dissemination architecture based upon web standards. The dissemination architecture will provide a mechanism to add useful "views" to a particular digital artifact (i.e. asset, schema, or metadata instance), and bind those views to consuming services. These views can help learners navigate knowledge spaces and events through the way the data is presented.
Build your own ontology model (Patricia Charlton)
See behind the scenes about how to build an ontology model that is used to support the creations of semantic web and intelligent solutions. This demo will take a look at protégé to show how models are created and can be used to help to map the learners' context as a knowledge trace and how this may map to the future of intelligent artefacts.
EcoMuve (Brigitta Goedhuys)
Ecosystems are complicated, requiring students to be able to reason about complex causal patterns. As these patterns often clash with students' preconceptions, they can struggle to acquire and apply their knowledge. To help them, Professor Chris Dede and colleagues at the HarvardGraduate School ofEducation developed a EcoMUVE curriculum (see http://ecomuve.gse.harvard.edu). This multi-user virtual environment offers students two immersive, simulated ecosystems in which to conduct scientificinvestigations. The system helps students gain a deep understanding of difficult concepts - one that can help them apply their learning in different situations.