Web 2.0 for networked learning : from collaboration to shared cognition and knowledge networking

This poster presents research-in-progress into the educational affordances of so-called Web 2.0 sites, services, with a particular emphasis on those applications that involve forms of shared human-machine cognition and that promote public knowledge networking. This research involves reviewing many hundreds of Web 2.0 tools and selecting approximately 50 for further analysis and exploration as learning applications. In doing so, the research will generate examples of unusual affordances provided by Web 2.0; it will also present a more structured categorisation of the kinds of uses and benefits of these tools. This approach is valuable because much current research and analysis of the impact of Web 2.0 on education, particularly higher education, has emphasised a relatively limited array of tools – principally blogs, wikis and social networking services – that offer educators and students opportunities for student-led collaborative work. Such opportunities involve strong emphasis on constructivist pedagogy: students’ interactions with each other, mediated via the Internet, are viewed as the positive benefit which networked learning can provide. However, Web 2.0 is far more than just collaboration, and associated shared self-expression. In particular, Web 2.0 includes many examples of services that take one form of input from a user and, rather than just sharing it with others, enable the transformation of that input into different forms, either as visualisations, maps, or other re-representations. Web 2.0 is also starting to see the development of knowledge-work engines that embody the concept of shared cognition, in which the service and the user cooperate in the production of some final knowledge output or which present to users knowledge that has already been processed more extensively than through simple searching. Web 2.0 is also closely associated with the idea that knowledge work is now networked and distributed; it involves users appropriating, creating and sharing knowledge products in a very public way, far beyond the narrow ‘audience’ of a particular course or program of study. The research presented in this poster will provide, firstly, examples of the Web 2.0 tools which emphasise these additional ways of exploiting the Internet for networked learning; secondly, the research will provide a first iteration of the overarching structure of categories and classifications which can be used to assess any proposed Web 2.0 application in terms of its affordances for learning as knowledge networking. By understanding these technologies, truly collaborative networked learning can be developed that blends with the emerging cultures of online behaviour increasingly common to contemporary student populations.

Cognition, Redundancy, and Learning in Organizations

No abstract available.

Cognition and Student Learning Through the Arts

An increasing number of recent research studies suggest connections between cognition, social and emotional development, and the arts. Some studies indicate that students in schools where the arts are an integral part of the academic program tend to do better in school than those students where that is not the case. This study examines home/school factors that contribute most to variance in student learning and achievement and the arts from over 8,000 students in grade 5. The findings suggest in-school arts programs may have less of an impact on student achievement than proposed by previous research.

Learning to 'understand backwards' in time: children's temporal cognition and the primary history curriculum

This study examines children’s temporal ways of knowing and it highlights the centrality of temporal cognition in the development of children’s historical understanding. It explores how young children conceptualise time and it examines the provision for temporal cognition at the levels of the intended, enacted and received history curriculum in the Irish primary school context. Positioning temporality as a prerequisite second-order concept, the study recognises the essential role of both first-order and additional second-order concepts in historical understanding. While the former can be defined as the basic, substantive content to be taught, the latter refers to a number of additional key concepts that are deemed fundamental to children's capacity to make meaningful sense of history. The study argues for due recognition to be given to temporality, in the belief that both sets of knowledge, the content and skills, are required to develop historical thinking (Lévesque, 2011). The study addresses a number of key research questions, using a mixed methods research design, comprising an analysis of history textbooks, a survey among final year student teachers about their teaching of history, and school-based interviews with primary school children: What opportunities are available for children to develop temporal ways of knowing? How do student teachers experience being apprenticed into the available culture for teaching history and understanding temporality at primary level? What insights do the cognitive-developmental and sociocultural perspectives on learning provide for understanding the dynamics of children’s temporal ways of knowing? The study argues that the skill of developing a deeper understanding of time is a key prerequisite in connecting with, and constructing, understandings and frameworks of the past. The study advances a view of temporality as complex, multi-faceted and developmental. The findings have a potential contribution to make in influencing policy and pedagogy in establishing an elaborated and well-defined curriculum framework for developing temporal cognition at both national and international levels.

Increasing stochastic perturbations enhances acquisition and learning of complex sport movements

Traditionally, the aquisition of skills and sport movement has been characterised by numerous repetitions of presumed model movement pattern to be acquired by learners. This approach has been questioned by research identifying the presence of individualised movement patterns and the low probability of occurrence of two identical movements within and between individuals. In contrast, the differential learning approach claims advantage for incurring variability in the learning process by adding stochastic perturbations during practice. These ideas are exemplified by data from a high jump experiment which compared the effectiveness of classical and a differential training approach with pre-post test design. Results showed clear advantages for the group with additional stochastic perturbation during the aquisition phase in comparison to classically trained athletes. Analogies to similar phenomenological effects in the neurobiological literature are discussed.

Lingodroids : studies in spatial cognition and language

The Lingodroids are a pair of mobile robots that evolve a language for places and relationships between places (based on distance and direction). Each robot in these studies has its own understanding of the layout of the world, based on its unique experiences and exploration of the environment. Despite having different internal representations of the world, the robots are able to develop a common lexicon for places, and then use simple sentences to explain and understand relationships between places even places that they could not physically experience, such as areas behind closed doors. By learning the language, the robots are able to develop representations for places that are inaccessible to them, and later, when the doors are opened, use those representations to perform goal-directed behavior.