Susan led our team on a paper that won the best paper award for the American Education Research Association (AERA) Special Interest Group Instructional Technology (SIG IT).
Land, S. M., Zimmerman, H. T., Seely, B. J., Mohney, M. R., Dudek, J., Jung, Y., & Choi, G. W., (2015, April). Photo-capture and annotations supporting observations in outdoor mobile learning. 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Chicago, IL.
SIG IT best paper award for 2015
On Monday, March 26, 2015, Chris & Heather are presenting on an digital badges with their paper An Online Badging System Supporting Educators’ STEM Learning at Workshop on Open Badges in Education in Poughkeepsie, New York, USA. Download the paper here: Gamrat_Zimmerman_2015_OBIE_Workshop_Long_Paper [pdf].
In our paper, we investigate how a digital badging system was used as part of an informal (i.e., not-for-credit) professional development project. Teacher Learning Journeys was designed for personalized science learning for educators in K-12 schools, museums, universities, and teaching colleges through employing two levels of micro-credentials: lower achievement digital stamps and higher achievement digital badges. We conducted a qualitative collective case study centered on 36 teachers; the primary data were records from learners’ interactions within the digital badge system; secondary data came from a survey at the end of the experience and two interviews with 11 focal teachers. Our findings suggest the following design principles: (a) two levels of assessment can support personalized learning, (b) mastery of learning can be demonstrated and assessed through reflective logs, (c) collaboration during and after badging activities can provide value to the learners, and (d) establishment of relevance of badging experiences can support the application of content outside the badging system.
Chris Gamrat, Simon Hooper and Heather Zimmerman have a new article in TechTrends about digital photography in informal learning environments:
Parents and children are rapidly adopting mobile technologies, yet designs for mobile devices that serve a communication function to connect parents to children’s out-of-school time activities are limited. As a result, our team designed the Digital Postcard Maker so that children attending summer camps can create digital photographs to send home to their parents. These digital postcards help to connect children’s home life with out-of-school learning experiences and also support 21st Century Skills’ media literacy practices. The research design included two iterations of a design-based research project with 58 children from 55 families. Design implications related to supporting informal science learning with mobile computing relying on digital photography are shared, including (i) the need for additional support to transform an out-of-school recreational activity into an out-of-school learning activity, and (ii) the utility of photographs as a means to connect parents and children to talk about environmental sciences topics.
If you do not have access to a university library, you can download the article here on our website: 2014_Zimmerman_Gamrat_Hooper_TechTrends.
New in 2014 – a TechTrends special issue
We started this year with new energy for supporting learners with augmented reality (AR) and mobile computers. As editors of a special issue for the journal TechTrends by AECT, we (Susan and Heather) sought out experts in the fields of augmented reality and mobile learning. The authors offer the field empirical studies and design papers that offer ideas for designers, teachers, museum and other out-of-school educators, and researchers at all stages.
In this issue, we have nine articles on three themes:
1) Developing & scaling mobile games for learning
2) Museum exhibits & everyday experiences to foster learning interactions
3. Designing for place-based learning in the outdoors
We are interested if these authors’ perspectives can inform our own projects— so do leave us a comment to share what projects you’re working on.
Students use smartphone to view 3-D images.
Posted in Design, Research, Team publications!
Tagged augmented reality, design, mobile computing, mobile learning, research, special issue, TechTrends
