We hope you have enjoyed the summer holidays and that the academic year has started well for you.
We warmly welcome you to the monthly research seminar of the Learning, Culture and Interventions (LECI) expert group on Friday 23rd of August from 10-12 AM, at Siltavuorenpenger 5.A,room K108 (Minerva building).
We are very happy and proud to start the new semester with a presentation by Associate Professor of Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Deborah Fields, Utah State University, USA.
Title: Bugs as a nexus of emergent peer collaborations: Contextual and classroom supports for solving problems in electronic textiles
Abstract: Few studies have examined the role of failure in more open-ended situations where problems develop as a consequence of designing projects and where collaborations can emerge as an outgrowth of debugging said problems. In this presentation, I explore the peer-to-peer collaborations that emerge spontaneously in the context of coding, crafting and design bugs within open-ended design activities, specifically an electronic textiles unit for secondary students taught over 10-12 weeks in introductory computer science classes. Examining observations from three introductory computer science classrooms, we address the following research questions: (1) How and what kinds of peer-to-peer collaborations emerged in unstructured ways, especially around bugs in open-ended projects? and (2) What curricular, spatial, social, and teacher supports allowed these interactions to emerge and flourish? I consider implications for supporting similar types of emergent collaborative learning in open-ended computational making designs.
Bio: When not flying through the air during trapeze lessons or sewing with electricity, Dr. Deborah Fields seeks to understand and describe Connected Learning. She studies what happens at the intersection of children’s informal learning spaces, like home, school, friends, and online. She has pioneered the Craft Technologies at Utah State University, where students utilize microcontroller programming to create light-up reactive clothing, sewn electronic sensors, and interactive quilted game controllers. She has published on children’s online media, such as virtual worlds and social networking, DIY, and computer science education sites. Deborah is an author of Connected Play: Tween Life in a Virtual World, (MIT Press, 2013) on kids’ online play. Related, she co-authored a critical review of children’s participation in social networking sites for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. For more information see:https://itls.usu.edu/people/faculty/fields/index
Everyone interested is very welcome to join the seminar!