Projects

The CK Workspace is a tool used for the redistribuiton of posts among class members and the assignment of various tasks (i.e., tag posts, upvote promising ideas, or provide feedback / build onto others' ideas). This workspace provides the context for personalised group tasks. The teacher authors these tasks as workflows (in CK Workflow tool) and selectively assigns them to various student groups/roles/conditions. Once activated each student accesses the workspace on their own personal device, with all group members receiving the same copy of posts for which to complete the assigned tasks. A progress bar displays to each group their own progress as well as the average progress of all groups assigned to the same task. Additionally, Distribution Workflows can be assigned to move posts into organizational buckets based on meta-data.

The CK Monitor is a tool used by the teacher during activity orchestration. It presents dynamic data, such as mirroring progress on various tasks (i.e., min, average, and max completion). We are currently developing tools for representing gauges of student engagement (e.g., creating, reading, upvoting, tagging, or moving posts in various contexts, i.e., personal board, community board, or balance of group participation in the workspace). Static learner model data such as content knowledge, social-emotional learning data, and engagement self-report data will also be visualized in this dashboard. Teachers will see data of all students in both individual and aggregate form, while students can view only their own personal data for purposes of reflection, planning, and co-regulation of their learning. 

The CK Board environment provides a suite of tools for co-regulation, including community boards for developing task understandings of target interests (e.g., social-emotional learning, engagement, etc.), personal analytics and personal boards (with graphic organizers) for reflection and planning, goal setting tools for establishing goals, creating goal descriptions with resource links, tagging goal types, and setting deadlines for follow-up. 

A key area of ongoing design and development is the script authoring and teacher orchestration tools as well as integration between SCORE and CK Board. In computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) scripts can be means of modeling or designing the intended sequences of activities, roles, groupings, materials, or specifying creation and distribution of student-generated artefacts as well as transitions between activities (to compose a classroom script). Now, whereas CK Board provides an open environment for collaboration and collective inquiry, it does not inherently script (or guide) student interactions. SCORE adds the means of "componentising" each major CK Board feature (e.g., community board, personal board, goal setting tools, workspace, etc.) to allow for the design of personalised scripts regarding when, how, and by whom each component or activity can be accessed and completed. To support the instantiation and orchestration of these scripts, we are also designing teacher Orchestration Tools that integrate with SCORE to curate, sequence, and automate resource allocations (to groups, roles, and devices) to selectively offload, script, or scaffold responsibilities of the teacher during activity enactments (see attached figure).

Our close collaboration with developers at UC Berkeley is enabling the development of a technology environment called the SCripting and ORchestration Environment (SCORE) to support design and enactment of complex forms of inquiry (Slotta & Linn, 2009). This platform provides a full suite of learning management system tools (e.g., group chat, discussion boards, videos, and other resources) for inquiry-based curricula. Our CK Board platform (described above), therefore, is available both as a standalone platform and integrated into the broader SCORE system to extend the feature set of tools available. SCORE offers: (1) Teacher Tools for managing classes, student data, groups, grading support, and casting activities or content to student or classroom devices, (2) an authoring environment for sequencing activities, defining activity transition logic, and populating content and developing lessons around interactive simulations, and (3) a student-facing virtual learning environment for reflection, inquiry, drawing, data visualization and a variety of other tools for inquiry tasks. 

This study investigated how technology-enhanced activity patterns can support students’ sense of community and collaboration among large distributed, asynchronous classrooms in undergraduate mathematics. Community Supported Worksheets (CSW), is an activity pattern developed during two years for mathematics in a face-to-face, synchronous learning in an active learning classroom (Li et al., 2020). Our study re-designed the activity along with a new technology infrastructure (SCORE, described above) to support the scripting and orchestration of this activity for over 300 students in an online, asynchronous format during early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study illustrated early means of macro-scripting group negotiation of mathematics answers and community support (across all cohorts) through a collective repository of hints to solve difficult worksheet questions in an online, asynchronous format.

A cohort of graduate students (from engineering, OISE, and iSchool) was organized to build and share knowledge about learning communities, scripting and orchestration, and active learning spaces. This included tours of two new active learning spaces and a literature review of these topic areas of interest. The initial goal of this reading cohort was for the ENCORE Lab to build knowledge of active learning and learning community pedagogy to inform future research and the development of learning technologies. In a follow-up review, however, members of this cohort began a review of active learning in two primary Learning Sciences journals (JLS & ijCSCL). Preliminary screening have identified that of the twenty approaches and strategies coded for, three were clearly most researched: inquiry-based learning (52), debates and scientific argumentation (41), and problem-based learning (20). Future publications intend to investigate the contributions of the computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) field to approaches and strategies commonly used in active learning classrooms.

“Future Cities, Future Us” is a special climate action project of Urban Minds, 1UP Toronto, Evergreen, and ENCORE Lab at OISE. As the climate is changing and the City of Toronto had recently declared a climate emergency, this project was designed in hope to build a youth-led, intergenerational exchange of ideas with the goal to create a collective, actionable vision of future cities. Ideas were submitted by youth to help us build a physical and digital display for the upcoming Future Cities Canada Summit and Community Studio at Evergreen Brick Works. Professionals and visitors of all ages were engaged with by youth to respond to these ideas and help inspire our youth to take real action.

For more, read this blog post written by one of the youth.

The goal of my master's thesis at OISE, University of Toronto was to explore the theories, barriers, and possibilities of “anytime, anywhere” Knowledge Building. Knowledge Building assumes that students are legitimate contributors of knowledge and advocates for students’ creative work with ideas that pervades their mental lives within and beyond school. The research investigation took place in a grade 6 class whereby students presented and discussed local and global news. This study utilized Knowledge Forum as a software environment aiming to move the work of Knowledge Building beyond set times of the day and bridge the divide between online and face-to-face discourse. As an exploratory study, several opportunities and barriers were identified with implications for future studies and technology development.  

This pilot study was performed at a university in China during the course Knowledge Media Design 1001. This study examined the current role and future possibilities of using learning analytics for Knowledge Building. Learning analytics have been proposed as a means to provide  visualizations and ongoing feedback to support self-assessment, reflection, and information to inform students in online contexts toward shaping their online community and inquiry. Knowledge Forum was utilized as the virtual environment, a longstanding platform for social construction of collective knowledge, which contains embedded analytics. This research involved a pre- and post-study questionnaire, focus group with students, and interview with the instructor. Preparation for this study involved setup of a Knowledge Forum server in Hong Kong.