In this talk, David Williamson Shaffer looks at the transformation of the social sciences in the age of Big Data through the lens of Quantitative Ethnography, an approach to analyzing human behavior that integrates data-mining, discourse analysis, social interactionism, cognition, learning science, statistics, and ethnography to produce new and innovative ways of thinking that go beyond the old dichotomy of qualitative and quantitative methods and past simple mixtures of methods in thinking about data and data analysis.
Author: LI Lab
Expanding Interaction Geography in Museum Studies with Dr. Ben Rydal Shapiro (Georgia State University)
On Friday, February 18, 2022, the Learning Informatics Lab and Science Museum of Minnesota hosted GSU professor Dr. Ben Rydal Shapiro. This talk demonstrates new methods to transcribe and dynamically visualize people’s interaction as they move over space and time that comprise an approach called interaction geography, focusing on the value of interaction geography for museum studies. Specifically, Shapiro traces his collaborative development of interaction geography with one museum and reviews recent efforts to scale open-source tools from this work to support collaborative research and design in other museums, as well as other settings, such as schools. The talk concludes by highlighting how this work raises new questions about learning and the ethical use of data that span multiple fields including museum studies, learning sciences, and learning analytics.
PhD Students Xinran Zhu & Hong Shui Win ICCE Best Student Paper Award
Learning Technologies Ph.D. students Xinran Zhu and Hong Shui, along with LIL Co-Director Bodong Chen, won Best Student Paper at the 29th International Conference on Computers in Education. Their paper, Designing Support for Productive Social Interaction and Knowledge Co-construction in Collaborative Annotation, introduces a general scaffolding framework of participation roles to support collaborative learning activities in online classes. A part of the Collaborative Annotation in College Classrooms Project, their study used a web annotation tool, Hypothesis, to pilot the framework in a fully online undergraduate course in Fall 2020. Social network analysis and content analysis of students’ annotation data were conducted to examine how the framework facilitated social interaction and knowledge co-construction in the online class.
Their paper was also nominated for Best Research Paper.
An Exploratory Study of Playful, Goal-Flexible, and Rule-Explicit Problem Solving
Jesslyn Valerie and David DeLiema share their pilot work on middle school and college students playing Baba is You, a challenging, puzzle-based video game, to explore what actions players take when they reach impasses during play. They also discussed coding procedures involved in their interaction analysis.
The Role of Conceptions of Learning in Technology-Enhanced Learning Environments with Dr. Chin-Chung Tsai (National Taiwan Normal University)
On Thursday, October 7, the Learning Informatics Lab hosted its first seminar of the Fall 2021 semester. This talk, featuring Dr. Chin-Chung Tsai, reviews a series of studies from his research team regarding students’ conceptions of learning for different subject matters and various types of technology-enhanced instructional activities. It is found that the students possess quite different conceptions of learning by technology-enhanced learning environments than those in traditional school settings. The interplay among conceptions of learning, approaches to learning and learning outcomes for certain technology-supported environments will be discussed. How the technology may play a role in fostering students’ conceptualization of learning will also be addressed.
Watch a recording of the talk below.
LIL Faculty Chen, Scharber, and DeLiema Awarded NSF Grant
LIL Faculty Bodong Chen, Cassie Scharber, and David DeLiema were awarded an NSF grant to develop a justice-oriented, tech-enhanced learning program that integrates critical data literacies in science and social studies. “DataX: Exploring Justice-Oriented Data Science with Secondary School Students” is a project that aims to help St. Paul Public School students learn how to use data in meaningful and authentic ways. The two-year project will iteratively advance curriculum, a web-based platform, and pedagogical design components of the DataX program.
See the full abstract here.
New Publication by LIL Faculty Cassie Scharber
Lana Peterson and Cassie Scharber recently published an article in collaboration with their long-term community partners in Austin Public Schools, MN describing the ways this K-12 school district shifted to emergency remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Read the full article here.
Co-Director Bodong Chen and PhD Student Basel Hussein present at Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference
Bodong Chen and PhD student Basel Hussein recently presented a study in a workshop at the 11th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference. Their paper, titled “Modelling Network Dynamics in Social Annotation,” examines complex network dynamics in collaborative web annotation in an online classroom. Departing from a conceptual exploration of social interaction in web annotation as a mediated process, as well as a dissatisfaction with analytical methods applied to web annotation data, they analyzed student interaction data from a web annotation environment following the Relational Event Modelling approach. Results found several network factors including student activity, reciprocity, annotation popularity, and annotation location playing important roles, while longer annotations were also slightly more likely to attract replies. This study contributes empirical insights into web annotation and calls for future work to investigate mediated social interaction as a dynamic network phenomenon.
View the presentation slides here.
LIL Faculty Bye and Varma Receive Disciplinary Diversity & Integration Award
Vimal Rao, PhD student in the quantitative methods in education program in the Department of Educational Psychology, Jeffrey Bye, lecturer in the psychological foundations of education program, and Sashank Varma, formerly a professor in the psychological foundations of education program now at Georgia Tech, have been awarded a Disciplinary Diversity & Integration Award by the Cognitive Science Society. The trio are receiving the honor for their paper, “Categorical perception of p-values.”
According to CSS, the Disciplinary Diversity & Integration Award recognizes the best cognitive science research in disciplines that have been traditionally under-represented at its annual conferences and journals. All submissions must include interdisciplinary perspectives and integrative approaches to understanding the human mind.
Journal of Learning Sciences names LIL core faculty DeLiema a Reviewer of the Year
Dr. David DeLiema, assistant professor in the Department of Educational Psychology and core faculty of the Learning Informatics Lab, has been named a Reviewer of the Year by the Journal of Learning Sciences (JLS). DeLiema was recognized for his timely, thorough reviews and invaluable mentorship to authors. He is one of eight reviewers to receive the honor for 2020.
This award acknowledges Dr. DeLiema’s generous and deeply pedagogical reviews, which promote the best in scholars seeking to disseminate their work and is consistent with what we see in his interactions with students and colleagues.
College of Education and Human Development interim dean Michael Rodriguez explains of the honor.
Read the full article here.