Author Archives: Patrick Lowenthal

AECT Webinar: Veletsianos “Academics’ experiences of intrusion, cruelty, abuse, and intimidation online”

The AECT Research & Theory Division (RTD) invites you to attend an upcoming FREE professional development webinar with Dr. George Veletsianos tomorrow Wednesday February 21st at 12pm CT (1pm ET, 11am MT, 10am PT). To attend please register here: https://cc.readytalk.com/r/fyzeytnutojl&eom


Dr. Veletsianos (http://www.veletsianos.com) will be discussing “Academics’ experiences of intrusion, cruelty, abuse, and intimidation online”. Below is an introduction to his presentation. Hope you can join us!

Abstract:A myriad of articles and op-eds encourage academics to be more active online. They generally argue that there are many benefits in doing so, including enabling faculty and students to network with colleagues, share their research, and conduct public scholarship. Dr. Driscoll’s excellent keynote talk at the 2017 AECT annual conference for instance encouraged and promoted public scholarship. Often such advice is very good.

However, increasing concerns are brewing over the incivility, harassment, and vitriol that faculty encounter on social media. The potential of social media being used for harm and abuse needs to be factored into any expectations placed on social media uptake in higher education. In this presentation, I will discuss experiences of intrusion, cruelty, abuse, and intimidation that women academics have faced online. This presentation is grounded on fifteen interviews with female scholars who have face harassment online. These experiences suggest wide-ranging implications for individual scholars, faculty developers, centers for teaching and learning, the design of online platforms and algorithms, and expectations around scholars’ online participation.

Call for papers–Designing, using and evaluating learning spaces: The generation of actionable knowledge

DESIGNING, USING AND EVALUATING LEARNING SPACES: THE GENERATION OF ACTIONABLE KNOWLEDGE

Guest editors

  • Dr. Paul Flynn, National University of Ireland Galway. paul.flynn@nuigalway.ie
  • Dr. Kate Thompson, Griffith University. kate.thompson@griffith.edu.au
  • Prof. Peter Goodyear, The University of Sydney. peter.goodyear@sydney.edu.au

Focus of the special issue

This special issue will include papers that consider the design, use and/or evaluation of learning spaces and contribute actionable knowledge for future learning spaces. Learning spaces are fundamental to engagement in tertiary education. They are growing more complex: as sites where the physical/material, digital and social come together and where the needs and activities of multiple stakeholders (students, teachers, managers, designers, etc.) co-exist. Understanding how such spaces function is also complex. Research often needs to combine multiple methods and multiple data sources. To generate actionable knowledge, researchers also need to consider who is in a position to create and improve learning spaces, and what kinds of knowledge can inform and improve their actions. For example, spaces are ‘brought to life’ by individual self-managing students, students working on group projects, teachers using conventional lecturing or facilitation methods, infrastructure managers, library, IT and Ed. Tech. staff, architects, furniture makers and interior designers. There are overlaps and differences in the knowledge needed by users, managers and designers if they are to co-create better learning spaces.

This special issue provides an opportunity to: bring together researchers in learning technology and learning spaces; examine learning spaces as technologies for learning; foreground the spatial aspects of learning with technology; consider ideas about learning as physically, digitally, socially and epistemically situated; explore ways of making research-based knowledge easier to share and use.

Topics for this special issue may include, but are not limited to:

  • Interdisciplinary or discipline-specific implementations of new learning spaces
  • The consideration of ‘space’ as a technology when designing for learning
  • What constitutes actionable knowledge for learning space design, management and use
  • Integrated design of learning spaces and technologies
  • Learning space design, use and/or evaluation methodologies
  • Learning spaces in tertiary education, teacher education and school education (where relevant to tertiary education)
  • Learning spaces that bridge between school and tertiary education, or between tertiary education and work.

We welcome well-conducted empirical studies, reviews and conceptual articles.

Manuscript Submission Instructions 

Manuscripts addressing the special issue’s focus should be submitted through the AJET online manuscript submission system. Please review the Author Guidelines and Submission Preparation Checklist carefully, and prepare your manuscript accordingly. Information about the peer review process and criteria is also available for your perusal.

NOTE: When submitting your manuscript, please include a note in the field called ‘Comments for the Editor’ indicating that you wish it to be considered for the “Learning Spaces” special issue. Please direct questions about manuscript submissions to Paul Flynn at: paul.flynn@nuigalway.ie

Deadlines for authors

  • Strict submission deadline: 1st May 2018
  • Decision on manuscripts: 1st August 2018
  • Revised/final manuscripts: 1st October 2018
  • Expected Publication: December 2018

Call for Papers–Special issue titled “Learning and Identity in Virtual Learning Environments”

The Journal of Experimental Education (JXE) has just released a Call for Papers for a special issue to be published online in 2019 and in paper format in early 2020, entitled “Learning and Identity in Virtual Learning Environments.” This special issue seeks to provide education scholars with insight into current theoretical and methodological approaches to conceptualize, facilitate, and empirically examine learning and identity in virtual learning environments (VLEs) such as games, virtual realities, and simulations. A major goal for this issue is to illuminate characteristics of VLEs that provide learning and identity change opportunities, explicate learning and identity development within VLEs, and/or demonstrate the role of educators and contexts in supporting learning and identity change in VLEs.

The guest editors of the special issue are Aroutis Foster and Mamta Shah of Drexel University.

Prospective authors are required to provide the editors with a one-page summary (500 words max) by 11th May, 2018.The summary should provide a brief description of the topic and how the intended journal paper addresses learning and identity in virtual learning environments within one or more of the three main emphasis areas of JXE: Learning, Instruction, and Cognition; Motivation and Social Processes; or Measurement, Statistics, and Research Design. For the accepted summaries, the full manuscripts will be due by 11th January, 2019.

The full Call for Papers and a timeline for the submission and review process are available at http://explore.tandfonline.com/cfp/ed/vjxe-identity-virtual-learning-environments

One-page summaries and queries should be submitted to jxe.identity.vle@gmail.com. However, kindly note that manuscripts are *not* to be sent to this email address (see the Call for Papers for submission instructions).

Call for papers–Situating Data Science

A Special Issue of Journal of the Learning Sciences
Guest Editors: Michelle Wilkerson and Joseph L. Polman

The emerging field of Data Science has had a large impact on science and society. This has led to over a decade of calls to establish a corresponding field of Data Science Education (Berman et al., 2016; Cleveland, 2001; Finzer, 2013). Initial efforts to do so, while productive, have focused primarily on curricular structures and materials rather than learner knowledge and experience. There is still a need to more deeply conceptualize what makes learning Data Science sufficiently different that it requires a new field of study, and to explore the theoretical and practical implications of these differences for constructing an ethical and effective Data Science Education.

This special issue of Journal of the Learning Sciences (JLS) will explore one key feature of Data Science that we argue has serious implications for education and research: learners’ relationships to data. Data Science is typically concerned with data that is at once personal and opaque—collected in incidental, automated, or unknown ways from activities and contexts within which learners themselves are deeply situated. Emerging research suggests this can significantly impact how learners engage with and make sense of these data—limiting opportunities to learn when these relationships are not recognized by educators or designers (Philip, Olivares-Pasillas, & Rocha, 2016; Rubel, Lim, Hall-Wieckert, & Sullivan, 2016) and enriching them when they are leveraged (Kahn, 2017; Lee, 2013; Taylor & Hall, 2013). The goal of “Situating Data Science” is to sketch the contours of what a Data Science Education might entail given these relationships. More specifically, we ask: In what ways do learners’ relationships relative to data, the contexts from which data are derived, and the tools and practices of data science, shape how they engage with and make sense of data? And, How might learners’ prior experiences with and relationships to data equip them for formal and structured Data Science Education experiences?

We invite contributions that explore how learners’ situatedness—relative to data, and relative to the field of data science—can impact learning in ways that necessitate new lines of research, new theoretical and methodological development, and new approaches to educational design and practice. We use the term situated (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Lave & Wenger, 1991) in its broadest sense, to refer to a collection of approaches toward learning, cognition, and participation that we expect can grant new insight into the complex territory marked by the emerging fields of Data Science and Data Science Education. Papers may focus on questions such as:

• How do learners’ different experiences of the same data context affect their engagement with data, and how might this diversity be leveraged pedagogically?
• How do different framings of data science activity goals (e.g., using data for commercial exploitation, predictive modeling, advocacy, self-monitoring, scientific inquiry) influence learners’ engagement with and treatment of data?
• How are current data scientists, such as practitioners of learning analytics or educational data mining, apprenticed into the discipline? In what ways do such apprenticeships leverage (or not) learners’ own data or learning experiences?
• What might be fruitful theoretical and methodological approaches for uncovering orientations toward or experiences with data that are likely to be especially powerful for supporting formal Data Science Education?
• How can insights about learners’ experiences with the types of datasets, tools, and methods characteristic of Data Science in informal (e.g., home, online, museum, hobbyist, advocacy) contexts inform the design of formal Data Science Education experiences?

Submission Instructions: We are currently soliciting abstracts for proposed papers for the special issue. Abstracts should be no longer than 500 words and be accompanied by up to six keywords. Abstracts should be submitted to situatingdatasci@gmail.com. Our anticipated timeline is as follows:

Abstracts Due (to situatingdatasci@gmail.com) : Feb 19, 2018
Invitations to Submit Drafts Sent : Feb 26, 2018
First Drafts Due (to JLS ScholarOne online submission system) : June 22, 2018
Reviews of First Drafts : September 15, 2018
Ongoing Revisions : October 2018-April 2019
Final Manuscript Submitted : May 31, 2019
Special Issue Publication : Fall 2019

Per JLS editorial policy, all articles which are part of this special issue must be accepted through the journal’s standard review process. We anticipate including six (6) articles in this special issue, as well as an introduction by the guest editors and two commentaries.