Klarman, L., Krentz, U., Brinkley, B., Corina, D. P., & Kuhl, P. K. (2007, August). Deaf and hearing infants’ preference for American Sign Language. Poster presented at the American Psychological Association Convention. San Francisco, CA.
Dr. Baba Kofi A. Weusijana, Research Associate, University of Washington, babaw@u.washington.edu
Vanessa Svihla, Ph.D. Student, The University of Texas at Austin, vsvihla@hotmail.com
Drue Gawel, Ph.D. Student, University of Washington, djgawel@u.washington.edu
Dr. John Bransford, Professor, LIFE Center PI, University of Washington, bransj@u.washington.edu
2007 Second Life Community Convention, Education Track, Chicago, IL
http://slcc2007.wordpress.com/education-track/
ABSTRACT
Multi-User Virtual Environments such as Second Life should make it possible for students to experience events first hand rather than simply learn about them secondarily. We designed an interactive task in Second Life that involves moving an avatar through a maze made of a series of rooms. Students were prompted to operate in an efficiency mode by being told to learn how to get through the maze as quickly as possible. Subsequently, the students are helped to realize that they did not deeply understand how the rooms work. The maze was specifically designed to provide participants the opportunity to relate their experiences to a set of classic studies in the learning literature. The purpose of this study was to verify that we could help people experience differences between “efficiency” and “innovation” modes of operating using a MUVE. In future studies we will investigate the hypothesis that telling people about different dimensions of adaptive expertise can be helpful, but letting them virtually experience these dimensions for themselves should be even more effective.
Investigators:
Post-Doc: Baba Kofi Weusijana; Student: Drue Gawel
Institution:
Cognitive Studies in Education, University of Washington
Researchers at the University of Washington have begun a study of how software, including websites, are currently being used to help teach homeschoolers and how software is perhaps not addressing the needs of homeschool students. This is currently being done with a web-based survey for USA home educators at http://faculty.washington.edu/babaw/hssw/.
The primary goal of this research is to assist researchers and designers of software to design better educational software for homeschoolers. This work also contributes basic knowledge to the Learning Sciences field regarding homeschool learning environments, which can be a mixture of both formal and informal practices and attributes.
The survey is freely available for anyone to complete, but recruitment is focused on online homeschool organizations and discussion groups. Participants are being asked to characterize their favorite and most disliked educational software, their use of software and the Internet for home education, their pedagogical practices, and their political and demographic backgrounds. Demographic information is asked because homeschooling practices and movements are known to differ along political, religious, and cultural lines (Stevens, 2001) although the relevancy of such characteristics to software usage and needs is not yet known. Many survey questions and answer items were adapted from a survey of American homeschoolers by the National Home Education Research Institute (Ray, 1997) and a survey on the connection between children’s home software usage and school (Kafai & Sutton, 1999). The survey software is developed and maintained by the University of Washington’s Catalyst Learning & Scholarly Technologies group. The project’s team is also using modern techniques for effective Internet surveying (Dillman, 2007).
References:
Dillman, D. A. (2007). Mail and Internet Surveys : The Tailored Design Method (2nd ed.). New York: Wiley.
Kafai, Y. B., & Sutton, S. (1999). Elementary School Students’ Computer and Internet Use at Home: Current Trends and Issues. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 21(3), 345-362.
Ray, B. D. (1997). Strengths of their own: home schoolers across America; Academic Achievement, Family, Characteristics, and Longitudinal Traits. Salem, Oregon: NHERI Publications.
Stevens, M. L. (2001). Kingdom of Children: culture and controversy in the homeschooling movement. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
