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Technology-enhanced learning environments
Sunday, 31 March 2013 00:00

 

Invited Editor

Antoni Badía Garganté ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )
Universitat Oberta de Catanlunya

Call open from: March 2013
Manuscript submission deadline: 1st September 2013

Background

The meeting of WWW and Internet evolution has in some cases consolidated new educational modalities such as on-line learning, blended learning, open educational practices, etc. In general terms these practices and modalities reflect a strong tendency towards personalization of learning, going from the construction and adjustment of environments, adapting them more and more to the needs and preferences of users, to the inclusion of tools designed to help students to work out their own learning processes within those environments. In this sense, it is not an overstatement to say that the increasing sophistication of the techno-pedagogical designs and the tendency to a higher personalization of the learning process, found in the educational modalities based on the use of Internet, are closely related to the aim of offering more and better help to learners.

This help is related to the selection, organization and representation of the information of the participants’ activity, as individuals and as a group, to favor and promote Awareness, Mirroring or Monitoring participants’ processes (Soller, Martinez, Jermann y Muehlenbrock, 2005), guide participants’ interaction (Soller, Martinez, Jermann y Muehlenbrock, 2005) or scaffolding the process of knowledge building (Zhang, Scardamalia, Reeve y Messina, 2009).

In research of this new source of help for learning, pertaining to digital environments, it is possible to detect two different though complementary orientations related to helping the user. In the first place we find works that are oriented to study helping centered in and for the learner (individualized, differenced, adjusted) in order to promote metacognitive processes, and regulation and control of the process of learning itself. In this case help is delivered through devices designed for monitoring improvements, identifying learning profiles and accordingly introduce particular characteristics in the learning environment. On the other hand, we also find investigations that study helping oriented to support collaboration processes and assist participants in the management of the group improvements, participation and involvement in the task, the time they are devoting and the temporary patterns in this commitment, etc. In this case the accent is on the data produced by the learners and groups of learners while they collaborate in learning, and in the creation of analysis models for processing, organizing, delivering and acting over that information. In addition to these two lines of work, there are other perspectives as Learning Analytics / Academic Analytics that, according to Brown (2011), are centered in the analysis of data produced by students while working in digital environments to generate models of the eventual incidence of different types of help, its design, delivery and use in learning.

Focus

According to precedent considerations, digital environments and the possibilities they offer to generate and provide new kinds of help for learning, open a new kind of scenery for research. At the same time, the novelty of on-line teaching and learning contexts are a challenge and an opportunity to study different levels in which chances to offer and receive help for learning may appear or not, which may not be easy to identify in the face to face learning and teaching contexts. In this framework, Infancia y Aprendizaje launches an open call for the presentation of original manuscripts for publishing a monographic issue on Digital environments and educational help. The goal of the monographic is to reveal works and investigations focused on help for learning that is associated directly with the possibilities offered by on-line platform, tools and learning devices. In this framework the expectation is to receive originals that treat among others, subjects such as:

• Interpretative models for analysis of help for learning of educational modalities based on Internet and www (e-learning, blended learning, etc.).
• Explaining models generated around one or some of the sources of help for learning, associated more or less directly with the design of on-line teaching and learning process.
• The analysis of virtual platforms and learning digital environments from the point of view of the possibilities for recollecting, organizing and delivering information of the participants' activities such as help and learning support, individual or collective, and the collaborating processes.
• The analysis of techno-pedagogical concrete designs that offer articulation of learning resources submitted to students as educational helping sources.
• Design and evaluation of specific tools to help students manage their learning processes (metacognitive aspects, strategic use of knowledge, scaffolding for a collaborative building of knowledge, etc.).
• Making of interpretative models about the information provided by virtual platforms, data collecting and processing (data mining) and the possible use of that information by different users of information (students, teachers, tutors, managers, etc.).
• Potentialities that can be offered by certain models associated to the use of recorded information on virtual learning platforms as support for counselors or advisors, in order to orient students in their learning process, future decisions, continuity in the academic process, etc. As well as a support for institutional decision making about organization, and characteristics of the offered and designed forming processes.

 

Languages

Spanish and English.

Structure and general characteristics of the monographic

The monographic issue will be set up by approximately 7-8 articles. According to the editorial line of the journal, works presented must be investigations or theoretical reflections and must comply with the established demands in each case. Check Infancia y Aprendizaje's Author Guidelines here.

For the manuscripts selection, priority will be given to investigations, and to those papers which having been qualified positively by the reviewers make theoretical and methodological approaches of a more global, systemic and interdisciplinary nature. Those works positively evaluated that cannot be included in the monographic for space reasons will be published with previous consulting and agreement with the authors, in posterior volumes of Infancia y aprendizaje.

Those works positively evaluated that cannot be included in the monographic for space reasons will be published with previous consulting and agreement with the authors, in posterior volumes of Infancia y aprendizaje.

References

BODEMER, D. & DEHLER, J. (2011). Group awareness in CSCL environments. Computers in Human Behavior, 27 (3), 1043-1045.

BROWN, M. (2011). Learning Analytics: The Coming Third Wave. EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. BRIEF. Available (06.12.23012) at: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELIB1101.pdf

JERMANN, P. & DILLENBOURG, P. (2008). Group mirrors to support interaction regulation in collaborative problem solving. Computers & Education, 51 (1), 279-296.

SOLLER, A., MARTINEZ, A., JERMANN, P. & MUEHLENBROCK, M. (2005). From mirroring to guiding: A review of state of the art technology for supporting collaborative learning. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 15, 261-290.

ZHANG, J., SCARDAMALIA, M, REEVE, R., & MESSINA, R. (2009). Designs for collective cognitive responsibi- lity in knowledge building communities. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 18, 7-44.

 
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