Events

Community Tools Theme Workshop

CILT's Community Tools Team invites you to participate in its workshop, DESIGNING FOR LEARNING COMMUNITIES: TECHNICAL AND SOCIAL FOUNDATIONS. This workshop will be held prior to AERA, on Monday, April 1, 8:00 AM - 2:00 PM, in Ballroom D at the Sheraton New Orleans, one of the conference headquarter hotels for AERA in New Orleans.

The workshop is the fourth in a series of community tools workshops hosted by our theme team within the Center for Innovative Learning Technologies. CILT, funded by the National Science Foundation, is a consortium of researchers and practitioners formed to stimulate the development and implementation of important, technology-enabled solutions to critical problems in K-14 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning. Co-principal investigators (alphabetically) include:

John Bransford, Vanderbilt University
Marcia Linn, U.C., Berkeley
Barbara Means, SRI International
Roy Pea, Stanford University
Nora Sabelli, SRI International
Robert Tinker, Concord Consortium

In this workshop, Roy Pea, Jim Gray, Mark Schlager, and Melissa Koch, in collaboration with a Coordinating Committee of outside experts (1), will lead a highly-interactive discussion of research, theory, and practice related to community tools. Specific topics under consideration include:

Video resources for reflective community discourse on learning & teaching
Teacher learning communities
Student learning communities
Mentoring/Coaching communities (e.g., student-scientist, pre-service/in-service teachers)
Designing for sustainable learning communities
Understanding community norms and activities of learning
Tools for community knowledge building

The goal of this workshop is to stimulate discussion around issues that are central to the field and to encourage collaborative work to address these issues. As in the past, workshop participants can submit proposals for Seed Grants to support innovative multi-institutional projects. A limited number of seed grants are available this year, in the range of $6,000 - $15,000 for promising proposals that emerge from this workshop.

A registration fee of $15 will be collected at the door to cover the cost of providing food. A continental breakfast and lunch is included. If you plan to attend, please send email to Jim Gray jim.gray@sri.com. In the email, state the following: your background, research area, and interests. Your email and a confirmation response from SRI will serve as your reservation for the workshop.

Note: we will provide cross-platform 802.11.b wireless Ethernet access to a local area network (and perhaps the Internet) for group brainstorming and feedback activities. Attendees are encouraged to bring PC or Mac laptops with wireless Ethernet cards.

(1) Including, to date: Barry Fishman, Ricki Goldman, Susan Goldman, Glenn Kleinman, Therese Laferriere, Margaret Riel, Ray Rose, Jim Slotta and Dan Suthers.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation