Enhanced Anchored Collaboration over Mixed Media
Online media (e.g., video) is playing an increasingly important role in higher education. Unfortunately, current media hosting solutions lack tools to foster rich collaborative discourse and social learning. Student-to-student interactions that would be trivial in face-to-face settings are not easily reproduced online. In part this is due to the lack of spatial-temporal collaboration. Most systems organize comments and annotations contributed by student viewers chronologically based on submission time, resulting in a loss of referential cues between the specific content of the media and the participants' comments or queries. To address these limitations we embarking on a new project that explores the implementation of tools allowing spatial-temporal collaboration over a variety of web-hosted media used in post-secondary classes.
Contact: Brian Dorn
CSLearning4U
This project provides CS learning to High School teachers and others, ubiquitously.
We design eBooks to allow others to learn how to program by using educational psychology and learning sciences principles. We incorporate programming in the browser, worked examples, and low cognitive load practice to encourage learning and success.
Contact: Briana Morrison
Wearable Research for In-service STEM Teachers (WRIST)
Involving teachers in the emerging research areas of wearable computing can serve as an effective means to improve their STEM teaching and inspire more students to enroll in their classes. Wearable Research for In-service STEM Teachers (WRIST) project will motivate more Omaha Public Schools (OPS) students to seek engineering and computer science careers with sustained support from the long-term collaborative relationships between UNO faculty and participating OPS computing and technology teachers. Twelve teachers in grades 8-12 per year from OPS will participate in a six-week summer hands-on research experience program. For more details, about the WRIST program, visit the RET Site @ UNO page.
Contact: Briana Morrison
Computing Attitudes Survey
In this collaborative, multi-institutional project (joint with Allison Elliott Tew), we are developing an empirically-validated assessment instrument targeting attitudes and misconceptions held by students in introductory computing classes. For more details about the CAS or to download a copy of the instrument see the dedicated CAS project page.
Contact: Brian Dorn
Supporting Elementary Computational Thinking through Web Development
For many, web design and development provides an important formative experience in both code writing and computational thinking skills. The majority of these learners come from populations outside the typical range of computing literacy efforts (e.g., young children, adult informal learners). In this collaborative project with Andrea Forte of Drexel University and the Mozilla Foundation, our mission is not only to develop educational software/materials and robust assessment instruments that can help nurture computational thinking but also to help learners (and educators) recognize web building as a form of computational creativity that prepares learners to engage in further computer science courses and training.
Contact: Brian Dorn
Informal Learning for End-User Programmers
This project explores the informal learning processes employed by web designers who have adopted scripting/programming in their everyday activities. The goal is to understand how to design and deploy resources that enable users to learn deeply about computing concepts as they go about their work. Given that the vast majority of script authors have little to no formal education in computing, this work has direct implications for increasing non-traditional programmers' knowledge about software development, enabling them to better communicate with one another, and reducing latent errors in the field. We have published qualitative and quantitative work exploring the underlying motivations for why such users begin programming and the impact of deploying case-based learning aids into the information ecology of these users while engaged in problem-solving tasks.
Contact: Brian Dorn