documenting Disciplinary Intuitions and the Six Learnings framework for curricular design in fictive worlds and virtual environments. http://sites.google.com/site/disciplinaryintuitions/
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some of my colleagues and i will be hosting a symposium as part of the 31st International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSEI).
ICSEI 2018 will take place at the Nanyang Technological University, and our symposium will be held on the 9th of January, from 11 am to 12:30 pm, in the Conference Room of the Administration block of the National Institute of Education.
A/P Teo Beng Chong, Drs Michael Tan and Chong Sau Kew, and Koh Hon Jia and myself will be talking on the theme of Changing learning cultures by re-evaluating existing resources: informal learning within the school context. For the fifteen or so minutes allotted to me, i will likely be talking about Designing for the surfacing of intuition in learning environments.
there will be a number of concurrent symposiums, and ours has been placed under the Congress sub-theme of Generating Principles for Change and Scaling, which - in turn - is part of the overall Congress theme this year of Deepening School Change for Scaling: Principles, Pathways & Partnerships.
that’s a lot of themes and titles - just know that i’d be happy to interact with you on the 9th from 11 am, at the National Institute of Education :-)
the National Institute of Education, Singapore, will be receiving a delegation from Seoul National University (SNU) on the 9th of February 2018.
by God’s grace alone, my team and i have been invited to participate in the day’s proceedings and interact with our visitors. The delegation is led by Professor Song Jin Woong, who is the Director of the Globalization and International Collaboration committee of the SNU, and comprises Social Studies educators Professors Kim Hee Min and Mo Kwung Hwan, as well as Physics educators Professor Yoo June Hee and Dr Park Ji Sun.
the theme for the day will be Building bridges: fostering international research collaboration in education.
our team and i are tentatively presenting on Multidisciplinary collaborative learning environments and learner intuitions on Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM). we hope to be able to share on our existing collaboration with the Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia - on the open-source environmental sensors we call Maker Motes - as well as on our latest project on collaborative music making with Minecraft, which we call Redstone Jammin’.
beginning with Semester One of the Academic Year 2017 / 2018, our team is able to offer an unrestricted elective, open to all undergraduates at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore (including BA (Ed) and BSc (Ed) students of the National Institute of Education (NIE)).
AGE08D Designing learning environments: a focus on the Internet of Things, seeks to introduce student-teachers to open-source sensors and hardware and help them design contexts for learning using such technologies.
we thank God for His Grace in affording us this opportunity.
our team is also very grateful to our parent institution - the NTU - as well as to the NIE Board of Studies, and the NIE Office of Teacher Education.
i have been asked to be part of a team headed by the Geography Unit of the Curriculum Planning and Development Division of the Ministry of Education here in Singapore, to act in the capacity of a Research Mentor, under the Ministry's Budding Researchers' Fund.
i have collaborated with two of the other four members of the team in the past, and i am thrilled to have the opportunity to work alongside this new team over the course of 2018.
together, we will be exploring the topic of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in geography education: in what ways do GIS-based learning resources influence teacher instruction?
further to my post from three weeks’ ago, Dr Ari Widodo and the team from the Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, together with my own team, would like to thank all the teachers from the 2018 run of the Maker Motes programme in West Java who participated in this morning’s introductory professional development workshop!
earlier today my team and i conducted what we believe is a first-in-the-world design for a learning intervention specifically leveraging the properties of redstone in Minecraft, for a collaborative music-making activity.
conceptualised, designed, and built by our high school intern - Lionel Lim - the music composition environment deliberately steers clear of mimicking codified representations of music and musical instruments.
it is instead designed to surface the naive and evolving intuitions about music which learners with little or no formal background in music education might have. in this way, it is aligned with our team’s existing work in Disciplinary Intuitions.
Minecraft was chosen as a music creation tool and environment because it represented a way to explore the nature of the social collaboration associated with group-based music-making from the perspective of embodied cognition. That is to say, instead of presenting participants with facsimiles of virtual instruments (say, in a manner similar to the popular music creation app Garageband from Apple), a three-dimensional environment was designed and built within Minecraft in which participants – through their avatars – would be able to explore and interact with elements within the landscape concurrently and collaboratively. In turn, their interactions would result in tones being generated, and participants would be given opportunities to influence the resulting music through the editing (or ‘modding’) of the in-world elements. Such interactions are possible because one of the phenomena engineered in to the Minecraft environment is analogous to the presence of electrical current flow.
From the perspective of the learning sciences, the study leverages principles of embodied cognition. It also draws on the work of Gee (2007) with respect to his work on the notion of projective identity. From the perspective of musicology, the study was designed as a response to Baker’s and Harvey’s (2004) work on ‘music as social behavior’, in which they considered a range of ways in which the social psychology of music might be empirically investigated. They concluded their chapter by drawing attention to a wide range of social psychological research questions that remain ripe for exploration, and encouraged researchers to “use imaginative” methods in approaching them.
Understood thusly, our approach does not focus as much on the nature of the actual music collaboratively ‘composed’, but more on the social processes through which participants seek to create (what might be eventually be construed as tuneful) music in the first place. As such, Laurillard’s (2001) work on conversational frameworks was used to analyse the transcripts of conversations among the participants as they seek to make music. Specifically, the focus is on how any participants might have taken initiative to ‘step up’ to guide their fellow participants in aspects of the interaction in which they may have been more proficient (such as music background in determining the cadence of the notes).
