voyeurism

commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice

i am very happy to share that a commemorative book celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice has just been made available for download :-)

do feel free to browse Two decades and beyond: growing education research in Singapore :-)

Personal spaces and communal consequences: navigating geographical tensions with the Socially Responsible Behaviour through Embodied Thinking (SORBET) Project

i am very happy to share that a paper authored by myself and my friend Samuel Li has just been published in the journal Frontiers in Virtual Reality.

titled Personal spaces and communal consequences: navigating geographical tensions with the Socially Responsible Behaviour through Embodied Thinking (SORBET) Project, the paper is published in a section of the journal on Virtual Reality and Human Behaviour, in the article collection on Human Spatial Perception, Cognition, and Behaviour in Extended Reality. 

its abstract reads:

The coronavirus pandemic has impacted societies in different ways. This variation is inherently geographical, with patterns across space and time reflecting underlying societal inequalities. This paper describes a learning intervention designed to afford participants opportunities to experience the diffusion of a (virtual) virus within a community, albeit in a safe way. The intervention was enacted in March 2021 among nine undergraduate teachers-in-training at a teacher-education institute in Singapore. Participants were invited to reflect on the connections between their personal decision-making and its impact on the broader community, after having first undertaken a collaborative task in a virtual environment. The Socially Responsible Behaviour through Embodied Thinking (SORBET) Project draws on the learning sciences in terms of embodied cognition and projective identity, and in this paper, seeks to apply them to geographical understandings of diffusion. Responses from post-activity interviews are reported along three themes, as structured by Cultural-Historical Activity Theory. Through encouraging reflection on authentic experience, the authors hope to catalyse a more grounded appreciation of the need to practise positive social habits in the context of a pandemic and, by extension, contribute to the fight against the virus through the application of geographical thinking at scales local and global.

Six Learnings: the story of the first ten years of the curriculum design framework in Singapore schools

two years' after i first shared my commemoration of the first decade of the Six Learnings curriculum design framework, i am happy to say that the story is being told in a chapter written by my team, which has been published in a Springer volume that has just been released.

my co-authors Yuen Ming De, Ahmed Hilmy, Derek Chua, Joshua Lee and Joel Ng and i have written the synopsis as follows:

Since 2009, the Six Learnings curricular design framework (Lim, 2009) has been used in the design and development of lesson units in several neighbourhood schools in a variety of subjects. The programme leverages primarily open-source tools and platforms to help teachers design canvases within which their students can express their emerging conceptual understandings. In this way, students’ thinking and intuitions – which would otherwise be largely tacit – are made visible and can be dialogued around with peers. Learning is thus more enduring as first-principle understanding is built.

This chapter discusses scaling and translation in a system of education, using the case of the Disciplinary Intuitions / Six Learnings programme and how it has evolved since 2009. It advances the argument that successful scaling and translation is predicated upon a set of design principles – wider to the intervention itself – and concludes with discussion of a principle in emergence over the past two years of the programme.

Designing for the nurturing of new norms of social responsibility with the Socially Responsible Behaviour through Embodied Thinking (SORBET) Project

through God’s grace alone, my team and i received the news today that we have been awarded a grant by the National Institute of Education. titled Designing for the nurturing of new norms of social responsibility with the Socially Responsible Behaviour through Embodied Thinking (SORBET) Project, the quantum of the grant is just over US$77600.

we are especially grateful to our two external Co-Principal Investigators (Co-PIs) from the Educational Technology Division and the Curriculum Policy Office of the Ministry of Education, as well as to our other external Co-PIs - one of whom is a Senior Consultant / Clinical Epidemiologist from the Department of Epidemiology at the Tan Tock Seng Hospital, and the other is the Head, Large Innovation Platform – Antibody and Product Development Lab, Bioinformatics Institute, Experimental Drug Development Centre at A*STAR.

it looks to be a wonderfully exciting and meaningful journey ahead of us. all thanks be to God.

Data Science and AI, the SORBET Project and Yunnan Rangers shared during the opening keynote of ELSI 2021

my team and i are very happy and humbled that our various projects on Data Science and AI, the Socially Responsible Behaviour through Embodied Thinking (SORBET) Project, and the Yunnan Rangers hybrid on-site / off-site Augmented Reality board game has been chosen by the Director of the National Institute of Education, Singapore to be shared during her opening keynote delivered during this year's Educational Leadership Summer Institute (ELSI).

ELSI 2021 was hosted by the College of Education, De La Salle University, the Philippines, from the 30th of September till the 2nd of October. This year's theme was Educational Leadership in the New Normal: Navigating Technodependence.

we would like to thank our Director for her gracious encouragement.

:-)

recognition of the effort of my student intern at the Global Undergraduate Awards 2021

I am thankful to God to share that this year, my student intern responsible for the initial transposition of the code-base of the Socially Responsible Behaviour through Embodied Thinking (SORBET) Project from desktops to tablets / smartphones - Tan Boon Hing - has won the highest award he was eligible for - 'Highly Commended' in the Education category - in the Global Undergraduate Awards 2021.

Boon Hing has worked tirelessly over the past year on this, under the auspices of the Nanyang Technological University's Undergraduate Research Experience on Campus (URECA) programme.

The Global Undergraduate Awards are a non-profit organisation founded in Ireland in 2008. It is the world’s leading undergraduate awards programme which recognises top undergraduate work, shares this work with a global audience and connects students across cultures and disciplines.

Each year, work submitted by undergraduates is anonymously assessed by a panel of international academics and industry leaders.

The best 10% of work is shortlisted as Highly Commended.

I am so very pleased that Boon Hing's efforts have been recognised in this way.

:-)

the SORBET Project: published in Computers and Education Open

a year ago, the learning intervention my team designed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic was enacted for the first time in schools.

we remain very grateful to teachers and school leaders whom we have worked alongside this past year.

today, i am very pleased to share that a paper describing everyone's efforts towards the Socially Responsible Behaviour through Embodied Thinking (SORBET) Project has been published in the Gold Open Access Elsevier journal Computers and Education Open.

all thanks be to God for His provision along this journey.

the National Institute of Education acknowledges the hard work of my team

my team and i are very encouraged by, and grateful to, the National Institute of Education for so graciously setting aside valuable column space in the most recent issue of the Institute's quarterly newsletter to feature our work.

the write-up means a lot to us, and can be found in the June - August 2021 issue (number 116) of NIEWS.

glory be to God alone.

visit our team's mini-campus in Frame VR

my team and i are very happy to invite you to visit a mini-campus - in Frame - which we have designed to showcase some of our work.

Frame is a website that lets people communicate and collaborate in a 3D space as avatars from a browser on desktop, mobile, or VR. It is currently still in beta.

for our mini-campus, we used one of the standard environments provided by Frame, and populated the space with examples of our work.

we are excited about Frame because the multiplicity of ways in which content may be accessed - from smartphone to full-blown desktop VR - coupled with the low barriers to access - visitors only need a standard web browser - points a way forward for immersive and VR learning spaces to come.

for example, Frame runs from a web browser on desktop (including Chromebook), mobile, or VR.

on desktops and notebooks, Frame is accessible through Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Chromium-based Edge browsers.
in stand-alone VR, Frame is accessible through the Oculus Browser.
on mobiles and tablets, Frame is accessible through Chrome on Android, and Safari on iOS.

do have a go :-)

The SORBET Project: sharing at this year's annual conference of the Royal Geographical Society

i am very happy to share that my student and i have been given the opportunity to read a paper at this year's annual conference of the Royal Geographical Society.

Samuel Li is presently training to be a Geography educator and this past year i have had the privilege to mentor him as part of our university's Undergraduate Research Experience on Campus (URECA) programme. Samuel and i will be reading Personal spaces and communal consequences: navigating geographical tensions with the Socially Responsible Behaviour through Embodied Thinking (SORBET) Project.

this year's annual conference will be held from the 31st of August till the 3rd of September, and is themed on Borders, borderlands and bordering. Our paper will be read on the 31st of August during a session on The geographies of digital health, sponsored by the Geographies of Health and Well-being Research Group of the society.