Impacts of the Digital
Digital Childhoods or Multimodal Lives
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nicola Yelland
This paper is concerned about learning and living in the 21st century - a time of social turbulence on a global scale. For children from low socio-economic backgrounds it is also a time of austerity that impacts on their daily lives in significant ways as "cutbacks" to education and social services limit their opportunities to thrive. This paper discusses the findings from a four year iPad project with young children in preschool and the early years of school. It considers what constitutes learning in the 21st century and posits what it means to be a multimodal learner. Working alongside teachers, with children in the west of Melbourne and in country regions, we sought to discover how tablet technologies can enhance and extend the use of traditional materials to enable young children to become literate and numerate in the 21st century. This paper describes some of the ways in which this was achieved, as well as encouraging the use of 21st century skills; creativity, collaboration, critical thinking and communication.
Digital Literacy and Critical Thinking Development in the 21st Century College Classroom
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kimberlyn Greene
The findings from a dissertation project examining how undergraduate digital literacy courses foster students’ critical thinking skill development will be presented. Utilizing a multiple case study design, two digital literacy courses were analyzed and compared according to their course structure and instructional delivery. The novel conceptual framework exploring the interplay of digital literacy, critical thinking development, and teacher beliefs will also be discussed. This study has implications for higher education curriculum design and faculty training.
Integrating Affective Assessment in Academic Distance Learning Courses
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michalis Feidakis
Despite the progresses made so far, modern e-learning and distance learning systems suffer severe lack of human-like interaction with their human users and responsiveness to them: the typical system is irresponsive to the affective state of the user while even an inadequate human tutor will respond to it and even adapt his/her instruction accordingly. In an attempt to address this problem, this paper presents the design of a digital system that integrates affective assessment in a real-world distance learning scenario. The proposed system uses modern affect theory results along with state-of-the-art technologies in order to (i) “sense” or “gauge” the affective state of a remote class of learners, while they participate in a distance learning course, either synchronous or asynchronous, and (ii) provide feedback to the human participants at three levels: to the individual learner (for self-reflection purposes), to the peer learners and to the class tutor. This is achieved through intuitive, easy to grasp digital visualization of the dominant affect or “temperature” of the online (remote) class, presented on the computer screens of the participants and updated periodically along the duration of the distance learning session. The solutions investigated involve either self-reporting of the user affect or state (“explicit” case) through wearable devices and gestures, or fully automated affect recognition (“implicit” case) through fusion of a number of “experts” (monitored features or physiological parameters of the learner) that will feed a decision-making algorithm after suitable processing. System development, test, adjustment and evaluation issues are also discussed.
