Noel Enyedy

Little science confronts the data deluge: habitat ecology, embedded sensor networks, and digital libraries

Abstracte-Science promises to increase the pace of science via fast, distributed access to computational resources, analytical tools, and digital libraries. “Big science” fields such as physics and astronomy that collaborate around expensive instrumentation have constructed shared digital libraries to manage their data and documents, while “little science” research areas that gather data through hand-crafted fieldwork continue to manage their data locally. As habitat ecology researchers begin to deploy embedded sensor networks, they are confronting an array of challenges in capturing, organizing, and managing large amounts of data. The scientists and their partners in computer science and engineering make use of common datasets but interpret the data differently. Studies of this field in transition offer insights into the role of digital libraries in e-Science, how data practices evolve as science becomes more instrumented, and how scientists, computer scientists, and engineers collaborate around data. Among the lessons learned are that data on the same variables are gathered by multiple means, that data exist in many states and in many places, and that publication practices often drive data collection practices. Data sharing is embraced in principle but little sharing actually occurs, due to interrelated factors such as lack of demand, lack of standards, and concerns about publication, ownership, data quality, and ethics. We explore the implications of these findings for data policy and digital library architecture. Research reported here is affiliated with the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing.

Activity centered design: towards a theoretical framework for CSCL

Computers have not yet had the profound impact on classroom practice that has been predicted. Given the proven potential of computer-mediated instruction, what can account for the lack of progress? This paper explores the theoretical underpinnings of many of the existing computer-mediated learning environments and suggests that the learning theories that lie behind them lead to designs that do not fit with nor change the basic participation structures of the classroom. We argue instead for Activity Centered Design (ACD), a model of design for Computer Supported Collaborative Learning environments, based on the following assumptions: that activity is mediated by cultural tools, that activity must be conceptualized on a number of interdependent levels, and that conceptual understanding is first established socially. We then critique our own existing learning environment, the Probability Inquiry Environment, from the ACD perspective.

Inventing Mapping: Creating Cultural Forms to Solve Collective Problems

In this article I detail the conceptual trajectory of a classroom of 2nd- and 3rd-grade students as they reinvent topographical lines to represent height in a map within the constraints of an overhead perspective. In my analysis I pay special attention to the role of social interaction—and in particular the role of the teacher—in the process of knowledge production. First, I demonstrate how the invention of representational forms by individuals occur as part of a larger social process of creating cultural conventions and negotiating a taken-as-shared understanding of these new tools. Second, I show how gesture, as a part of the larger semiotic ecology for meaning making around representations, contributes to creation of understanding. Third, I make some preliminary proposals regarding the process of transforming personal inventions into cultural conventions. The analyses are intended to contribute to our fields growing understanding of young childrens activity when inventing representations (i.e., metarepresentational competence), the mechanisms for learning within instructional activities based on the iterative refinement of these representations (i.e., progressive symbolization), and a rejection of the dichotomy between an individuals cognition and her participation within a cultural community.

Studying the Struggle: Contexts for Learning and Identity Development for Urban Youth

Activism and organizing can be a fertile subject matter for young people to study. This article presents a case study of a summer seminar in which urban high school students examined the historical struggle for educational justice in their communities. Adopting a “communities of practice” approach to learning, the article documents the changing participation of seminar participants and the changing identities and skills that this entailed. During the seminar, students took on identities as “critical researchers”— skilled investigators who produce and share knowledge relevant to social change. In the process, seminar participants developed and deployed high-level academic skills in language arts, social studies, and mathematics.

They Don't Show Nothing I Didn't Know: Emergent Tensions Between Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and Mathematics Pedagogy

This article describes data from the Community Mapping Project, a set of statistical activities and inquiry projects within a summer seminar for high school students. In designing the Community Mapping Project, we attempted to create conditions under which urban students themselves would come to recognize how mathematics is relevant to their lives and their communities. Using mixed methods, we analyzed the pre- and postassessments and final projects of 25 high school students to investigate what students learned from their experience. We also analyzed the data from video case studies to begin to understand how learning was organized. Our qualitative analysis revealed several tensions that emerged between the goals and norms of our instantiation of a culturally relevant pedagogy and the goals and norms of our mathematics pedagogy. We argue that how these tensions are navigated mediate what opportunity students have for learning statistics. This article provides some considerations and lessons learned that may help inform both teachers who wish to rethink their mathematics pedagogy, and the designers who wish to create culturally relevant curricula.

Revoicing in a Multilingual Classroom

The concept of revoicing has recently received a substantial amount of attention within the mathematics education community. One of the primary purposes of revoicing is to promote a deeper conceptual understanding of mathematics by positioning students in relation to one another, thereby facilitating student debate and mathematical argumentation. Our study reexamines revoicing in a multilingual high school algebra classroom; our findings challenge the assumption that revoicing is necessarily tightly connected with classroom argumentation. We demonstrate that a single discursive form, such as revoicing, can play a wide range of valuable functions within the classroom. More importantly, we investigate systematic differences in the ways that revoicing is used, by a particular teacher, across languages. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.

Building digital libraries for scientific data: an exploratory study of data practices in habitat ecology

As data become scientific capital, digital libraries of data become more valuable. To build good tools and services, it is necessary to understand scientists’ data practices. We report on an exploratory study of habitat ecologists and other participants in the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing. These scientists are more willing to share data already published than data that they plan to publish, and are more willing to share data from instruments than hand-collected data. Policy issues include responsibility to provide clean and reliable data, concerns for liability and misappropriation of data, ways to handle sensitive data about human subjects arising from technical studies, control of data, and rights of authorship. We address the implications of these findings for tools and architecture in support of digital data libraries.

From dialogue to monologue and back: Middle spaces in computer-mediated learning

The authors develop a framework for the design of tools to mediate collaboration intended to lead to learning. We identify two categories of media that are common in computer-supported collaborative learning and software in general: communication media and information media. These two types of media are then mapped onto two types of social activities in which learning is grounded: dialogue and monologue. Drawing on literature in learning theory, we suggest the need for interfaces that help students to transition from dialogue to monologue and back again. We examine in detail two cases of students participating in a computer-mediated science learning activity that involved technologies designed to support this transition, and suggest ways that the “middle space” can be supported with software and activities that transcend some of the traditional tradeoffs associated with information and communication interfaces.

Constructing Liminal Blends in a Collaborative Augmented-Reality Learning Environment

In vision-based augmented-reality (AR) environments, users view the physical world through a video feed or device that augments the display with a graphical or informational overlay. Our goal in this manuscript is to ask how and why these new technologies create opportunities for learning. We suggest that AR is uniquely positioned to support learning through its ability to support students in developing “conceptual blends”—which we propose extend beyond cognitive spaces to include the layering of multiple ideas and physical materials, often supplied by different conversation participants. We document one case study and trace how the narrative structure of a board game, the physical floor materials (e.g. linoleum), a student’s first-person embodied experiences, the third-person live camera feed, and the augmented-reality symbols become integrated in the activity. As a result, students’ conceptualization of force and friction become fused with a diverse set of intellectual resources. We conclude by suggesting that the framework of liminal blends may inform the design of future AR learning environments and in particular help generate predictions about the ways in which the juxtaposition of certain resources may otherwise produce unexpected results.

Active and supportive computer-mediated resources for student-to-student conversations

Communication is a central aspect of human learning. Using the Probability Inquiry Environment (PIE) as an example, we examine how external representations (both textual and iconic) mediate face-to-face conversations among students, and support productive mathematical discourse. We provide quantitative data that suggests that seventh grade students who used PIE learned some of the basic principles of probability. Two cases studies are that illustrate how communication supported by computer-mediated representations contributed to this success. The first case study demonstrates how the computer can actively prompt student conversations that lead to learning. The second case study examines how an animated graphical representation supported these productive conversations.