Sadaf Salavati

Collboard: Fostering new media literacies in the classroom through collaborative problem solving supported by digital pens and interactive whiteboards

Education systems worldwide must strive to support the teaching of a set of New Media Literacies (NMLs). These literacies respond to the need for educating human capital within participatory cultures in a highly technologized world. In this paper, we present Collboard, a constructivist problem solving activity for fostering the development of specific NMLs in classrooms: collective intelligence, distributed cognition and transmedia navigation. Collboard encompasses successive individual and collaborative work phases that prompt active student participation and engagement. It integrates digitally augmented appliances, namely, digital pens as a means to support individual work, and interactive whiteboards as a collaborative knowledge construction space. We report on the conceptual design of Collboard, its different technological and software components, as well as our findings from experiences we conducted in a Swedish school with 12 students from a 7th grade maths class. Findings from the experience provide an indication that Collboard can be well integrated in classroom teaching, and that it can foster the development of collective intelligence, distributed cognition and transmedia navigation in different knowledge domains.

Informed Systems: To Advance Organizational Capacity and Co-Worker Capability

Since its introduction at HICSS-39, Informed Systems has evolved both through and as a process of organizational design for -˜learning in action.’ Fortified by Bruce’s informed learning theory and fostered by Checkland’s soft systems methodology, the approach is catalysed by participatory design, elaborated by action research, and expressed as information experience. The aim throughout is information exchange for knowledge creation through -˜working together.’ Organizational capacity builds as colleagues use information to learn in ever expanding professional contexts. This paper explores aspects of the -˜bridge’ between individual and collective learning through enabling organizational systems and associated professional practices. An Informed Systems Capability Bridge Model and Information Curation and Knowledge Management Map detail processes and elements of a prototype system, generated from original research on co-workers’ information experience. Concluding reflections explore value added synergies from information-centered, action-oriented, technology-enabled, and learning-focused systems design.