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Join us on 7th April 2021 for the thirteenth session from the CSCL in Times of Crisis webinar series. This is the last session in the current sereis. We hope to see you there to explore Virtual Learning Dens: A Third Space for Playful Reflection with Will Freudenheim, YJ Kim, Peter Kirschmann, and Leslie Coles, MIT Playful Journey Lab. Virtual Learning Dens: A Third Space for Playful Reflection In partnership with the Mendon-Upton Regional School District, the MIT Playful Journey Lab is developing Learning Dens—virtual spaces that provide a weekly activity series to promote playful interactions and reflection among learners. These spaces create a safe, social, virtual opportunity to help educators connect with and support their students and for students to connect with and support one another. Learning Den activities emphasize creative and collaborative forms of reflection and empower each student to recognize the different circumstances that their peers have faced over these past months of the pandemic, fostering a sense of...

Join us on 31st March 2021 for the twelfth session from the CSCL in Times of Crisis webinar series. We hope to see you there to explore Facilitating Productive Disciplinary Engagement in an Online Class: Reflections from a Covid-19 hub in India with Chandan Dasgupta, V. Alekh and P. C. Herold, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Facilitating Productive Disciplinary Engagement in an Online Class: Reflections from a Covid-19 hub in India This pilot study focuses on an introductory course on Human-Computer Interaction for Educational Technology. This course is intended for graduate students who are interested in learning about design issues and key considerations while designing or evaluating educational technology. As such, the topics in this course cover the basics of interaction and usability issues and also go beyond by introducing students to various pedagogical and learning theories that influence the design of educational technology. You can stream the webinar and participate in the subsequent Q & A session here on Wednesday, March 31st 2021, 3:00...

Join us on 24th March 2021 for the eleventh session from the CSCL in Times of Crisis webinar series. We hope to see you there to explore Fostering Social Presence and Sense of Belonging in University Students with Kris Isaacson and Kevin Tharp, University of Wisconsin-Stout. Fostering Social Presence and Sense of Belonging in University Students by Creating an Extracurricular Online Community The goals related to building an online community outside the classroom is to create a positive, holistic learning experience that contributes to improved engagement, sense of belonging, and retention. A well-curated online community provides scaffolds for building social presence. It also encourages interaction between groups of students who are usually perceived as separate groups (e.g., campus-based and online), thus enabling a sense of cohesion and mutual support. Studies suggest increased social presence and sense of belonging contribute to higher levels of engagement and retention among college students. You can stream the webinar and participate in the subsequent Q & A session...

Join us on 17th March 2021 for the tenth session from the CSCL in Times of Crisis webinar series. We hope to see you there to explore Positioning the university lecture in a time of crisis with Charles Crook, University of Nottingham. Positioning the university lecture in a time of crisis A pandemic can seriously disturb the established social fabric of education. How do university lectures fit within such a social fabric and can they support collaborative relationships? This presentation will suggest ways to protect (or even extend) the social dimension of lecturing during times of social distancing. I address the lecture through a design-based research trajectory that draws on a research literature, on the voices of staff and students, on logs of learning resource access, and on direct observation of student collaboration around captured lectures. Current strategies for crisis re-mediation of the lecture lean heavily on distributing video ‘captures’. The strengths and limitations of this approach will be discussed before moving...

Join us on 10th March 2021 for the ninth session from the CSCL in Times of Crisis webinar series. We hope to see you there to explore the Collective Regulation & Enhanced Analysis Thinking Environment (CREATE) with Tugce Aldemir, Marcela Borge, and Xia Yu, The Pennsylvania State University Collective Regulation & Enhanced Analysis Thinking Environment (CREATE) Our increasingly diverse society requires developing cultural competencies in a way that one could form relationships across differences. Developing these skills is a long-term endeavor that needs repetitive practices of collaborative sense-making around topics such as race, gender with diverse identity groups. However, learners have rarely been taught how to engage in this form of collaborative sense-making, and with the challenges COVID brings, the existing communication problems could be amplified across a larger scale, leading to more polarization in society. Thus, we introduce The Collective Regulation & Enhanced Analysis Thinking Environment (CREATE), an online text-based platform, and the pedagogical models. It was initially designed to develop...