Opening ‘digital’ channels for contributing to school education

Post date: Jun 28, 2018 10:54:45 AM

We have finally reached a stage in our educational technology research group at Open Lab to have a few concrete examples of technologies that can open channels for any skilled member of the community to contribute to school education. Bridging the gap between schools and communities have been my research vision since going back to academia full-time early 2016 and we are now at a good stage of starting to realize that.

I will just briefly summarize three projects that help demonstrate this.

Remix Portal

Remix Portal (Colin Dodd’s PhD work) is a web-based music remixing tool. In addition to supporting learning about music creation and production, one of the key goals of the design behind this tool is to support local musicians in contributing to students music education by sharing their music (as stems) with the students through the tool. Students can then remix the music, share it back with the musicians who can then give feedback to the students about their remixes. The tool supports the provision of rich feedback that goes beyond simple text comments to actually embedding suggestions mixer settings in the comments so students can see the changed controls and play the music resulting from any suggested changes.

While the design of the tool includes many other elements specific to learning about music remixing (e.g. interface with different layers of difficulty), as well as supporting other usage scenarios (exchanging feedback between students or between schools), my emphasis here is on how this technology allowed local skills (musicians) to contribute to students learning about music. Using the tool, students become more aware of the local music scene, become more motivated knowing that those who created the music will be listening to their remixes and provide feedback, and start to realize that music does not only get created in big cities in big studios but some great music is being created just around the corner (see [4]).

Computing Science students teaching programming at schools

In this project (Megan Venn-Wycherley), we aims to develop a framework that allows Computing students to volunteer to both prepare programming lessons to schools and to deliver them as well with the support of the school teachers. The framework aims to link school pupils, to university students, to the school teachers. School pupils in working with their teachers, can commission the university students to prepare material on specific questions they are interested in, the university student then works with the teacher in shaping the material they prepare to fit within the teachers objectives, and with the support of the teacher, deliver this to students.

We have run successful trials in collaboration with the BBC where our undergrads prepared lessons for programming with the BBC micro:bit in response to questions raised by the school children. Now we are working on further developing the framework to better streamline the process, and to build technology to support expressing needs for material or resources, volunteering, sharing resources and providing support for both volunteers and teachers. We are also looking into how such volunteering can be credited for undergraduate students.

This project is still at its early stages, but it is another example on how to support university students to support schools in teaching materials where there are shortage of subject specific teachers and especially in STEM subjects (see [5,6]).

So hopefully these three examples can help in explaining by what I meant by opening channels for contributing to school education. In these examples we have done this for location experts, musicians, and university undergraduates. Another way to view this is to make community resources available to schools ranging from human resources, to places (as in OurPlace), to physical resources (as we plan to make some programming hardware kits available to skills to borrow).

If you have any questions on any of these projects or on our approach to using technology to support learning please do email me at ahmed.kharrufa(at)ncl.ac.uk

References

1. Richardson, D., Crivellaro, C., Kharrufa, A., Montague, K., & Olivier, P. (2017, June). Exploring Public Places as Infrastructures for Civic M-Learning: Full paper. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T) (pp. 222-231). ACM.

2. Richardson, D., Jarusriboonchai, P., Montague, K., Kharrufa, A. (2018, to appear in September). ParkLearn: Creating, Sharing and Engaging with Place-Based Activities for Seamless Mobile Learning. Full paper. To appear in Proceedings of 20th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI). ACM

3. Dan Richardson and Ahmed Kharrufa. 2020. We are the Greatest Showmen: Configuring a Framework for Project-Based Mobile Learning. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–12. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376650

4. Dodds, C., Kharrufa, A., Preston, A., Preston, C., & Olivier, P. (2017, June). Remix portal: connecting classrooms with local music communities. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Communities and Technologies (pp. 203-212). ACM.

5. Venn-Wycherley, M., & Kharrufa, A. (2019, May). HOPE for Computing Education: Towards the Infrastructuring of Support for University-School Partnerships. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-13).

6. Venn-Wycherley, M., Bennett, C., & Kharrufa, A. (2020). Design Studios for K-12 Computing Education. In 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science. Newcastle University.