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This is a conference organized by EARLI Special Interest Group: Neuroscience and Education. Here is the conference program that we can examine the abstracts of the papers presented. There are also papers from Turkey :)

Through this link you can find some intriguing answers to the question "How can you employ Brain-Targeted Teaching methods in your classroom right now?"

SRI International research examines many of the topics we cover in class on learning sciences. Worth to check.

This article concentrates on collaborative methods in education to highlight their potentials in elevated learning outcomes. In the article, there is also some mention of learning by design and project-based pathways. I guess it is worth to check it out. By the way Edutopia is a great source for educational articles and videos.

Upon coming across this cartoon, I've felt an urge to share it with you because it touches on some relevant issues we've been discussing since the very beginning of the course. Please first click on the picture to enlarge it, and sorry for this inconvenience :)

Thanks for your share Yasin :) This cartoon reminds me of the education in Turkey. While areas like science, math, biology are thought to be important, unfortunately art, literature, music, dance etc. are underestimated. They are thought to be just hobbies and not enough attention is given to them. People interested in these areas are thought to be wasting their time or unsuccessful. Again unfortunatelly we cannot change this perception. I wish there were more people around me who were given the chance to show their talents and whose talents do not fade away.

You're welcome Seda :) It is even more depressing to know that this perception won't change as long as we live under today's economical perceptions. It is simply "be a part of the system or get ready to be called as marginal" :)

KlassData is a kind of Learning analytic tool. This video exlplains why LA is needed and how it can be beneficial for educational settings shortly.

I liked Klass Data because, it is respectful to students. It asks their consent. I mean it respects to the "informed consent" principle of ethics.

The use of big datasets is not just to measure the students' progress but also to shape it.

I found this paper when I was "googling". It covers legal, ethical and related management issues surrounding the generation, use and sharing of analytics data in the context of teaching, learning and research and the underlying business processes based on current UK law. It may be beneficial for the question marks on that whether the learning analytics has been violating the ethical issues.

We can take a look at this paper to learn about Learning Analytics applications in higher education

'The Many Faces of TPACK: Perspectives and Approaches" is a Wikibook created as part of the Research and Practice on Technology in Teacher Education Course (EDS 536) taught at Middle East Technical University in Spring 2013.

Professor Anthony Kelly from Southampton Education School at the University of Southampton answers the following questions: Is design based research a method on its own? Is design based research only for formative research or can it also be summative? How is design-based research different from mixed-methods? He says that design-based research is not a method like "qualitative", "quantitative" or "mixed". Rather, it is a research "genre" or "paradigm" which can use different methods when necessary. In fact, at most of the time, researchers collect quantitative and qualitative data in DBR.

Research on how deliberate practice combined with innate abilities lead to expertise.

Elanur, Actually, I was trying to find the movie that you mentioned about high-wire actor (Petit). Then I realized that you have already written here. What made me so impressed about him that he worked on that about 6 years. I have read somewhere "experts view mistakes as opportunities to learn", however, this man had no chance to do mistake. the story of the guy in this link http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2015/09/30/the_real_story_behind_philippe_petits_highwire_act_in_the_walk.php

Yes Yasin I totally agree with you about the mistake part but this man dedicated his life to perform on the wire between Twin Towers so I thought that someone who dedicates oneself to perform in a particular area develops expertise in that area eventually and we can call him an expert in being a juggler even he put his life in danger. By the way this is an extreme example of being an expert. I just try to make connections between dedication and developing an expertise through this example.

There are many theories in this page that we should be interested in in this page as learning sciences students. An example of two groundbreaking research results in learning sciences is (1) Entwistle's Phenomenography theory This conceptual framework focuses on the experience of learning from the student's perspective and is based upon a phenomenological approach to research. Entwistle explains: "Our task is thus to describe more clearly how learning takes place in higher education and to point out how teaching and assessment affect the quality of learning. From these descriptions teachers should be able to draw their own lessons about how to facilitate their students' learning" (Marton, Hounsell & Entwistle, 1984, p.1). (2) Festinger's Cognitive Dissonance Theory According to cognitive dissonance theory, there is a tendency for individuals to seek consistency among their cognitions (i.e., beliefs, opinions). When there is an inconsistency between attitudes or behaviors (dissonance), something must change to eliminate the dissonance. In the case of a discrepancy between attitudes and behavior, it is most likely that the attitude will change to accommodate the behavior.

Bruce McCandliss, professor in Stanford's Graduate School of Education and the director of the Stanford Center for Mind, Brain and Computation, speaks about brain-imaging technology that is revolutionizing the study of educational experiences and their effect on the brain.

In this article Roy Pea, who is one of the pioneers of learning sciences, discussing how computers are changing our cognitive lifes beyond amplifying. Article first supports this proposition, then discusses implications of applying computer-based technologies into education. Lastly it suggests updating educational practices in order to be harmonious with this new emerging cognitive life. This article is also important for being quite early, it constitutes one of the foot stones of the learning sciences area.

College professors and instructors can learn a lot from the chapters of a digital textbook that they assign students to read. Reynol Junco, an associate professor in Iowa State University's School of Education, says digital books provide real-time analytics to help faculty assess how students are doing in the class.

In this research, digital textbook is used for predicting students outcomes. With help of digital text book, instructors can track the time students spend reading. On the other hand, with regular textbooks, instructor do not know how students are doing or whether they read the assigned material or not until they give a graded assignment. Digital text book gives opportunity to teacher to monitor their students' actions and can take precation to make students read the material.With help of digital text book, instructors can track the time students spend on reading. By this way, instructor can gain some information like the material complexity for students reading level and s/he can adapt course material or take other precautions to help students succeed.

Many UK children have become less confident about succeeding in life by the time they leave school, a report says. The study by think-tank Demos says some pupils feel school is just preparing them for exam success. It urges the government to help schools and colleges explore how self-belief, perseverance and resilience can be instilled in pupils.

I think that not only UK chidren but also our children less confident and unhappy in real life. If same research is done in Turkey, I think that similar results can be obtained. Students spend 12 years in school (primary school, secondary and high school). And they learn socialising, success, failure in school. In traditional classrooms, success is gaining high score in exam, ranked in first three in competition and failure is gaining lower scores on exam. When students leave the school, they face with new environment that is not similar to school. I think, therefore, they can not adopt to this new environment they feel unhappy and less confident. For this reason, schools should bring the skills and qualities that are needed for out of the school. Community service course, role playing, field works should be done in the schools to introduce real life experinces to students. In addition, changing the laerning activites, assesment procedures in school also can be helpful for real life experinces.

In several videos it was said that we start to prepare our pupils for jobs that are not invented yet. It is because there are lots of information production and exchange throughout world now, which makes lots of jobs become obsolete in short period of times. Our students need to have skills to locate, synthesis, and evaluate information and adapt theirselves to new contexts instead of having static knowledge about specific jobs.