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A useful webpage offering a wide range sources of DBR such as book chapters, articles, design templates, social media links etc.

They say "No one else does what we do" while mentioning their interdisciplinary approach. They say that "The learning sciences field emerged more than two decades ago after researchers found that what worked in a laboratory simply did not hold up with real children, teachers, classrooms and workplaces. They saw that learning technologies, which held great promise for solving education's problems, were not being transferred to classrooms and schools. Cognitive scientists, educational and instructional psychologists, and computer scientists worked together to put their ideas and knowledge to use to improve the learning outcomes for a diverse group." The institute basically do two things: 1 - They identify the critical challenges in education, literacy, mathematics, science and the social sciences. 2- They work to find solutions. Their main aim is to create learning systems for 21st century classrooms thanks to interdisciplinary research in teaching and learning. They believe that learning is a complex process and so they get benefit from different disciplines (e.g. anthropology, computer science, education, linguistics, psychology and sociology) to share knowledge and best practices on education. At their another webpage, they define learning science as a science which "focuses on how to create new, improved and equitable learning environments for 21st century learners.". In order accomplish this, they focus on four questions: 1- How do people learn? 2- What do we want them to know and be able to do? 3- How can we design learning environments that help them learn? 4- How can we monitor what they are learning? They offer a Ph.D. program to raise future learning scientists.

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.

"Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn." ― Benjamin Franklin In the area of adult learning, Ben Franklin turns out to be quite prescient.

That's true. Education is a social-emotional act. As I said in my personal learning theory, teaching humans is not like inserting lines of codes to series of robots to make them behave in a specific way. We all have emotions and our emotions to a specific event may not be same all the time as our point of views to an event are affected by our personal experiences, culture, philosophy, etc. In that sense, for a teacher, it is important to monitor students' feelings to a specific topic and to arrange learning environments in which students have positive feelings about a topic.

"Introduce failure into your learning design." something we appreciate less in our educational system.

Based on Evrim Hoca's questions, while googling I came across this. While considering the motivation we disregard one important point I guess. What about the social and economic status of learners and its influence on motivation? Here the news tell us about the accesibility problem. If some are not able to access can we talk about the motivation?

I am studying on learning environments in socioeconomically disadvantaged schools Yelda, :) May be I can provide some information during the course. Thanks for sharing this :)

Yelda, I have no idea about the target population of MOOCs when they first broke out..But I know they have many pros like no-cost for students (mostly), quality (some Ivy League universities are leading), opportunity for who has no chance to enroll a famous university, no presequities like diplom and chance of discussing things through an online platform (diversity)..So motivation is not one of the pros but cons. Because those MOOC institutions does not offer any college credit but a certificate which does not help you for employment and they are free, nothing forces you to complete..Anyway I have already enrolled a 6 weeks Cryptography Course (I am a Courseran now) offered by a Stanford Professor.

it seems that we will try to go to some Chinese Universities in ten years time, instead of Europe or States.

In my opinion education policy of the countries do not be planned based on the students' academic achievement. Real achievement of an education system could be observed as individuals' adaptation to life. For example the main vision of the elementary science curriculum defined by Ministry of National Education of Turkey [MONE] (2005) is that regardless of the individual differences of students, they are educated to become scientifically literate, the uniqueness nature of the learner; background and culture of the learners and motivation of the learners were taken into consideration in the development of the curriculum (MONE, 2005), but putting those in the practice is very difficult.

Also, as mentioned in the text "… those results come at the cost of one of the highest levels of student anxiety in the world." Anxiety is very important and big research area in educational psychology also the news in the link http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-04/10/content_9710997.htm exemplifies its importance in Chinese case.

Some inspirational ideas on design thinking from IDEO.

I like his ideas, they are indeed inspirational and realizable. And the OpenIdeo Platform (Global community to solve big challenges for social good - http://www.openideo.com/ ) is very promising.

Art is like a filter in our brain to mean the world we are in. By visiting art museums, watching more movies and put more emphasize on literature, i believe that we really can 'Design the world' with respect to critical thinking skills and social tolerance:)

Couldn't agree more with you and this article you shared:) Being exposed to diversity of ideas and being challenged by differences, what a joy :) I also believe that it helps design the world,

Contemporary Theories of Learning - Learning Theorists...in Their Own Words - Knud Illeris >>> http://tr.scribd.com/doc/152409290/Contemporary-Theories-of-Learning-Learning-Theorists-in-Their-Own-Words-Knud-Illeris#download

Thank you for the source, I found it last week too and I believe it is a very comprehensive source that can guide us in this course.

Thanks for sharing the link. I found it in the METU library too. I can bring it to our class on Thursday. We can benefit from it for the discussion sessions or refer to it in our personal learning theories.

Turkey has been undergoing education reforms because of the same reason" ..the current system was designed and conceived for a different age..." Do you think the reformed curricula meet the requirements of 21st century? I think wee need to reform the minds of people who are designing the curricula in this country...

It is like imitating other countries and take their education systems for granted rathr than reforming. Whatever it is, the education systems not only in East but also in some parts of west are based on social efficiency theory and students are conceived as to-be-workers. Self-actualization and intellectual development are not even in the secondary place.

as it is mentioned in the video, our educattion system also kill the creativity of the students and cause them to behave like robots.I think we loose huge amont of potential to produce artistic, scientific and tecnological productions.

It`s a short introduction of how teacher education is treated in Finland.it talks about the classroom environment they create, the goal of teacher education and the inservice training they provide after teachers get their Masters degree.

The compulsory and voluntary intense in-service trainings for all grade teacher as in Japan and Korea, is very critical I think. These training are very well structured focusing on different topics such as educational philosophies, relationships with parents or different instructional methods.

I agree with Canan. Because I know that Shanghai-China is the first country according to latest PISA results. Also, Shanghai's population is over 14,5 million. With this population they can have high achievement level in an international exam. I think the success is not related to population. This is only related to educational policies. Especially teachers quality have huge impact on countries success in such exams. Educational policies on teacher candidates' selection and education should be revised as soon as possible. As turkish idiom said: "Az olsun ve öz olsun-less number- higher quality"(I'm not sure about the translation, can English teacher friends help me that point?.). Goverment should select teacher as many as the country need.

We spook about Mishra in class and Evrim Hoca gave some information about him. .
Punya Mishra is a professor of educational technology and director of the Master of Arts in Educational Technology program. He is nationally and internationally recognized for his work on the theoretical, cognitive and social aspects related to the design and use of computer-based learning environments. He has worked extensively in the area of technology integration in teacher education which led to the development (in collaboration with M. J. Koehler) of the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework, which has been described as "the most significant advancement in the area of technology integration in the past 25 years." He has received over $4 million in grants, published over 45 articles and book chapters and edited two books. Dr. Mishra is an award-winning instructor who teaches courses at both the masters and doctoral levels in the areas of educational technology, design and creativity. He is a gifted, creative and engaging public speaker, having made multiple keynote and invited presentations for associations and conferences nationally and internationally.
My dream is to work with him and Ann Thompson and also taking TPACK badge.:)

Allan Collins is a retired professor of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University and best known in psychology for his work on semantic memory and plausible reasoning, in artificial intelligence for his work on reasoning and intelligent tutoring systems, and in education for his work on situated learning, inquiry teaching, epistemic forms and games, design research, and cognitive apprenticeship. His famous work with the co-author Richard Halverson is "Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America" that was published in 2009. I have put the link to download the article presenting a summary of the contents of the book written by Collins and Halverson.

Here is a list of his publications and books: http://allancollins.northwestern.edu/pubs-more.html http://allancollins.northwestern.edu/books.html

Yelda, I am really happy to meet such a study and really curious about reading this paper. As you know, I am interested in technology in education. Therefore, it will be my basic reading. Thanks for your sharing.

We can think that in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning Environments has a pitfall in that it prevents the social construction of knowledge, interactive group learning and shared understanding. In the article, an intelligent CSCL environment is proposed, which is based on awareness about the others in the task and in the non-task context.

By the way, you can reach the article through Full Text icon. I couldn't share the direct link. :(

Hey everyone! Here is a video on the role digital media plays in young people's lives. Social networks, online games and media production are seen as significant tool of the 21st century. There are other videos you can view on learning as well from this New Learning Institute.

James Paul Gee is a researcher of literacy studies from Arizona State University. According to him, language is always used from a perspective and always occurs within a context and meaning is socially-constructed. His publications might be worth checking!

"A learning platform built on a foundation of social mediated knowledge communities helps fulfill the goals of critical pedagogy to disrupt formal power imbalances between student and faculty while also tearing down the walls of the ivory tower" (Wankel, 2011, p. 349).