I’m at the iConference this week. Also in meetings at work this week. It’s sort of worked.

Anyway, my netbook died last year so I decided to try a tablet for a while to see if it would meet my conference needs. (Rooted NookColor with a custom Android OS = cheap tablet)

I took some notes on Gerry Stahl’s talk in the eLearning session using Springpad and midway decided to try the WordPress app for Android. (I’ll paste that in later.) Let’s see how it works out.

Stahl is going over how he looked at chat data of virtual math teams, working collaboratively using conversation analysis modifed for online discourse. [Need to get his paper to look at lit review and modifications.]

Focus on structure of timescales. Longer sequence of 10 discourse moves made up of a series of adjacency pairs is the scale that worked. 10 cognitive steps. Each adjacency pair played one of the steps. The cognition was visible in the chat turns. Wow.

Stahl makes claim that his is first paper that exposes long sequence as cognitive unit.

[Discussion covered Brigid Barron, reminds me of Jay Lemke’s timescales]

Kate Starbird- More than the usual suspects

3d avatar programming environment for kids
Embodied cognition
The use of own body to visualize how to program avatars
[Reminds me of Stephanie’s work with gestures]

Distributed cognition among different representational states (imagined, embodied, computer?, something else). The learning is happening in the movement between states.

Carlos Monroy- Emerging contexts for science ed: Embedding a forensics science game in a virtual world

invoked McGonigal who was at UW on her book tour last night

webadventures.rice.edu
Monroy covering forensics one with a CSI wrapper that was created for a museum and embedded in Whyville

Have completion rates (17% or so)
Used a post survey for why they stopped

Graph of quitting points. Most quitters quit in first 1/3 of game
Spontaneous collaboration thru Whyville forums
This is a case that emphasizes importance of collaboration for informal learning

[If collaboration is so important, how does one design for it?]