American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Conference - San Diego, California

Over the years, I’ve heard a lot about the American Educational Research Association annual conference and I finally got the opportunity to experience the event “first hand”. Wow, over 1400 concurrent session blocks with around 15,000 conference delegates.

Irene Naested (the Chair of our Mount Royal Education & Schooling Program) and I touched down in San Diego on Monday April 13^th to sunny skies and warm weather. The reason we were at the conference is that Irene had been invited to participate in a panel session about nine Canadian pre-service teacher education programs that had been sponsored by the Canadian Society for Studies in Education (CSSE). Our session was well received and we made a lot of important contacts while attending the conference.

We stayed at the Manchester Hyatt Hotel on the water front and upon our arrival they provided us with the option of each staying in a 1500 sq. ft. hospitality suite with a Murphy bed. We decided to go for the opportunity and it was wonderful to have lots of space along with a full dining room kitchen and work study. Sigh, the lens of the camera jammed again and I didn’t think that I would be able to take any pictures until I met Ron MacDonald from the University of PEI on the last day of the conference. Ron also has a Canon PowerShot and he explained to me that you just to “tap” the camera body – in order to un-jam the lens (it works). Thus, the trip pictures are very limited.

The number of session options and special interest group (SIG) sessions at the conference was overwhelming. I’ve just highlighted a few in this blog posting but I did try to make a complete set of notes for all the sessions that I attended.

Community of Inquiry as a Theoretical Framework to Foster “Epistemic Engagement” in Online Education – Peter Shea

• Online Education – over 20% of all college students, over 1 million K to 12 students
• Challenges – technologies evolving, building a plane as it flies – where is the plane going – flight plan
• Conceptual frameworks of learning – Larreamendy-Joerns & Leinhardt (2006) – RER

1. Presentational view

· Focus on information transmission

· Visualize abstract concepts

· Myth of immaculate perception

2. Performance tutoring view

· Automated environments that support problem solving

· Increase student-content interaction, transform passive to active learning experiences

· Lack of social context

3. Epistemic engagement view

· Intellectual engagement and interaction

· Engages in questioning, makes connections, validation of knowledge, student-student and student-instructor interaction

· Challenge of reflective learning and co-construction of knowledge – successfully orchestrating (an instructional) dialogue demands sophisticated skills

The Use of Research Circles in Education from Sweden

• Democratic knowledge practices
• Characteristics
• Starting with the participants’ problem
• A meeting on equal terms
• Mutual knowledge construction
• Open and critical attitude
• Building knowledge together
• Critical reflection
• Collective knowledge construction
• Documentation – making public
• Used as a process in Sweden for political decisions

• Epistemology
• View of knowledge – non-hierarchal, anti-authoritarian, in essence democratic
• Construction of knowledge – interaction, reflection, critical analysis
• A critical approach

Notes

• No Scholarship of Teaching & Learning SIG at AERA
• Roots in participatory action research (PAR) – focus on community development
• Issue of action research not being considered “scientifically” viable – quantitative focus of AERA

Research Report: Evaluation of Information and Communication Technology in the Service of Action Research

• Center for Collaborative Action Research (CCAR)
  
• Collaborative Action Research Papers

• Learning from and through practice
• Disposition – way of thinking
• Adaptive expertise versus routine expertise – focus on continual improvement
• Cycles of inquiry
• Progressive problem solving
• Technology – mediate relationships of others either through the creation of conceptual artifacts or visualization of shared cognition
• Structure of human activity (Engestrom, 1987) – activity theory – different framework for action research (instruments, rules, division of labour)
• Issue of problem finding – developed skill – educated mind – one who knows how to find problems
• Focus on “acting” on results of research – not just on dissemination of results

Traditional Textbook vs Student Authored Wikibook - Old Dominion University, Norfolk, West Virginia

• Students write their own textbooks
• Is having students write their own textbook a credible pedagogy?
• 8^th semester of implementation
• Wikibooks – Foundations of Education and Instructional Assessment
• Online and campus-based course
• 30 hour field observation for the course as well