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The 10th KM&EL Workshop Has Been Successfully Organized


The 10th KM&EL Workshop has been successfully organized by the Advanced Innovation Center for Future Education at Beijing Normal University (AICFE, BNU) and the Laboratory for Knowledge Management & E-Learning at University of Hong Kong (KM&EL Lab, HKU). The workshop aims to enhance the collaboration with international scholars and to improve the international recognition in the field of knowledge management and e-learning. The theme of the workshop (Part I) is The Future of Online Learning: Challenges, Opportunities, and Creativity . Four scholars from the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and Hong Kong delivered keynotes and shared their latest research findings. The activity has attracted hundreds of teachers and students from BNU and other universities.

 

The workshop was officially launched at HKU on May 15 with Prof. Rupert Wegerif from University of Cambridge. The topic of his keynote speech is Developing and Trailing a Measure of Group Thinking . Three more keynote speeches were continuously delivered from May 23 to May 24 at 318 Yingdong Building, BNU.

 

In the afternoon of May 23, Prof. Carolyn Rosé (ISLS Fellow) from School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University gave a talk on Fueling a Cycle for Continuous Improvement in Discussion Based Learning. The talk mainly focuses on sharable infrastructure for supporting computational discourse analysis in action as well as research that leverages this infrastructure in a continuous improvement cycle. With Discourse DB as a foundation, Prof. Rosé and her team use text mining and other computational modeling techniques applied to discourse data, which allows them to estimate measures of student conversational roles, attitudes, motivation, cognitive engagement, and confusion. Together these insights motivate design of collaborative activities and interventions triggered through real time analysis of collaborative processes, which then scaffold collaborative processes and increase learning and performance within groups. Language technologies like text classification and dialogue agents make collaboration effective. Some resources have already been or will be ported to Chinese.

Prof. Carolyn Rosé

Keynote speec: Cycle for Continuous Improvement in Discussion Based Learning

 

In the morning of May 24, Dr. Maggie Minhong Wang shared the speech entitled Laboratory for Knowledge Management & E-Learning (KM&EL Lab): Review of Ten Years and Prospect of Development. Similar to AICFE, KM&EL Lab aims to use technology to improve individual and organizational learning for sustainable development. Technology has showed advantages in convenience, flexibility, autonomy, opportunities, and facilities in teaching and learning, but challenges coming with advantages. For example, complex process is inaccessible to learners, undesired learning outcomes, anxiety, and low confidence in inquiry and problem contexts in computer-based learning environments. From prior studies, Dr. Wang found that deep or deeper learning is characterized by high level of engagement in learning, driven by intrinsic motivation, supported by relevant learning approaches or strategies that allow learners to manage complexity and key challenges to sustain engagement and to achieve a high level of understanding and performance. Designers of online environment and course should pay more attention to externalizing the tacit aspects of complex tasks for effective thinking and improved performance, to relating new ideas with prior knowledge and experience for effective construction of knowledge, combining discrete pieces of knowledge into a coherent whole, and converging and evolving knowledge in social contexts.

Dr. Maggie Minhong Wang (in the middle)

Keynote speech: Laboratory for Knowledge Management & E-Learning (KM&EL Lab): Review of Ten Years and Prospect of Development

 

In the afternoon of May 24, Prof. Gregor Kennedy the Vice-Chancellor at the University of Melbourne delivered a lecture of Ensuring Learning Online is not a Second Class University Education. Over the last two decades, there have been widespread changes in the provision of higher education, the rise of digital technologies and online learning has been central to the way in which universities now engage with their students. Comparing online with face-to-face delivery modes is not that useful, because controlling variables across conditions is untenable. The differences in outcomes are equivocal. The effective learning is not about the mode of delivery but the design of the learning environment and its component activities. The important component of design is interaction, the interaction between teacher and learner, between learner and learner, and between learner and content, for online delivery.

Prof. Gregor Kennedy

Keynote speech: Ensuring Learning Online is not a Second Class University Education

 

Except lectures, every scholar had deep communication and related cooperation with AICFE. The 10th KM&EL Workshop (Part II) will be organized at BNU from July 9 to July 10.