Archives Portfolios Environments (APE)
Coordinator: Donald Broady, ILU / Uppsala University
Summary
The APE experiments are part of a pilot project called New Meeting Places for Learning, coordinated by the Swedish Learning Lab (SweLL). The overall aim of this project is to experiment with, and investigate, the potential of new information and communication technology (ICT) to put the student's learning in focus at universities and other learning organizations. Such a focus on learning requires the design of new learning activities and environments, which activate the learners, as well as systematic assessment of learning outcomes. This approach provides the basis for a critical evaluation of the effectiveness of the technology against the goal for which it is being used, namely, improved student learning.
Project overview
The three experiments proposed for the New meeting places for learning pilot project will perform work within the following areas:
- Distributed Interactive Learning Spaces (DILS) - An experiment concerning the development of physical and virtual learning spaces supporting a wide spectrum of learning activities, local as well as distributed, supported by information technology. This experiment is a joint venture between KTH, UU, KI and Stanford.
- Development and analysis of different virtual collaborative techniques and tools that can support the acquirement of not only theoretical knowledge, but also of "soft" knowledge, known to be important in professional life. Examples of this might be problem solving capacity and interpersonal communication skills. These tools will be tested in the ISP-VL experiment at KI, UU and Stanford School of Medicine, with technical support of the infrastructure from KTH.
- Experiments on content archives, student portfolios and 3D virtual learning environments . These experiments will explore the implications of the use of digital resources created by students (personal portfolios) and teachers (content archives) as well as the impact of advanced 3D virtual environments as a medium to deliver course content to the students. This will be performed in the Mathematics program of KTH, the Pharmacology course at KI and the Humanities area at UU but also as an exploratory experiment within the Linguistics course at UU and in cooperation with Stanford University. The 3D part of the experiment will be performed in collaboration between UU and KTH with important links to the ISP-VL experiment at KI and UU, mentioned above.
APE-Track A: Content and context of Mathematics in Engineering Education
Partners:
- DSV/KTH (Jansson)
- Media Technology/KTH (Handberg)
The goal of APE-Track A is to encourage and try out methods for the student use of e-folios to document and reflect over their learning process, including courses and the connections between them, beneficial for both further university studies and as a basis for life long learning. Track A consists of two studies: one at the information technology program (study 1) and one at the media technology program (study 2) at KTH. The focus of the second study is more general while the first is more strongly focused on the structural and conceptual aspects of the mathematics education within the program.
Reports
APE-Track C: Communication and Visualization Environments for Learning (CVEL)
Partners: DIS/Uppsala University (Seipel)
The goals of the CVEL experiments are to
- increase the students' ability to understand complex spatial and dynamic relationships in a variety of disciplines.
- increase possibilities of collaborative interaction between students and shared exploration of course contents from remote teaching settings
- improve the ability to access and retrieve course material by visually explore digital content archives