US-Finland Planning Visit: Transformed Social Interaction and Telecollaboration for Collaborative Learning

University Of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara CA

Investigators

Abstract

Educational experiences for students that focus on online interactions are becoming increasingly important in current educational contexts. New technologies for video communication and technologies expand the pedagogical contexts well beyond the typical video chat applications and have the potential to enhance both instructor-student and peer-to-peer models of teaching. This project is a new collaboration between researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara and two universities in Finland to explore the development and use of transformed social interaction and tele-collaboration technologies in the context of learning and education. The focus of the collaboration is to create a new community of scholars, identify key research questions and relevant issues, share particular expertise and experience related to the effort and plan for a collaboration with well-articulated research objectives. This project will involve a series of meetings that will catalyze the new partnership in research on collaborative learning technologies. The researchers from the US will include two graduate and one undergraduate student from computer science and media arts and technology and two graduate and one undergraduate student from education. The Finnish universities will include several students and researchers in addition to the core faculty involved. A one-week conference in Finland will be proceeded with sharing of information and publications among the groups. Follow-up teleconferencing meetings will provide the opportunities to continue to refine the outcomes and develop project descriptions of potential research projects.