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Research Areas

Our research is founded in the Learning Sciences with focuses on collaborative learning, learning technology, educational design, e-Research, complex systems, and environmental and science education.

The Learning Sciences: CoCo has made major contributions to the emerging international interdisciplinary research field of the learning sciences, which brings together researchers from the fields of education, computer and information science, cognitive science and psychology, linguistics, sociology, and anthropology to work on problems that are increasingly recognised as central to economic and social well-being in the 21st Century.

Schools and 'the Digital Education Revolution': We conduct learner-oriented research that focuses on collaborative learning and knowledge-building pedagogy, and develop a strong line of research on teachers as innovators of pedagogical practices. We do research on various curriculum areas, with particular expertise in science and environmental education. We are developing a learning-by-modelling pedagogy in this area. This is also the area where we see a huge potential to conduct research on the educational use of mobile computing and social networking technologies. It is also a focus for multidisciplinary work that draws systematically on a number of key curriculum areas.

Higher Education: Our work in this area focuses on students' experiences of blended learning, and collaborative learning in virtual teams. On the conceptual level, we will be looking deeper into an inclusion of theoretical work on the knowledge society and further development of knowledge-building pedagogy and learning through inquiry, and on the technical level, into an inclusion of knowledge technologies (e.g., Semantic Web, intelligent agents).

Life-long and Informal Learning: Research on the use of ICT for informal learning and learner-managed life-long learning is an important element of our portfolio, and builds on our experiences working with museums and in outdoor education (environmental sites, etc.). In addition to mobile computing, this incorporates the rapidly growing sector of 'serious gaming'.

Educational Design Educational design, conceptions of 'teaching as design', and the use of design tools, design patterns and pattern languages provide a key area for the integration of empirical research on learning and teaching, relevant to all education sectors.

e-Research: The potential of e-research-based analyses of students' ongoing formal and informal curriculum products is considerable and will have a major impact on research, and on teacher education. This line of work may include EVA-type approaches to pedagogy as a way of understanding discipline- and multidiscipline-based forms of learning and displaying mastery.

Epistemic Fluency & Academic Literacy: Two key concepts in CoCo's approach to understanding the relationship of learning to the curriculum and to the changing demands on C21 citizen-workers are epistemic fluency and academic literacy. These terms refer to learners' abilities to employ the literacies involved in various disciplines in new, flexible combinations that are responsive to complex and unforeseen task demands, and to represent their contributions in new kinds of texts, often digitally mediated and multimodally constructed, that are appropriate and powerful in terms of the range and blend of modalities used and the purposeful synthesis of visual and linguistic genres.

Take a look at some of the journals and conferences where our research in these areas has been published.