Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
extensive possibilities for remote synchronous data analysis, such as distributed
annotation and analysis of classroom video observations, remote synchronous
access to data sets, and analysis. Tools allow teachers' collaboration with het-
erogeneous external professional communities, to include instructional designers,
university researchers, and other professionals.
Knowledge dissemination and decision-making space
provides possibilities for
integrating various classroom innovations, related inquiry data and evidences into
large shared innovation, and evidence repositories. This space provides a knowledge
base for new innovations and decision-making. Firstly, shared repositories create
opportunities for teachers interrogating such knowledge collections, finding inquiry
cases that are relevant for their professional questions (including descriptions of
innovations, their contexts, associated instructional resources, data, and evidences,
i.e., what, how and why these innovations work). Teachers, building upon these
resources and knowledge, can develop their new classroom innovations. Secondly,
well-described small classroom innovations and inquiry data provide possibilities
for conducting integrated analyses of raw data and meta-analyses of inquiry results
at broader community or system levels.
ICT-enhanced educational innovations are modular in nature. Innovation sys-
tems and inquiry platforms can provide effective means for storing, sharing, and
repurposing instructional resources (such as learning objects), design patterns,
learning activity, and research workflows as well as other related digital artifacts and
knowledge in
federated repositories
. Metadata with instructional contexts and
provenance records, inquiry data, results, and evidence amended to the design-
based innovations provide rich opportunities for integrating small-scale distributed
classroom innovations and data into larger evidence repositories. This provides
opportunities for reusing data in new meta-level studies using new data-driven meth-
ods (e.g., data mining). Such studies could generate new types of knowledge and
generalized evidence that otherwise would be impossible to gain from individual
inquiries.
Taken as a whole, such an e-inquiry infrastructure could support the entire dig-
ital life cycle of ICT-enhanced educational innovations and knowledge. Moreover,
such platforms based on open service-oriented architectures allow flexible reconfig-
uration of spaces and tools to match specific needs of innovators, their knowledge
structures, and knowing processes. And it provides a basis for distributing research
on students' (and teachers') learning between the main actors, teachers, and full-
time researchers. This will be essential, since it is unrealistic to assume that teachers
will find the time to engage in extended research on top of all their other duties, even
if they had the interest and the incentives.
Process Data Streams and Video Data
To illustrate specific applications (that could be seen as a part of the above discussed
e-inquiry platform, but also independent areas of learning technology research), in
