ULI Grants and Research

ULI Partners to Create National Ethics Center

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=118057&org=NSF&from=news
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has recently taken definitive steps to ensure that the science and engineering community has valuable resources at its disposal to make informed, ethical, responsible decisions in research projects and professional practices. After soliciting feedback from the community, NSF has made a five-year, $5 million grant to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to develop a national center for professional and research ethics in science, mathematics and engineering.

 

Transforming Student Assessment: The Assess-As-You-Go Writing Assistant

http://newlearningonline.com/assess-as-you-go/
Imagine having a learning information environment which provides learners, parents, teachers and the public with all they need to know about student progress without having to have end-of-program tests. That seems like science fiction? A team of researchers in the The College of Education at the University of Illinois is thinking ambitiously about such a possibility, while working modestly and incrementally to build a web-based-learning environment which does just this.

A team lead by Dr Bill Cope is working on a $1.5 million grant from the US Department of Education to create the Assess-As-You-Go Writing Assistant. This will be a web-based working environment in which students can create written texts, as well as embed images, sound and video. Students will be able work both individually and collaboratively, representing online various kinds of complex knowledge performance – such as scientific report writing or persuasive writing in language arts.

 

u-learn.net: An Anywhere/Anytime Formative Assessment and Learning Feedback Environment

http://newlearningonline.com/assess-as-you-go/u-learnnet/
Social networking technologies allow the social relationships of learning which have been initiated in the classroom, to continue beyond the walls of the classroom and the timeframes of the school timetable. This project will develop a ‘Web 2.0’ environment which provides feedback for learners and supports formative assessment. It will support the capture of text, image, table, diagram, video and audio, thus allowing the construction of a wide range of multimodal texts such as scientific reports, writing in language arts, history essays and social studies projects. It will also support collaborative work, maintaining an audit trail of co-authors’ varied contributions. Alongside the student work environment, there will be three formative assessment processes and learner feedback mechanisms: 1) a commenting and editing module; 2) a review and rating module; and 3) a semantic tagging module. Classroom-based research and development will involve overlapping and iterative processes of feasibility analysis, technical specification, software development and beta testing.

 

US Department of Education Grant Supports Learning by Design Research and Development

http://newlearningonline.com/learning-by-design/rd-project/
This project will create an innovative technology tool for teachers which reconfigures traditional curriculum design and instructional roles. The technology developed in this project will support teachers as they design ‘Learning Elements’, or online modules of teaching content, and will consist of three closely interconnected online spaces, which users can choose to view separately or juxtapose in side-by-side panes presenting parallel views: 1) a ‘teacher resource’ space in which lesson planning occurs; 2) a ‘learner resource’ space in which this plan is translated into student-accessible text for independent or semi-independent learning; and 3) a ‘learner workbook’ space in which students undertake activities that have been scaffolded in the ‘learner resource’ space. The technology will support multimodal text delivery (text, image, video, audio). The project will develop key elements of today’s ‘Web 2.0’ social networking technologies including the potentials for the collaborative design of content amongst teams of teachers, easy dissemination to students, and rapid, responsive formative and summative assessment of student work. Phase II will involve overlapping and iterative processes of technical specification, software development, beta lab testing and feasibility analysis.

 

Towards a Semantic Web: Connecting Knowledge in Academic Research

Bill Cope, Mary Kalantizis and Liam Magee
http://www.woodheadpublishing.com/en/book.aspx?bookID=2025&ChandosTitle=1
This book addresses the question of how knowledge is currently documented, and may soon be documented in the context of what it calls ‘semantic publishing’. This takes two forms: a more narrowly and technically defined ‘semantic web’; as well as a broader notion of semantic publishing. This book will examine the ways in which knowledge is currently represented in journal articles and books. By contrast, it goes on to explore the potential impacts of semantic publishing on academic research and authorship. It sets this in the context of changing knowledge ecologies: the way research is done; the way knowledge is represented and; the modes of knowledge access used by researchers, students and the general public.

 

Postdoctoral Research Training Grants

Professor Bill Cope and a group of colleagues have been awarded $700,000 to fund four two-year postdoctoral research training grants by the Institute of Education Services. For more information, please contact Bill Cope (billcope@illinois.edu).