Azilawati Jamaludin

In this article, the authors discuss the importance of studying identity in the context of 21st century learning. Identity is an evolving trajectory that is always in-flux or changing. In a fast changing 21st century, educators are recognizing the significance of identity work, in particular projective ident1ty, as individuals participate in multiple roles. The purpose of this article is to formulate key tenets for the study of projective identity in the form of role-play(s) as youth-participants navigate different social and spatial affinity spaces, and to describe why it is important to 21st century learning.

This paper reports the impact of using a structured argumentation board and enactive role play in Second Life on students' argumentative writing skills in the context of the A-level subject General Paper. Students were taught the structural aspects of argumentation based on Toulmin's (1958) argumentation framework. The structured argumentation board, Voices of Reason, supported their argumentation discourse while the Second Life platform supported students' contextualised role-playing activities on the topic of globalisation. Students participated in these two separate modes of technology-facilitated learning in a cyclic, interwoven fashion, alternating back and forth between two cycles of argument and enaction. Data in the form of argumentative essays were collected at the beginning and the end of a four week intervention period. We compare the pre and post intervention argumentation essays written by the students based on Toulmin’s argumentation framework, contrast the findings with that of the control group's argumentative essays, and present the statistical results in this paper.

Primary school learners are often engaging in learning opportunities in both inside and outside of school contexts. To understand how these different contexts afford opportunities for metacognition and self-regulation, we follow local primary school students of elementary grades five and six. In Vygotsky's work, metacognition appears as an awareness of one's own thinking processes and the way they can be controlled and directed. For Vygotsky, metacognition and self-regulation are completely intertwined in which the latter takes the forms of control over one's attention, thoughts, and actions (Fox & Riconscente, 2008). Consequently, the understanding of these important constructs supports the understanding of human behavior, learning, and development within a broader context of all human activities. To explore the learning of metacognition and self-regulation in students' learning, we draw data from an informal context: a primary school, co-curricular activities (CCA), in bowling. Interpreting from a variety of data-collection techniques such as field observations, interviews, field notes, and video recording, the research team has been observing the bowling team's practices at least once a week since January 2010. Although the school's team comprises of more than thirty students, we targeted our observations to nine of these students. A further sub-section of two participants were selected and interviews were conducted to collect information on strategic planning, self-efficacy, and knowledge application. Moreover, artifacts such as written statements of the way their families assisted in their learning in an informal context were also collected. Preliminary findings indicate that learning in an informal context affords opportunities for metacognition and self-regulation in interesting and authentic ways. In addition, students point out that learning strategies can be used in both formal and informal contexts. The findings also illustrate the importance of linking students' development of metacognitive abilities to parental mentoring in providing a fuller understanding of their learning in both formal and informal contexts.

Where the notion of education used to be (and still is) prevalently accepted as the teaching and learning within formalized settings, 21st century learners of today are developing highly sophisticated, and reflective literacies through participation and play with digital technologies. With the hybridization of learning with popular media culture, learners expect, and derive, little gratification from institutional contexts such as school. Such development implies an pressing need to understand the kinds of phenomena occurring in these so-called progressive (relative to current school practices) learnings and to consider the implications to present settings. Situating our study within the context of the extremely popular immersive multiplayer game space, World of Warcraft (WoW), this research is focused on the intertwining relationship between individual identity and the collective emergence and regulation of social communities within the activities transacted in the game and its related spaces. These issues are investigated in the informal learning space of online guild structures within WoW, while foregrounding central issues of identity and becoming that are core to contemporary media and literacies. The findings arising from this research are meant to inform design principles that will contribute to strongly coupled learning processes within both formal and informal contexts of learning.

Computer mediated communication (CMC) tools have marched into schools to provide borderless teaching and learning to complement existing face-to-face interactions. This article describes how teachers have used CMC to facilitate asynchronous online communication among students' collaborative project groups in project-based classrooms. Secondary school teachers used the CMC tool to facilitate and manage students' learning in terms of brainstorming and challenging student ideas, building resources, and working collaboratively to complete group projects.

In this paper, we discuss metacognition against a backdrop of 21st century traversals, where learners are constantly moving and interacting across different contexts. We describe how learners’ traversals are underpinned by triadic coupling relationships between self, social others, and cultural resources. Drawing our observations from contemporary contextual spaces of online games, we articulate how a situated and embodied form of metacognition pivots the dialectics of the aforementioned coupling relationships.

Issues of innovation diffusion and its related tractability in schools remain key challenges in education research. At the Office of Education Research in Singapore, the authors have been working to develop a research program leveraging upon a school cluster system with the view to experimenting on the centralization and decentralization structures of Singapore's education system to enable scaling or the diffusion of innovations to occur. They posit that underpinning the structural aspects of diffusion is the notion of apprenticeship learning among teachers for epistemic change to occur. In this article, they define and outline how epistemic learning can occur at the teachers' level, articulating how leaders can provide the necessary socio-technological infrastructure to spread and sustain epistemic shifts for pedagogical change. To this end, they explore the use of the cluster system as an alternative approach and a proximal vehicle to build teacher capacity and to promote epistemic change in a more optimal manner in the context of innovation diffusion in education.

This paper investigates the digital migration of Singapore youth to virtual worlds so as to better understand the dialectical interplay between living in the real and the digitally-mediated worlds on how youth construct their identity and sense of self, negotiate meaning, and make sense of their social experiences online. Situating this study within a context of the immensely popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft (WoW), this paper proposes the notion of a performing cyborg as a theoretical lens of looking at the interplay between the everyday, situated lives of digital youth gamers and their activities in WoW. The findings suggest a recurrent theme that challenges ascribed dichotomies between youth’s presence in the real world and virtual world in terms of their identities in play, their sense of embodiment, and their orientation toward work, play, and the spirit of communitas within WoW. We posit that exploration of such a phenomenon that indicates a more intimately enmeshed and dialectically coupled experience of youths’ online and offline worlds provides a fundamental framework for educators to better understand the impact of youths’ exodus to the virtual worlds and its implications for 21st century pedagogy. To this end, this work will strengthen current efforts in augmenting an understanding of the broader learning ecologies within which youth learning activities are situated, illuminating the interplay between youth living in the real and the digitally-mediated virtual world.