Hung Wei Loong, David

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.

Central coordination characterises centralised education systems. Centralised systems pride on efficient systemic planning for strategic foresightedness. This study investigates how educators fostered partnerships towards lateral networking propensities or laterality in a centralised system with hierarchical tendencies. A qualitative method was applied in examining newly formed, centrally initiated yet interest-based partnerships that were supported by central agency affordances. The concept of 'champion resource' - that is, teacher-leaders who champion particular innovations - is introduced to explain the integration of individual resources and collective efforts that can benefit teachers in their learning process through the appropriation of pedagogical innovations. We argue that tenets of partnerships drawn from studies conducted in decentralised systems can inform the dynamics of laterality in centralised systems. In our study, developing laterality starting from champion resource/teacher dyads was witnessed, and the aim is that the dyadic relationships can grow to multi-connected teacher-to-teacher laterality. We argue that the growth of this laterality is both cultivated by the 'champion resource' and afforded through centralised coordination efforts, which we will illustrate through the data from this study. We are in a unique position to study partnerships in a centralised system from the early stages of inception and towards laterality. This study has begun to clarify the possibilities of developing these partnerships systematically, and recommendations are made on how to advance partnerships in centralised systems.

SUCCESS is a project that proposes an approach to improving the academic learning of secondary Normal Technical (NT) students in Singapore through the strategic use of computers in the school curriculum. Capitalising on the NT students' interest in using the computer, an inquiry is being carried out in participating neighbourhood schools to develop instructional strategies (Chen & Oei, 1996) enabling tools (Looi, et al, 1996) in English, Maths, Science and Computer Applications to bring about more effective learning and higher academic achievement. This paper describes a pilot project conducted in a school which involves students doing a survey-based project on some aspects of shopping and consumers' choice, and analysing and presenting their findings using the computer.

The notion of community is at the heart of many epistemological theories of learning, both in organizations and in academia. CoPs or Communities of Practice facilitate not only the processes of learning about knowledge within a particular practice, but through enculturation practitioners learn to be identified with that profession. With the rise of the Internet, and its ability to reach out and connect people, it is unsurprisingly the focus of many community initiatives. The success of some commercial online communities is compelling other organizations and academics to follow suit. The aim of this article is to act like a speed breaker for those rushing to create online learning/knowledge communities, urging them to stop and heed the numerous, and often neglected, social aspects associated with such developments. By drawing on research done by John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid, Larry Prusak, Peter Cohen, and Malcolm Gladwell, and by companies like British Petroleum, we hope to implant the notion that "virtuality" is only effective when it is used as an add-on to already existing social structures and not as a stand-alone initiative. Similarly, learning is facilitated through complementing and extending existing social networks with technologies that can enhance the learning processes.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the more recent conceptions of learning in the light of more traditional conceptions which we are familiar with. These recent conceptions differ from traditional conceptions of individualistic thinking to a more collaborative and social nature towards learning. From these recent notions of learning and cognition, we discuss how the National Institute of Education is currently formulating e-pedagogies along the vein of these conceptions.

In this article, we propose a social constructivist adaptation of Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) (Schank, Berman, & Macpherson, 1999) by incorporating computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) tools such as Knowledge Forum into the thinking and reasoning process. Goal-Based Scenarios (GBS) are Roger Schank's translation of Case-Based Reasoning into simulated learning environments. In essence, by incorporating CSCL tools into GBSs, we illustrate how the social constructivist process is facilitated through facilitation cues and a simple polling mechanism within the CBR process.