Wong Lung Hsiang

In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of the mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) program that was implemented in three schools in Mongolia, and how students perceived the efficacy of such a digital learning solution for improving their English competency. The digital learning solution employed in this research includes mobiles, social media, and gamification to help students learn English through contextualized social learning processes. The students (N=67) completed the perception survey that measured their perceived efficacy of the digital learning solution. In addition, interviews with selected students and teachers were conducted to further investigate their experiences and challenged faced during the intervention. Overall, the findings indicate high levels of student participation throughout the intervention period and their increased interest towards English learning. In conclusion, we discuss both possibilities and challenges of integrating digital learning solutions in the developing world.

In this paper, we present the case of a future school in Singapore to illustrate the importance of designing learning spaces conducive to mobile CSCL practices from pedagogical design perspectives. Core design considerations are (a) to design activity or task types that lead to collaborative meaning-making discourse and experiences, (b) to promote intentional learning experiences across classroom and outdoor settings, and (c) to promote interdisciplinary thinking and discourse through the design of learning tasks that integrate concepts and skills in multiple subject areas. We also discuss the possibilities and challenges arising from the experiences of studying the design and enactment of mobile CSCL practices in a future school context. Challenges and tensions in our research trajectory include the enculturation process of collaboration, the appropriation of technological platforms, and the conflicts in assessment methods and designed learning experiences.

This research seeks contemporary understanding of how we can develop teachers' Technological-Pedagogical-Content Knowledge (TPACK) when scaling pedagogical innovation to different contextual situations. Teaching with technology has long been a wicked problem as the nature of technology is ''protean'' (used in versatile ways), ''unstable'' (rapidly changing) and ''opaque'' (elusive backend mechanisms), resulting in multifarious complexities which are exacerbated when its use is scaled and situated within the broader socio-cultural context of diverse learning ecologies. Scaling innovations to new contexts is rarely a mere supplanting of what works at the seeding school to new pedagogic sites with less hospitable conditions. It entails the perpetual marshalling of resources to mitigate the enfolding tensions that can emanate from many incompatibilities at the new site. Herein lies the tensions of diffusion: the conflation between fidelity adherence and localised accommodation. The purpose of this research then is to study how teachers' three knowledge bases - technology, pedagogy and content - can be holistically developed so that the core ingredients of success at the seeding school can be sustained and not ''amputated'' at new innovation sites. Informed by complexity theory, the qualitative case study will employ the complexity constructs of ''distribution'', ''enaction'' and ''emergence'' to examine how teachers' epistemic resources are distributed during the knowledge creation process and how teachers leverage on TPACK to enact co-designed lessons or improvise their lessons in-situ. More importantly, by studying the diffusion process of Seamless Science Learning project from the seeding FutureSchool (ICT prototype school) to another non-affiliated mainstream primary school, the study aims to articulate how teachers' reified TPACK can emerge through feedback loops between components of TPACK and interaction with other actors in an ecological complex adaptive system. The study will also articulate the implications of such interaction on the translations of teachers' professional learning and the conceptual model related to challenges of nurturing readiness. It has the potential to inform policymakers on the theoretical principles of professional learning support which may culminate into ensuing successful uptake of innovations. By inter-meshing three domains: complexity theory, TPACK and scaling, this project can provide novel methodological perspective to how the inter-locking influences underpinning teacher's TPACK can be studied. Through cross-case analysis, the proposed study aims to reify both ''local divergence'' and the ''noncontextually bounded'' theoretical principles about scaling school-based intervention.

This workshop focuses on how East Asian cultures furnish unique contexts for education and learning in the region. We share and discuss ongoing research, observations, and theory buildings with regard to the interdisciplinary research on the learning sciences, with the unique context of the interplay of sociocultural, language, and political and historical factors in East Asia. The guiding question is: How learning experiences are shaped by the cultural contexts? In elaborating the uniqueness of the Eastern Asian cultural context, existing studies show that the cultural beliefs, the native languages and bilingual contexts, virtual adolescent social lives, have impacts on the teaching and learning. These studies and the observations of those impacts initiate the introduction to the general theoretical synthesis of Interest-Driven Creator (IDC) theory. This half day workshop aims at reaching a consensus on the benefits of exploring wisdom from East Asian cultures in transforming learning towards the cultivation of interest-driven creativity. Our knowledge synthesis effort will entail a) a consolidation of relevant research findings to date; b) a negotiation of understanding on the East Asian cultural factors by invoking the broader perspectives of researchers from other cultural contexts; and c) new research questions, methodologies and theoretical inputs to inform forthcoming studies and practices on the topic. In particular, we aim at developing a conceptual paper beyond the workshop to be submitted to a suitable journal, with the aim of triggering more cross-cultural dialogues among international scholars on the captioned topic.

This paper reports a pilot study on mobile-assisted language learning that focused on both creative learner output and seamless learning. In learning Chinese idioms, students proactively used smartphones on a 1:1 basis to take photos in their daily lives, subsequently in-class or online sharing and discussions took place, enhancing the students’ understanding in the proper usage of the idioms. Our analysis of the student artefacts in both product- and process-oriented aspects reveals the students’ cognitive process and learning strategies during the course of content creation. The students’ ongoing, open-ended, personal-to-social meaning making process and learner-created authentic content have indeed shown some indicators of seamless language learning and induction-based peer learning that has the potential of transforming language learning into an authentic learning experience.

This panel aims to facilitate an exchange between scholars specialized in various technology-enhanced socio-constructivist learning approaches with the common ground of placing Student-Generated Ideas (SGI) in the center of the learning trajectory. Despite varying theoretical underpinning and socio-cognitive mechanisms, these learning approaches similarly elicit ideas contributed by individual or groups of students in diverse forms and put them into the learners’ classroom or online community space to advance their learning. Examples of such approaches are not restricted to those which will be explicated by the panelists, namely, seamless learning, knowledge building, guided student questioning, student-generated questions, ubiquitous learning log, and productive failure-based flipped classrooms, but may also encompass problem-based learning, project- based learning, computational thinking, STEM, design thinking, makers, etc. The roles of technology in facilitating and enhancing such learning trajectories will be discussed.

This paper reports on a study to investigate the effects of collaborative concept mapping in a one-device-per-student (1:1) digital learning environment, as compared with one-device-to-many-students (1:m), in terms of students' overall learning gains, knowledge retention, quality of the concept maps, interactional patterns, and learning perceptions. Guided by the methodology of quasi-experimental research, we adopted Group Scribbles (GS) 1.0 in our empirical study where students carried out collaborative concept mapping activities in two different settings: (a) students working in pairs with one Tablet PC assigned to each of them; (b) multiple students sharing a Tablet PC. In particular, we investigated the students' learning process, identified and compared various interactional patterns exhibited by the student groups who were engaged in both settings, and discussed how such group dynamics might have affected the quality of the student artifacts produced by individual groups.

In this paper, we propose a MMS (Multimedia Message Service) -based Interactive Mobile Learning model for adult learners to update their CPR (Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation)-related knowledge and skills. Informed by N. A. Crowder’s (1960) branching version of B .F. Skinner’s (1958) Program Instruction approach, we designed an interactive learning process that requires the learners to make series of decisions and then be informed by the system of their consequences, thereby achieving “by making and reflecting on mistakes”. A feasibility study was conducted in three phases with volunteered adult learners being engaged in the MMS learning process. Through the process of learning content development and our analysis of the learner data, we gained better understanding in the feasible activity modes and the factors that may potentially affect the learning process and learner perceptions toward the learning model.

We present a study in “Move, Idioms!”, a mobile Chinese Language learning approach that emphasizes learner created content and contextualized meaning making with their daily encounters. Students used smart-phones on a 1:1, 24x7 basis to capture photos of the real-life contexts pertaining to Chinese idioms or conjunctions, made sentences with idioms/conjunctions, and posted them onto a wiki space for peer review. This paper focuses on students’ on-campus face-to-face collaborative learning process. We derive a novel visualization approach for descriptive analysis of the small group activities inspired by the notions of mediation by artifacts and distributed cognition to provide a synoptic view of the process of student artifact co-creation in such collaborative activities. The artifact-oriented analysis and visualization approach is our preliminary attempt in making sense of how the seamless learning process may look like in the perspective of learners’ individual and collaborative learning experiences.