Research resulting from MIRACLE project's developmental work will be presented at the forthcoming International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS 2012). The biennial conference, which will be held 2-6 July in Sydney, is one of the most important events for the learning sciences community, and is a referent of the state-of-the-art on research within learning and education. The topic for the ICLS 2012 is "the Future of Learning".
Some of the researchers within MIRACLE will take part in a symposium called "Hybrid Spaces for Science Learning: New demands and opportunities for research". The symposium will discuss the emergence of new spaces for learning that have moved beyond the traditional desktop computer configuration, and are mediated by mobile and ubiquitous technologies. Hybrid spaces refer to the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments for science learning. Students manipulating a physical device in a museum setting can produce changes within a digital space that, in turn, influence subsequent curricular activities. Students' social interactions online can result in changes to their physical classroom environment, or to an aggregate representation gathered from many students and classrooms through activities in an informal setting.
The symposium will gather three distinct research groups – one from Canada, one from USA, and one from Norway (the MIRACLE project) – who have done empirical research into notions of spaces as an affordance and facilitation for interaction with science phenomena. These projects have designed and investigated learning trajectories in such spaces, paying attention to activities that span virtual and physical spaces. The discussant will be professor Wolff-Michael Roth, who will synthesize the ideas and advances in this work and lead a discussion amongst participants. You can read the researchers' backgrounds and agendas on hybrid spaces here.
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