Authors: Moher, T., Rogers, Y., Quintana, C., Joiner, R.

Publication: Annual Conference of the American Education Research Association, San Francisco, CA

Focus and organization of the symposium

While the personal computer (and by implication the individual learner) continues to be the target platform for most educational software, the affordances of distributed computing and communications have received considerable attention within both the learning and technology worlds for their potential in supporting the development of communities of science learning.

These capabilities have been manifested in two complementary but distinct frameworks. On the one hand, researchers are exploring the affordances of technologies, particularly the Internet, that link physically separated users (e.g., Pea, 1993; Edwards et al., 2001; Dede, 1995).

At the same time, inspired by the Participatory Simulation framework emanating from MIT (e.g., Resnick & Wilensky, 1997; Colella, 2000), designers are actively exploring the potential for using distributed collections of computation devices within physically shared (“co-present”) spaces.

Date: April 7, 2006 - April 11, 2006

Document: View PDF

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