Developing an orchestrational framework for collective inquiry in smart classrooms: SAIL Smart Space (S3)

This paper describes PLACE a 12-week cross-contexts curriculum for grade 11 physics that engaged students at home, in class, in their neighbourhoods, and in a smart classroom setting. Using a design-based research approach we introduce a smart classroom infrastructure (SAIL Smart Space; S3) and investigate its role in supporting students in the curriculum as a knowledge community. The present paper focuses on the culminating smart classroom activity, where students use the community knowledge base to scaffold their solving of ill-structured physics problems involving popular Hollywood movies. We examine the efficacy of the tools and the environment, including software agents and data mining approaches that serve to define S3, and help orchestrate the flow of activities, materials, and students during the activity’s enactment. We conclude with a set of design principles that support collaborative inquiry in smart classrooms and across learning contexts. Supporting Knowledge Communities and Inquiry Learning Within the field of learning science there is a growing call to think of classrooms as knowledge communities where students approach learning as a collective endeavor (rather than an individual one), towards solving authentic and personally relevant real-world problems (Slotta & Najafi, 2010). The knowledge community approach, with its focus on user-contributed content and student driven inquiry, is particularly well suited for investigating learning that goes beyond the traditional confines of classroom settings. For example students may visit a local stream or waterway to investigate issues around water quality (Hsi, Collins & Staudt, 2000), or a playground to investigate geometry principles (Milrad et al, 2013). Within this work there is a corresponding challenge of connecting this learning across contexts back into the classroom in meaningful ways. In response, a promising new approach to supporting such designs is the digital embedding of aspects of the community’s inquiry in the walls, ceilings, and floors of the physical learning environment. Examples include a simulated ecology of bugs living in a classroom’s walls (Moher, 2006), and evolutionary simulations of rainforest fauna and flora over millions of years (Lui & Slotta, 2013). By connecting students to these inquiry environments with personal, portable and connected computing devices (such as tablets), we can unchain them from traditional classroom configurations, instead fostering a dynamic “smart classroom” model where students can move throughout the room engaging in spatially index real time collaborative activities (Slotta, 2010). The enactment of complex real-time inquiry activities places a high load on teachers, requiring them to simultaneously manage changing student roles and groups, assign activities, and organize materials – including potentially large and diverse community-generated content from the knowledge base (Tissenbaum & Slotta, in press). The supporting of teachers and students in the enactment of such activities is often termed orchestration (Dillenbourg, Jarvella, Fischer, 2009), and has been highlighted as a major design challenge in the learning sciences (STELLAR, 2011). In response, technology enhanced learning spaces like smart classrooms, may offer a means for supporting the orchestration of such curricula, including tracking student movement within the room, providing procedural scaffolds, and making real-time decisions including student group formation and the delivery of timely materials (Tissenbaum & Slotta, 2013). In order to investigate the role that a smart classroom could play in supporting a knowledge community curriculum, we needed both a pedagogical model and an underlying technology infrastructure. The pedagogical approach we used for this study is the Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI) model, which engages students to work collectively, contributing, tagging and improving content in a shared knowledge base that serves as a resource for subsequent inquiry. In KCI, inquiry activities are carefully designed so that they engage students with targeted content and provide assessable outcomes, allowing students some level of freedom and flexibility but ensuring progress on the relevant learning goals (Slotta & Najafi, 2013). The teacher also plays a critical role within a KCI curriculum, as they must be able to adapt (orchestrate) the designed script “on-thefly,” based on emergent themes and community voices (Tissenbaum & Slotta, 2013). SAIL Smart Space (S3) – a Technology Framework for Smart Classrooms In order to successfully enact the kinds of complex designs required for KCI, we needed a flexible and adaptive infrastructure to support the design and orchestration of collaborative activities that include spatial, social, and semantic dependencies. To this end, we developed SAIL Smart Space (S3), an open source framework that coordinates complex pedagogical sequences, including dynamic sorting and grouping of students, and delivery of materials based on emergent semantic connections. S3 allows the physical space of classrooms or other learning environments to play a meaningful role within the learning design – either through locational mapping of pedagogical elements (e.g., where different locations are scripted to focus student interactions on different topics) or through orchestrational support (e.g., where physical elements of the space, like projected displays), help to guide or coordinate student movements, collaborations or activities. S3 was developed to add a level of intelligence to classrooms or other learning environments, including real-time data mining and computation performed by intelligent agents to support the orchestration of inquiry scripts. A key component to these agents is that although their roles are well defined within the activity (e.g., grouping students with peers they have not previously worked with), who (or what) will satisfy these conditions cannot be know a priori, rather they emerge during enactment (requiring agents to process information in real-time; Tissenbaum & Slotta, in press). In order to investigate S3 as a smart classroom infrastructure to support collaborative inquiry, three questions have driven our research: (1) How can S3 support students’ inquiry activities? (2) How effective are intelligent software agents and data mining in providing students with needed materials and enacting specific pedagogical moves? (3) How does S3 support the teacher in orchestrating class activities? Below, we discuss an implementation of S3 within a grade 11 physics classroom, highlighting specific orchestrational supports (including the design of intelligent agents), and evaluating their effectiveness for supporting classroom inquiry.