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1. SimSnap: Supporting Collaborative Learning through Reconfigurable Simulations

   Tarun, A. ; Andric, V. ; Yang, L. ; Tibu, T. ; Zaccagnini, L. ; Litong Zeng L. ; Hadinezhad, S. ; Cang, X. ; Goss, W. ; Baker, S. ; et al ( June 2022 , Computersupported collaborative learning)

   Weinberger, A. ; Chen, W. ; Hernández-Leo, D. ; & Chen, B. (Ed.)

   SimSnap responds to the need for a technology-based tool that supports learning at three social planes—individual, small group, and whole-class—while being easy to deploy with minimal technology overhead costs during their uptake. While much research has examined the efficacy of large-scale collaborative systems and individual-oriented learning systems, the intersection of and the movement between the three social planes is under explored. SimSnap is a cross-device, tablet-based platform that facilitates learning science concepts for middle school students through interactive simulations. Students in physical proximity can ‘snap’ their devices together to collaborate on learning activities. SimSnap enables real-time transition between individual and group activities in a classroom by offering reconfigurable simulations. SimSnap also provides an environment where open-ended and task-specific learning trajectories can be explored to maximize students’ learning potential. In this iteration of SimSnap, we have designed and implemented our first curriculum on SimSnap, focusing on plant biology, ecosystems, and genetics. 

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2. SOCIO-TECHNICAL LEARNING: CONTEXTUALIZING UNDERGRADUATE EXTERNSHIPS TO BRIDGE THE DIGITAL DIVIDE

   Pickering, Cynthia ; Fisher, Erik ; Ross, Paul ( July 2022 , IADIS international journal on computers science and information systems)

   This paper describes the temporal progression of human and social dimensions that undergraduate information and communications technology (ICT) students realized during an experiential learning externship where they explored digital divide technology solutions for low-income neighborhoods in the surrounding urban community. The described research represents significant adaptation and use of socio-technical integration research (STIR) with undergraduate ICT students engaged in work based experiential learning to promote equity in STEM education, instill a sense of civic responsibility, and practice approaches to tackling complex societal problems. Methods used for the research study included: STIR, semi-structured interviews, and on-site group observations. Using STIR, an embedded social scientist conducted regular one-on-one dialogs with three of four student externs, to collaboratively describe each student’s consideration of human and social dimensions as part of their technical work, explore alternative choices and their potential outcomes, and engage in reflexive learning that in some cases, influenced deliberate changes to material and behavioral practices. The on-site observation of group activities within the ICT innovation center situated in the local urban community provided additional ecosystem context during technical solution design and development of the digital divide solution for local high schools and feeder schools. Outcomes for participating undergraduate ICT students showed: 1) Technology learning improvements for all students; 2) Capacity building to reflect, anticipate and respond to socio-technical interactions for some students; and 3) Each student was able to progress to a new level of socio-technical learning and decision making. Reflexive discourse with participants surfaced cultural assets and consideration of alternative knowledges in collaborative technology design, development, and implementation that can potentially lead to solutions that are more community centered now and in the future as the ICT students transition to the workforce. 

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3. One Step at a Time: Deepening Socio-technical Learning in Undergraduate ICT Externships to Bridge the Digital Divide

   Pickering, Cynthia ; Fisher, Erik ; Ross, Paul ( January 2021 , International Conference on Internet Technologies & Society)

   This paper describes the temporal progression of human and social dimensions that undergraduate information and communications technology (ICT) students realized during an experiential learning externship where they explored digital divide technology solutions for low-income neighborhoods in the surrounding urban community. The described research represents significant adaptation and use of socio-technical integration research (STIR) with undergraduate ICT students engaged in work based experiential learning to promote equity in STEM education, instill a sense of civic responsibility, and practice approaches to tackling complex societal problems. Methods used for the research study included: STIR, semi-structured interviews, and on-site group observations. Using STIR, an embedded social scientist conducted regular one-on-one dialogs with three of four student externs, to collaboratively describe each student’s consideration of human and social dimensions as part of their technical work, explore alternative choices and their potential outcomes, and engage in reflexive learning that in some cases, influenced deliberate changes to material and behavioral practices. The on-site observation of group activities within the ICT innovation center situated in the local urban community provided additional ecosystem context during technical solution design and development of the digital divide solution for local high schools and feeder schools. Outcomes for participating undergraduate ICT students showed: 1) Technology learning improvements for all students; 2) Capacity building to reflect, anticipate and respond to socio-technical interactions for some students; and 3) Each student was able to progress to a new level of socio-technical learning and decision making. Reflexive discourse with participants surfaced cultural assets and consideration of alternative knowledges in collaborative technology design, development, and implementation that can potentially lead to solutions that are more community centered now and in the future as the ICT students transition to the workforce. 

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4. Successes and Challenges in Supporting Undergraduate Peer Educators to Notice and Respond to Equity Considerations within Design Teams

   Turpen, Chandra ; Gupta, Ayush ; Radoff, Jennifer ; Elby, Andrew ; Sabo, Hannah ; Quan, Gina ( June 2018 , ASEE annual conference & exposition proceedings)

   We describe and analyze our efforts to support Learning Assistants (LAs)—undergraduate peer educators who simultaneously take a 3-credit pedagogy course—in fostering equitable team dynamics and collaboration within a project-based engineering design course. Tonso and others have shown that (a) inequities can “live” in mundane interactions such as those among students within design teams and (b) those inequities both reflect and (re)produce broader cultural patterns and narratives (e.g. Wolfe & Powell, 2009; Tonso, 1996, 2006a, 2006b; McLoughlin, 2005). LAs could be well-positioned to notice and potentially disrupt inequitable patterns of participation within design teams. In this paper, we explore (1) How do LAs notice, diagnose, and consider responding to teamwork troubles within design teams, and (2) What ideological assumptions plausibly contribute to LAs’ sensemaking around their students’ teamwork troubles? To do so, we analyze how the LAs notice and consider responding to issues of equitable teamwork and participation, as exhibited in three related activities: (i) an in-class roleplay, (ii) observing and diagnosing teamwork troubles (TTs) in the engineering design teams, and (iii) imagining possible instructional responses to those troubles, and students’ possible reactions. We articulate three modes of thinking that roughly capture patterns in LAs’ descriptions and diagnoses of, and imagined responses to, the teamwork troubles: individual accountability, where the trouble is seen as caused by individual(s) described as “off task” or “checked out” or demonstrating some level of incompetence; delegation of work, where the trouble was located in the team leader’s inability to delegate tasks effectively to team members, or in the group’s general lack of communication about what tasks need to be completed, who should execute the tasks, and what work other groups in the team were doing; and emergent systems, where trouble was described as a group-level phenomenon emerging from the patterns of interaction amongst group members, contextual features, and larger structural forces. We find that LAs drew on individual accountability and delegation of work to evaluate TTs. Much rarer were ascriptions of TTs to interactional dynamics between teammates. We connected these modes to the underlying ideological assumptions that have consequences for how meritocracy and technocracy (Slaton, 2015; Cech, 2014) play out in an engineering design classroom and serve to ameliorate or reify engineering mindsets (Riley, 2008). The modes are asymmetric, in that emergent systems based interpretations hold more potential for elucidating ongoing social processes, for challenging meritocracy and socio-technical duality, and for seeing power differentials within interpersonal and institutional contexts. We argue for the need to better understand the ideological assumptions underlying how peer-educators—and other instructors—interpret classroom events. 

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5. Shaping the macro-ethical reasoning of engineers through deliberate cultural practices

   Radoff, J. ; Turpen, C. A. ; Tomblin, D. ; Mogul, N. F. ; Agrawal, A. ; Elby, A. ( June 2023 , Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland)

   Most engineering ethics education is segregated into particular courses that, from a student’s perspective, can feel disconnected from the technical education at the center of their programs. In part because of this disconnect, several immersive programs designed to train engineering students in socio-technical systems thinking have emerged in the U.S. in the past two decades. One pedagogical goal of these programs is to provide alternative ideologies and practices that counter dominant cultural paradigms that marginalize macroethical thinking and social justice perspectives in engineering schools. In theory, longer-term immersion in such programs can help students overcome these harmful ideologies. However, because of the difficult nature of studying cultural change, very few studies have attempted to provide a thick description of how these alternative cultural practices are influencing student perspectives on engineering practices. Our study offers a rare glimpse at student uptake of these practices in a multi-year Science, Technology, and Society (STS) living-learning program. Our study explores whether and how cultural practices within an STS program help students develop and sustain the resources for using a socio-technical systems thinking approach to engineering practice. We grounded our work in a cultural practices framework from Nasir and Kirshner [1] which roughly understands practice to be “a patterned set of actions performed by members of a group based on common purposes and expectations, with shared cultural values, tools, and meanings” ([2, p. 99] as cited in [3]). Our descriptions of collective enactments of cultural practices are grounded in accounts of classroom events from researcher fieldnotes and reflections in student interviews. Looking across the enactment of practices in classrooms and students’ interpretations of these events in interviews allows us to describe the multiplicity of meanings that students distill from these activities. This paper will present on multiple cultural practices salient to students we have identified in this STS community, for example: cultivating an ethics of care, making the invisible visible, understanding systems from multiple perspectives, and empowering students to develop moral stances as citizens and scientists/engineers in society. Because of the complexity of the interplay between the scaffolding of the STS program’s pedagogy and the emergence of these four themes, we chose to center “cultivating an ethics of care” in this analysis and relationally explore the other three themes through it. Ethics of care manifests in two basic ways in the data. Students talk about how an ethics of care is part of the STS program community and how the STS program fosters the need for an ethics of care toward communities outside the classroom through human-centered engineering design. 

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