EXP: Digital Lofts: Online Learning Environments for Real-World Innovation

在这个网络学习：教育转型实验项目中，研究人员专注于培养未来的公民创新者。要成为公民创新者，学习者必须获得处理复杂、结构不良的设计挑战的经验，这些挑战不容易由一个人在固定的时间内解决。这样的教育是具有挑战性的，这些研究人员利用Web 2.0、众包、徽章和社交媒体来设计支持年轻工程师在解决公民问题时学习的方法。从设计和复杂问题解决活动中支持学习，包括为成功解决问题和实现目标提供支持，以及为反思这些经验以掌握协作和沟通技巧并开始学习创新的战略和战术提供支持。为此目的而设计的数字阁楼包括识别可能在新问题上合作的同行专家的设施，分配专业徽章以方便识别潜在的专家，从设计和解决问题的案例中提取关键设计原则，并在案例库中进行说明和索引，作为资源提供给参与者，帮助他们确定何时需要指导。并提供找到合适的导师提供必要帮助的方法。研究重点是识别人机学习生态系统的重要特征，这些特征促进了基础设施的成功设计和问题解决、成功学习、成功创新和可持续性。该研究将为设计公民创新教育的数字阁楼提供基于经验的原则，并促进对数字徽章、众包、案例学习、设计实践和社交网络在促进创新学习方面所起作用的理解。研究和开发是在“美国设计”（Design for America）的背景下进行的，这是一个多所大学合作的项目，旨在促进工程专业本科生的公民创新。我们迫切需要培养能够解决我们最大的社会挑战的公民创新者。这个项目探索了数字阁楼支持这种教育的可行性。在这样的学习环境中，本科阶段的工程专业学生与当地学生和其他地区正在解决自己社区问题的参与者一起参与解决社区问题。软件工具支持学生工程师之间的各种互动，这些互动是促进成功和学习所必需的，并且可以创建共享资源，使参与者能够建立社区知识，从而帮助他们成为更好的创新者。研究解决了几个软件功能的设计和集成问题，以成功地促进创新教育。

In this Cyberlearning: Transforming Education EXP project, researchers focus on developing the civic innovators of the future. To become civic innovators, learners must gain experience tackling complex, ill-structures design challenges that are not easily solved by a single individual within a fixed time frame. Such education is challenging, and these researchers take advantage of Web 2.0, crowdsourcing, badges, and social media to design means of supporting the learning of young engineers as they tackle civic problems. Supporting learning from design and complex problem solving activities includes providing support for successfully solving problems and achieving goals as well as providing support for reflecting on those experiences to grasp the collaboration and communication skills and begin to learn strategies and tactics for innovating. The Digital Loft being designed for this purpose includes facilities for identifying peer experts who might collaborate on new problems, assigning expertise badges to make it easy to identify potential experts, extracting key design principles from design and problem solving cases and illustrating and indexing them in a case library that is made available as a resource, helping participants identify when they need instruction, and providing means of finding appropriate mentors to provide necessary help. Research focuses on the identifying important characteristics of the human-machine learning ecosystem that promote successful design and problem solving, successful learning, successful innovation, and sustainability of the infrastructure. The research will produce empirically-grounded principles for designing Digital Lofts for civic innovation education and advance understanding of the roles that digital badges, crowd-sourcing, learning by cases, design practice, and social networking can play in promoting innovation learning. Research and development is being done in the context of Design for America, a multi-university collaborative focused on promoting civic innovation among undergraduate engineering students.There is an urgent need for educating civic innovators who can solve our greatest societal challenges. This project explores the feasibility of a Digital Loft for supporting such education. In such a learning environment, engineering students at the undergraduate level participate in addressing community issues together with both local students and participants in other locations who are solving problems in their own communities. Software tools support the kinds of interactions between student engineers that are needed to promote success and learning and the creation of shared resources that will allow participants to build community knowledge that will help them become better innovators. Research addresses issues in the design and integration of several software functions for successfully promoting innovation education.