Metafora · Learning to learn together: A visual language for social orchestration of educational activities

Current pedagogy increasingly fails to engage young people with the study of Science and Math (S&M) in a way that threatens the future of Europe. Without basic S&M knowledge it is not possible to understand many of the important issues that confront us, such as global warming or genetic modification. A general lack of S&M literacy makes the ideal of Europe as a participatory democracy an unattainable goal, and means that the new products required for thriving in a global knowledge economy will not be developed. To address this problem, this project proposes to explore the potential of social learning for S&M by providing a visual language to support online groups in designing their own learning together. To gain deep knowledge of any specific domain learners need to integrate learning experiences with shared reflection through dialogue, in a way that builds conceptual understanding cumulatively. To this end, the objectives of the proposed project are: to further our understanding of meta-learning within collaborative communities engaged in S&M learning; to design a visual language to support students' reflection on their individual and collaborative learning; to implement a platform integrating state-of-the-art argumentation tools with exploratory environments; to develop an adaptive diagnostic system utilizing AI techniques to support students and teachers during the collaboration and learning to learn process; to develop appropriate pedagogies to inform the design of the technical system; and to design new forms of assessment of the individual and collaborating learning exploiting the diagnostic system. Seven partners from 5 countries compose the consortium. Besides the technical development of the system, in its 3-year life the project will address the underlying pedagogical theory and extensive experimentation in classroom (ages 12-16) in the partners' countries. Extensive dissemination and exploitation-planning actions are foreseen as well.