Social Sciences
METAFORA - Learning to learn together: A visual language for social orchestration of educational activities.
1 July 2010 - 30 June 2013
PI/s in Exeter: Professor Rupert Wegerif
CI/s in Exeter: Dr Judith Kleine-Staarman, Dr Nasser Mansour Dr Ben Williamson Dr Yang Yang
Research partners: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel); The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece); the Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (Germany); Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz - DFKI (Germany); Institute of Education, University of London (United Kingdom); Testaluna - SRL (Italy).
Funding awarded: £ 221,571 (total funding of £ 1,600,000)
Sponsor(s): European Commission FP7
About the research
Metafora project proposes to explore the potential of social learning for Science and Mathematics 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 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 in the partners' countries. Broad dissemination and exploitation-planning actions are foreseen as well.
Outputs are disseminated through the Metafora Project website.
