Connected Learning Summit 2019

It’s About Relationships: Examining Facilitation as a Relational Practice                                          
Ricarose Roque, Kristina Stamatis
In this paper, we focus on the experiences of facilitators in informal settings designed to engage families in creative computing, or making, designing, and tinkering with computing. Facilitators can play important roles in developing welcoming spaces that enable youth to create and to learn computational literacy skills; however, research is still needed to examine the practices that facilitators use to engage with families in these activities. In this study, we highlight the ways that new facilitators came to take on the role of facilitators and focus specifically on the role of relationship building in their development and practices as facilitators. We worked with nine facilitators during five intergenerational computing workshops to examine the practices they used to develop relationships with participants and the ways they interpreted and reflected upon these relationships to deepen their development as facilitators. Our findings indicate that facilitators and families in these workshops built relationships by leveraging common language and learning practices, sharing family stories, and utilizing space to influence interactions. Additionally, as facilitators recognized and reflected on these relationships, they also reported growing in their understanding of facilitation.

Creative Production With Tablet Applications for Learning Digital, Social and Interpersonal Skills in the Primary Level Classroom                                                                                                                    Velislava Hillman
This paper looks at primary school curriculum for information and communication technologies (ICT) and the digital skills taught and practiced by students in these lessons in comparison to their practices and experiences outside school. Discrepancies between what children make with digital tools outside school and during ICT lessons are identified and used to design and test a model that enables digital, social and interpersonal skills learning and practice. This paper presents the tested model as a way to transform primary school ICT curriculum and pave the way for contextual digital, social and interpersonal skills practice and acquisition.

The skills children need to acquire today to ensure future job security are evolving from 'perennial' ones to ‘contextual’ (Dede, 2009). The ability to collaborate with people from various backgrounds is of growing importance in information-based economies where work is no longer a solitary experience as in the past (Karoly & Panis, 2004). Classrooms should provide opportunities for group collaboration, contextual digital skills learning and practice. This research demonstrates the objective to use primary level ICT lessons as a platform where children can practice and learn such skills.

Beyond Coding: Youth Creativity, Literacies, and Social Engagement in a Computer Programming Club                                                                                                                                                     Earl Aguilera
As momentum builds around computer programming clubs and broader movements promoting “computer science (CS) for all,” less work has explored the many other ways that young people are developing and demonstrating creative, multimodal literacy practices, as well as social engagement in these CS-focused spaces. The purpose of this paper is to share insights into these issues, based on a study of one such “code club” situated in a public library in the Southwestern United States. Specifically, this paper presents an analysis of data collected over the course of a 10-week summer session of the code club (June 2017 - August 2017). A total of 47 students aged 8-14 participated, which met twice a week with a library facilitator. As part of the study, I collected observational, artefactual, and audio-recorded data from each session, and engaged in first and second cycle qualitative coding (Saldana, 2015) to identify the ways in which students drew on multimodal literacy practices as they navigated, interpreted, interrogated, and designed their learning experiences across virtual and face-to-face contexts (Serafini, 2012). Findings from this study suggest that a wide variety of creative practices can be observed while students engage with digital content, procedural literacies, social contexts ‘beyond the screen.’ This paper contributes to the work of Connected Learning by providing additional evidence into the diverse and multidimensional learning practices that can occur within code clubs and similar environments, as well as the ways that teachers, parents, librarians, and other adults can support students engaging in these practices.