This structured review examined (academic) publications on flipped or inverted classrooms based on all Scopus database (n = 530) references available until mid-June 2016. The flipped or inverted classroom approach has gained widespread attention during the latest decade and is based on the idea of improving student learning by prepared self-studies via technology-based resources ('flips') followed by high-quality, in-class teaching and learning activities. However, only a few attempts have been made to review the knowledge of the field of interest more systematically. This article seeks to address this problem and investigates what constitutes the research on flipped classrooms and, in particular, to examine the knowledge contributions with the field so far in relation to the wider research topic of educational technology. This review found that the current state of flipped classrooms as a field of interest is growing fast, with a slight conference preference and a focus on higher education and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) area contributions, with the US as the predominant geographical context. It is concluded that studies on flipped classrooms are dominated by studies in higher education sector and are relatively local in character. The research tends not to interact beyond the two clusters of general education/educational technology and subject-specific areas. This implies that knowledge contributions related to the flipped classroom approach are relatively siloed and fragmented and have yet to stabilise. Academically and socially, the research is quite scattered, and only local evidence and experiences are available. The knowledge contributions within this field of interest seem to be anecdotal rather than systematically researched. To a large extent, the research lacks anchoring in, for example, learning theory or instructional design known from educational technology traditions and which would have helped much of the flipped classroom research to examine aspects of the flipped classroom approach more fully.
Social media are now an important aspect of the professional lives of school teachers. This paper explores the growing use of mass ‘teacher groups’ and ‘teacher communities’ on social media platforms such as Facebook. While these online communities are often welcomed as a means of professional learning and support, the paper considers the extent to which Facebook groups also expose teachers to some of the less beneficial aspects of social media, such as various forms of ‘digital labour’, commercialisation of exchanges and predominance of individualised reputation‐driven behaviours. Drawing on a detailed examination of a Swedish teacher Facebook group of over 13,000 members, the paper first addresses aspects of the online community that could be seen as professionally beneficial and/or valuable—particularly in terms of information exchange and social support. Yet while perceived by participants as a relatively beneficial and uncontroversial aspect of their working lives, the research also points to characteristics of the Facebook group that constituted disadvantaging, exploitative and/or disempowering forms of technological engagement. In these terms, the paper highlights tensions between what appears to ‘work’ for individual teachers in the short term and likely longer‐term implications that these practices might have for diminished professionalism and expertise of teachers.
With schools and universities closing across Europe, the Covid-19 lockdown left actors in the field of education battling with the unprecedented challenge of finding a meaningful way to keep the wheels of education turning online. The sudden need for digital solutions across the field of education resulted in the emergence of a variety of digital networks and collaborative online platforms. In this joint article from scholars around Europe, we explore the Covid-19 lockdowns of physical education across the European region, and the different processes of emergency digitalization that followed in their wake. Spanning perspectives from Italy, Germany, Belgium, and the Nordic countries, the article’s five cases provide a glimpse of how these processes have at the same time accelerated and consolidated the involvement of various commercial and non-commercial actors in public education infrastructures. By gathering documentation, registering dynamics, and making intimations of the crisis as it unfolded, the aim of the joint paper is to provide an opportunity for considering the implications of these accelerations and consolidations for the heterogeneous futures of European education.
In the past decade, some areas of science have begun turning to masses of online volunteers through open calls for generating and classifying very large sets of data. The purpose of this study is to investigate the epistemic culture of a large-scale online citizen science project, the Galaxy Zoo, that turns to volunteers for the classification of images of galaxies. For this task, we chose to apply the concepts of programs and antiprograms to examine the ‘essential tensions’ that arise in relation to the mobilizing values of a citizen science project and the epistemic subjects and cultures that are enacted by its volunteers. Our premise is that these tensions reveal central features of the epistemic subjects and distributed cognition of epistemic cultures in these large-scale citizen science projects.
The everyday use of smartphones with high quality built-in cameras has lead to an increase in museum visitors' use of these devices to document and share their museum experiences. In this paper, we investigate how one particular photo sharing application, Instagram, is used to communicate visitors' experiences while visiting a museum of natural history. Based on an analysis of 222 instagrams created in the museum, as well as 14 interviews with the visitors who created them, we unpack the compositional resources and concerns contributing to the creation of instagrams in this particular context. By re-categorizing and re-configuring the museum environment, instagrammers work to construct their own narratives from their visits. These findings are then used to discuss what emerging multimedia practices imply for the visitors' engagement with and documentation of museum exhibits. Drawing upon these practices, we discuss the connection between online social media dialogue and the museum site.
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