In the end of may, I participated in the  workshop “Inquiry Learning, building bridges to practice”, organized together by the Kaleidoscope project and new EARLI Inquiry Learning SIG. See the workshop website: http://kaleidoscope.gw.utwente.nl/WS-IL/. From KP-Lab members also Gijsbert Erkens was there :-). Most of the participants in the workshop represented a little bit different approach to inquiry practices than in KP-Lab, such as developing science teaching curriculum; teaching experimental research methods of natural sciences in schools; and developing content-specific learning materials, especially simulations etc.

One interesting lecture in the workshop was Jim Slotta’s key note presentation. Jim Slotta has been one of the key persons in the WISE program (http://wise.berkeley.edu) but he has now moved to the University of Toronto and probably starts collaborating with Marlene Scardamalia. In his presentation, Slotta raised up some future trends (based on the lessons learned from WISE) for the research and development work. They were pretty much the same as we are examining in  KP-Lab: Interoperable and reusable tools and learning objects, open source approach, and tools and scaffolds for communities of learners and more open inquiry. See the slides of his presentation: http://kaleidoscope.gw.utwente.nl/WS-IL/PDF%202006%20WS-IL/Slotta.PDF

Regards, Minna

KP-Lab has started well its five-year work: the kick-off meeting was inspiring and the work for co-evolution in design teams seemed to motivate for all participants. It helped to encounter the different worlds of technical and pedagogical partners.

Now we have faced the daily work, and the common activities have concentrated in writing and reflecting scenarios. Co-evolution WP and Theoretical foundations WP have been active in this discussion, and some fruitful (hopefully…) differences in the design approaches have raised up. I think that one of the challenges for creative development is how we manage to use the existing different opinions for collaborative work. It is much easier to play with those who think in the same way...

Co-evolution WP meeting in Linz will be important in this respect; we are in a good start but the scenarios are just tools, not an aim.

I’m happy to open our blog. I see the role of blog as a way of creating informal community of KP-Labers. This is for wondering, sharing and inspiring. Use this possibility!

Liisa