Editorial - Crafting Learning in Context

or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than IFETS must be honoured. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from the editors at [email protected]. The theme of the conference was " Crafting Learning in Context " which focuses on the crafting of learning experiences enabled or mediated by technology that enacts authentic contexts for the learning and doing to take place. Various theoretical frameworks for learning have posited that learning happening in contexts such as those embodying problem-based, scenario-based, cognitive, meta-cognitive, social, linguistic, cultural, artefact, and authentic task elements, is most likely to lead to transfer, being, doing, application and adaptation to new situations. The challenge for the designers of learning environments is to conceive and use technology as providing or simulating the richness and authenticity of real-life contexts. An important strand in this direction is the creation or manipulation of concrete artefacts by the learners, making the learning experience motivating, engaged and immersive. The word " crafting " connotes the need to carefully design the tasks, activities and processes enabled by technology, so that learning is most likely to emerge from the interaction between the learner(s) and the environment. We need skill and dexterity in creating learning scenarios using advanced technologies such as those which are presented in this issue. We also need to design new technologies with affordances which support new kinds of contextualized learning activities and experiences. In the area of concretizing learning, we have 2 papers. Sempere (this issue) presents the design of CTRL_Space, a software environment with companion hardware, which helps pre-literate children to learn basic computational concepts using an animatronic face. Lyons, Kluender & Tetsutani (this issue) presents a system for the real-time visual display of affective signals which help learners to estimate one another's level of arousal, stress, or boredom. There are 5 papers in the area of learning design that respects the context in which learning is happening, or tries to provide an effective context for learning. Two such papers that tries to personalize the learning based on the context, relate …