[DANCE] First DANCE online meeting in January 2015

[Oliver Ferschke]

Greetings,

and welcome to the first DANCE newsletter. We are very pleased that so many have shown interest in our working group on “Discussion Affordances for Natural Collaborative Exchange”. So far, we are counting over 25 registrations from eight countries with representatives from academia, industry and government. Like the topic itself, this group is highly interdisciplinary with backgrounds in computer science, linguistics, psychology, learning sciences, engineering and others. We are excited about this diversity and are looking forward to considering the broad range of ideas that will emerge from this group.

With this effort, we are seeking to build a common vision to enhance instructionally beneficial discussion opportunities available to students in massive open online courses. We will initially focus on the edX platform and partner with edX as a satellite group, but in the long run we seek to provide these capabilities to other online learning platforms more generally. Our vision includes text, speech, and video based interactions, instrumented with all sorts of intelligent support powered by state-of-the-art analytics and leveraging language technologies and artificial intelligence more broadly in order to offer contextually appropriate support.

To get things started, we want to kick off this working group in the second half of January with a virtual meeting on Google Hangouts. In this meeting, we will introduce ourselves and our interests, identify opportunities for collaboration and (most importantly) form some coordination plans for moving forward productively with our vision. If you are not sure yet if this group is right for you, this meeting is the best way to find out.

With so many time zones represented in this group, it won’t be easy to find a time that suits everybody. We decided to do a two-step poll to find the best time for a meeting. In the first doodle, you will only select the time during a typical week that is most likely available for a meeting. This poll does not yet identify the actual day of the meeting. Please participate in this doodle in the course of this week until Sunday, Dec 21. 
We will send out a second doodle in early January with a small number of candidate time slots, where you can select your choice for the actual day and time of the meeting.

Here is the link to the first of two doodles:
https://doodle.com/e5hhti4hzeu735tu

We are looking forward to meeting you in this first DANCE hangout and are excited to move forward with our vision to improve social learning through discussion.

Best wishes and happy holidays,

Oliver Ferschke and Carolyn Rose