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This book presents innovative instructional interventions designed to support inquiry project-based learning as an approach to equip students with 21st century skills. Instructional techniques include collaborative team-based teaching, social constructivist game design and game play, and productive uses of social media such as wikis and other online communication affordances. The book will be of interest to researchers seeking a summary of recent empirical studies in the inquiry project-based learning domain that employ new technologies as constructive media for student synthesis and creation. The book also bridges the gap between empirical works and a range of national- and international-level educational standards frameworks such as the P21, the OECD framework, AASL Standards for the 21st Century Learner, and the Common Core State Standards in the US. Of particular interest to education practitioners, the book offers detailed descriptions of inquiry project-based learning interventions that can be directly reproduced in today's schools. Further, the book provides research-driven guidelines for the evaluation of student inquiry project-based learning. Lastly, it offers education policymakers insight into establishing anchors and spaces for applying inquiry project-based learning opportunities for youth today in the context of existing and current education reform efforts. The aim of this book is to support education leaders', practitioners' and researchers' efforts in advancing inspiring and motivating student learning through transformative social constructivist inquiry-based knowledge-building with information technologies. We propose that preparing students with inquiry mindsets and dispositions can promote greater agency, critical thinking and resourcefulness, qualities needed for addressing the complex societal challenges they may face.

This book presents innovative instructional interventions designed to support inquiry project-based learning as an approach to equip students with 21st century skills. Instructional techniques include collaborative team-based teaching, social constructivist game design and game play, and productive uses of social media such as wikis and other online communication affordances. The book will be of interest to researchers seeking a summary of recent empirical studies in the inquiry project-based learning domain that employ new technologies as constructive media for student synthesis and creation. The book also bridges the gap between empirical works and a range of national- and international-level educational standards frameworks such as the P21, the OECD framework, AASL Standards for the 21st Century Learner, and the Common Core State Standards in the US. Of particular interest to education practitioners, the book offers detailed descriptions of inquiry project-based learning interventions that can be directly reproduced in today's schools. Further, the book provides research-driven guidelines for the evaluation of student inquiry project-based learning. Lastly, it offers education policymakers insight into establishing anchors and spaces for applying inquiry project-based learning opportunities for youth today in the context of existing and current education reform efforts. The aim of this book is to support education leaders', practitioners' and researchers' efforts in advancing inspiring and motivating student learning through transformative social constructivist inquiry-based knowledge-building with information technologies. We propose that preparing students with inquiry mindsets and dispositions can promote greater agency, critical thinking and resourcefulness, qualities needed for addressing the complex societal challenges they may face.

Given the limited budgets of schools, educators, and school librarians, free and open source tools for learning are more important than ever. Essentially, wikis are easily accessible webpages for creating, browsing, and searching through information, making them ideal vehicles for teaching and collaboration. In this pathbreaking collection, theoreticians and practitioners from a range of international settings explore how wikis are being used to create learning experiences in a variety of educational environments, from grade schools through universities. Offering numerous hands-on examples of using collaborative webpages with learners, this book gives teachers, educators, and instructor librariansa theoretical overview of the concept of web-based collaboration and the social implications of the participative web written by Mark Guzdial, a pioneer in using wikis in education; an understanding of how wiki-engines function as a flexible tool for collaboratively creating, linking, revising and regrouping hypertext content; pragmatic guidelines for the educational use and application of wikis, including applications as e-learning management systems, informational resource libraries, online tutorials, maker community project creation, and digital asset file management; strategies for setting up a learning unit the “Wiki Way” and choosing the most appropriate and suitable wiki-engine in a particular education setting; coverage of two different scaffolding models for learning scenarios which have been implemented and tested in the US, Germany, Hong Kong, and China.Enabling readers to see how wikis’ content and content creation processes can be harnessed for instructional design, this collection represents an important advance in improving education through collaborative technologies.