Archive of SILC Activities 2009-2010

Classes / Conferences / Meetings / Workshops

• ♦Spring 2009, SILC Co-Sponsored the Spatial Training Conference in Evanston, IL
• ♦Summer 2009, follow-up to the International Workshop of Spatial Cognition and Learning, held in New York City
• ♦Fall 2009, SILC was represented on the organizing committee of the 4th International Conference on Spatial Cognition (ICSC 2009) Rome, Italy
• ♦Kathy Hirsh-Pasek is spearheading The Ultimate Block Party, which is anticipated to have from 25 to 50 thousand participants ages 0 to 10 and outreach to literally millions including low and middle to high socio-economic status families. She will also be launching the web portal LEARN at the Ultimate Block Party which is a web e-zine designed to present the latest scientific findings to audiences of families, educators and policy makers in digestible and usable formats.

Talks & Lecture Series

• ♦Fall 2009, Forbus presented colloquium on Cog Sketch at Temple University, PA
• ♦University of Chicago hosts a weekly year long Developmental Brown Bag Seminar. During Fall 2009 and Winter 2010, several speakers were co-sponsored by both Developmental Psychology and SILC:
• 10/12/2009: Claire Vallotton, Michigan State University
• 10/19/2009: Mike Stieff, University of Maryland
• 11/23/2009: David Barner, University of California at San Diego
• 02/15/2010: Sue Hespos, Northwestern University
• ♦Several speakers have presented at Northwestern's Speaker Series:
• 04/15/2009: Anjan Chaterjee, University of Pennsylvania
• 07/17/2009: Banchi Dessalegn, University of Chicago
• 11/19/2009: Jennifer Cromley, Temple University
• 12/09/2009: Shannon Pruden, University of Chicago
• 04/16/2010: Mike Frank, MIT
• 05/11/2010: Kim Kastens, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University
• ♦Speakers for the series at Temple include:
• Spring 2009: Nina Simms, Graduate Student, Northwestern University
• Spring 2009: Phil Gersmehl, Ph.D., Hunter College
• Spring 2009: Ramon Lopez, Ph.D., University of Texas Arlington
• Spring 2009: Lynn Nadel, Ph.D., University of Arizona
• Spring 2009: Dawn Blasko, Ph.D. and Kathy Holliday-Darr, Penn State University
• Summer 2009: Jennifer Sutton, Western Ontario
• Summer 2009: Anna Papafragou, University of Delaware
• Summer 2009: Madeleine Keehner, University of Dundee
• Fall 2009: Ken Forbus, Northwestern University
• 09/25/2009: Aude Oliva, Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, MIT
  Co-sponsored by University of Pennsylvania Institute for Research in Cognitive Science
• 12/04/2009: Philip Kellman, Department of Psychology, UCLA
  Co-sponsored by University of Pennsylvania Institute for Research in Cognitive Science
• 01/29/2010: Alinda Friedman, Department of Psychology, University of Alberta
  Co-sponsored by University of Pennsylvania Institute for Research in Cognitive Science
• 02/12/2010: David Kemmerer, Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University
  Co-sponsored by University of Pennsylvania Institute for Research in Cognitive Science
• Spring 2010: Chris Weidemann, University of Pennsylvania
• Spring 2010: Kim Kastens, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University
• Spring 2010: Frank Durgin, Swarthmore College
• Spring 2010: Almut Hupbach, Lehigh University
• Spring 2010: Ken Coventry, Northumbria University
• ♦In the Fall of 2009, researchers at Temple University, led by Nora Newcombe, came together to form the Temple Institute for Learning and Education Sciences (TILES), which is a Provost’s Committee on establishing the learning sciences at Temple University. The goal of TILES is to bring together researchers in the Learning Sciences (LS) across colleges at Temple to ultimately achieve one or more of several things, for example: Constitute a research institute through which grants could be filed, overhead returned, and seed money dispensed; Constitute a base for a training grant; Offer degrees such as PhDs, Graduate certificates or specializations or Undergraduate degrees or certificates
• ♦To jumpstart the institute, a number of outside guest speakers were scheduled over the fall and winter of 2009 and 2010. Faculty, postdocs, graduate students and undergraduate students (including SILC) from across Temple University came to listen to the following speakers:
  
  • 10/1/2009: John Bruer, James S. McDonnell Foundation
  • 10/29/2009: Ken Koedinger, Carnegie-Mellon University
  • 1/28/2010: Talk by Dan Schwartz, Stanford
  • 2/28/2010: Joshua Aronson, New York University
• ♦In Fall 2009, Susan Levine and Susan Goldin-Meadow were invited as featured speakers during professional development activities at the University of Chicago Laboratory School.
• ♦In March 2010, Susan Levine and Sian Beilock have been invited to St. Joseph High School to discuss their findings on math anxiety and review the programs the school already has in place to address these issues.
• ♦Tim Shipley gave a keynote talk on spatial learning to the Madison structural geology and tectonics forum (2010).
• ♦Nora Newcombe, as part of SILC’s outreach effort, was invited to speak at the Radcliffe Institute Conference on Gender and Space in April, 2010.
• ♦Nora Newcombe has been invited to participate in an NSF-funded workshop to be held in France in June 2010, entitled “Studying Visual and Spatial Reasoning for Design Creativity, Design Science, Computer Science, Cognitive Science and Neuroscience Approaches: The State of the Art.” The aim of this workshop is to bring together leading international researchers into visual and spatial reasoning from the four areas of design science, computer science, cognitive science and neuroscience.
• ♦Dedre Gentner gave the keynote speech, Analogical Learning, at the European Science Education Research Association in Istanbul, Turkey, August 2009.