The first activity of the Kaleidoscope/EARLI SIG was the Inquiry Learning Workshop "Inquiry learning, building bridges to practice" on May, 29-31, 2006, hosted by the University of Twente.

At the end of May approximately seventy people, representing 14 different nationalities, gathered at the Campus of the University of Twente for the 2nd European workshop on Computer Supported Inquiry Learning. The workshop was organised by the Kaleidoscope/EARLI SIG Computer Supported Inquiry Learning in cooperation with the ReCoil eLearning project and the Kaleidoscope Advanced Training Institute .

The theme of the second Inquiry Learning Workshop was "Inquiry learning, building bridges to practice". This theme highlights the importance of bridging the gap between research on inquiry learning, the development of new and exciting inquiry learning environments, and everyday classroom practice. Inquiry learning provides students with the opportunity to develop understanding through proposing questions and ideas, and experimentation. This approach allows students to improve their domain understanding as well as their inquiry skills. Despite these promising prospects, inquiry learning has not found its way to the everyday practice in classrooms. During the workshop researchers, instructional designers, policymakers, people from educational support centers as well as active teachers explored a wide variety of inquiry learning materials and discussed ways bring experimental learning environments to the actual classroom.

The workshop consisted of diverse activities spanning many topics relevant to the important theme of building bridges to practice. Participants attended key note lectures, interactive sessions, a demo market, and a panel discussion. All of which linked inquiry learning through and within: (a) various disciplines, i.e. the natural and computer sciences and history; (b) various educational levels (primary, secondary & higher education), and (c) various kinds of technology, i.e. mobile technology, systems allowing smooth transition between every day life objects and technology, typical laboratory experiments with technological devices, etc.

The three key note speakers presented the success stories of three different computer based inquiry learning environments. Doris Jorde, Jorde from the University of Oslo presented the Viten project, Jim Slotta from the University of Toronto presented the Web-based Inquiry Science Environment, and Paul Horwitz from the Concord Consortium demonstrated how teachers and pupils worked with the Modelling Across the Curriculum materials. The speakers focused on the core ideas of the environments, and the current use of the presented inquiry learning environment in the classroom.

A number of 21 participants shared their own experiences with bringing inquiry learning to the classroom in an interactive session. The interactive sessions turned out to be a fruitful format that allowed the audience to join the discussion after a short presentation or hands-on experience. More hands-on experiences were provided in the demo-market
and the workshops. Participants were invited to actually use the learning environments and engage in (collaborative) learning activities. Participants could, amongst many other activities try to build a model using the CoolModes software, explore the life of flamingos in salt lakes with the help of scaffolds in the Stochasmos environment, play Mendel and breed different types of dragons with Genscope, explore the life of sea mammals and see how they adapt to underwater life, or make a virtual tour in the Estonian forests with the Hiking across Estonia software. Two projects used mobile devices to bring real data into the inquiry software. Carlos Celorrio and Marta Millán of the ENLACE project invited participants to take measurements of shadows around the campus, using a datalogger. This collected information was later used for knowledge construction activities like trigonometric calculations. Alex Verkade from De Praktijk, had participants design biological experiments with sound, humidity, and temperature measurements they could collect with a datalogger at the workshop venue. The collected data was later presented in graphs and analyzed by the participants.
The panel discussion with educational policy makers, a representative of the Dutch educational inspectorate, and representatives of teachers' education centers, discussed how to integrate inquiry learning activities in the current educational systems. The panel discussed a variety of constraining conditions like official curricula, dominant assessment methods, school infrastructure, lack of appropriate teachers' education, lack of enough robust teaching material and methods, and expressed a few ideas on how to overcome some of the listed constraints.

Issues that were addressed during the large number of discussions that took place throughout the three days of the workshop included; how to facilitate collaborative inquiry learning, ways to assess inquiry and modeling skills, the role of assessment, tools to support students, tools to support teachers, teachers strategies, the role of teacher training institutes, and curriculum issues. Al issues were related to the way in which they affect the implementation of inquiry learning. One particularly important theme crosscutting many of the discussions, activities, and sessions was if and how to support teachers and school units through pedagogical or technical services in their use and implementation of inquiry learning environments. The participants also discussed the promising idea to integrate existing approaches toward computer supported (collaborative) inquiry learning

Information on the program as well as interesting material and presentations can be found at the workshop web site: http://kaleidoscope.gw.utwente.nl/WS-IL