Concerning learning opportunities outside of a formal classroom setting, this paper first considers general concepts related to informal learning, and then summarizes trends in research concerning informal learning discussed in academic journals in the field of educational technology over the past ten years. The results reveal that such research has been carried out in six areas, namely: informal learning at lifelong learning facilities, informal learning related to workplaces and jobs, informal learning offered by universities on an extracurricular basis, workshops, informal learning in other areas, and developments in informal learning methodologies.

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This paper aims to suggest the direction of informal learning research using ICT in near future. In order to do that, I reviewed the previous research papers about overseas informal learning research using ICT, and introduce the findings from the results of the review. The results of review reveal the four categories of the effects of ICT use in informal learning; building of learning community, improvement of literacy, improvement of the use of learning strategies, skills and performances, and change of learning behavior. In the direction of informal learning research using ICT, the three viewpoints will be required; the bridge between formal and informal learning, the design principles of informal learning environment using ICT, and qualitative research about the role of ICT in informal learning. Informal learning research area plays an important role in clarifying the human learning system and further research is expected, considering privacy issues and daily life influences.

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This paper describes an experiment in group counseling with a robot as a facilitator, for the purpose of examining the following issues; 1) whether the group counseling sessions are effective, and 2) whether the robot can facilitate participants to actively talk on their own initiative. The authors measured the participants' self-efficacy before and after the experiment using questionnaires, and counted the number of proactive utterances of each participant during the sessions. The authors compared the experimental groups with a robot facilitator that was manipulated by professional human facilitators and the control groups led by other professional human facilitators without the robot. The result showed that the group counseling sessions with the robot facilitator worked as well as the controlled sessions with the human facilitator. In addition, the participants in the experimental sessions talked on their own initiative much more than those in the controlled sessions. Finally, the authors qualitatively examined the contents of the utterances in the experimental sessions, and revealed that those utterances in the experimental sessions made the participants join the dialogue for promoting the counseling on their own initiative. In addition, the authors discussed the possibility and necessity of improvements of the robot as a group counseling facilitator.

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Family narratives play an important role in developing young children's narrative skills. In this regard, parents should give constructive meaning to family experiences by encouraging communication within the family and explaining the meaning of events so that children can learn from them. In this study, the authors referred to the Family Narrative Consortium's indexes to design a family communication activity that aimed to improve family narratives using a digital storytelling technique. An analysis showed that it was possible to improve family narratives through this activity. Spouses in each family interacted with each other on the basis of the theme set by the family and deeply considered the meaning of "family" through active discussion. They also thought about the significance of the activity for the family and noted down in detail what they thought and felt on worksheets prepared by the author. These worksheets also had some questions on the participants' families, children, and lives.

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The authors developed "Reporeco", a system which visualizes the writing processes of students. This system was developed to help tutors grasp the writing processes of students, assuming the case of an academic writing course as an extracurricular study. "Reporeco" records the writing processes of students verbatim and visualizes them. The result of an experiment indicated that the use of "Reporeco" helped tutors grasp the writing processes of students.

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In this study, the system called "Re:" supporting collaborative review of argumentation written in Japanese are developed for high school students who are native speakers of Japanese. Three viewpoints are set for collaborative review: contents, structure, and language use. Experimental group and control group are compared before and after use of "Re:" system in the score of argumentation. Learners have diversity in their good abilities about three viewpoints in experiment group. Although, there are no diversity in control group. As a result, there is significant difference in whole score in after use condition of experiment group. Additionally, differences in whole scores in each learning group are more constant in experimental group than control group. On the other hand, there are also significant differences between two groups in some evaluation items that have deep relation about quality of facts. Therefore, suggested grouping method might guarantee constant learning effect for more distance learners.

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The Socla Project, which supports career learning of high school students, utilizes social media to connect them to college students and working adults. The participants in the project consisted of 56 high school students (28 in blended learning and 28 in online learning) who pursued their own career-related topics such as the meaning of work and the transition into college, while receiving support from college students and working adults through Facebook. This study evaluates the project on the basis of the results of a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews as well as how Facebook was applied. Although 42.9% fully online learners dropped out of the project (as opposed to the 7.1% blended online learners), the fully online learners who completed the project demonstrated higher levels of participation in and enthusiasm for the learning. In addition the questionnaire reveals that learners' anxieties regarding their careers were alleviated and their career decision-making self-efficacy was enhanced. Further, the interviews suggested that the learners' conversations with their supporters and the questionnaires distributed to the public had contributed toward their overall understanding of the career-related topics.

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In this study, we propose a new organizing principle for productive workshops. The hypothesis proposes that creative collaboration is promoted by what we call the "Analogical Jigsaw method," which is expected to combine the effects of analogy and the Jigsaw method. We conducted eight workshops for students, with two sessions on each of the following four methods: the Analogical Jigsaw method, a standard Jigsaw method, an analogical method without a Jigsaw structure, and a standard program. Analyzing the process of collaboration in each session suggested that creative collaboration is promoted in the sessions based on the Analogical Jigsaw method, and we also found that participants actively applied analogies, interpreted them from different perspectives, and used them to combine multiple ideas.

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This article reports our findings in World Museum, connecting universities/schools in many countries for creative collaboration across cultures and ages to create Scratch (Resnick, et al. 2009) animations. We propose a framework based on "constructive mindset", a generalization of "growth mindset" (Dweck 2007), as one's belief that one can construct the social/technological systems in which one is involved. Based on the framework, we analyze several cases of collaboration projects in World Museum in which hundreds of children from more than 10 countries collaborated to create large-scale animations to express themselves, their cultures and daily lives. We found that the students' passions (the extent of systems for which one has constructive mindset) expanded from products to relations with people, to meaning of the products, and to communities.

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Workshops have been recognized as one of the subjects of educational technology research. However, the evaluation of workshop practice in the domain of educational technology research has not been adequately discussed. In this study, we first considered the evaluation of workshops from an educational perspective, focusing on the relationship between workshops and learning goals. Second, we examined how learning in/on workshops can be evaluated in the field of educational technology research, with reference to the research methodologies in community planning and cognitive science. We suggested that explicit and implicit learning goals should be separated in the evaluation of workshops from an educational perspective. In addition, we pointed out the importance of "unexpected learning." Based on the methodology in community planning, we also proposed detailed descriptions of contexts of workshop practice and positions of the participants, and multi-faceted analyses. Furthermore, based on the methodology in cognitive science, we discussed multi-modal analysis.

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Role-play is a powerful learning strategy that promotes the learners to broaden their perspectives in various learning subjects - not only in humanity but also in science. In this paper, we will introduce a new possibility of puppetry as a device to facilitate the gaining of various insights into the perspectives of others in collaborative face-to-face role-play - especially for role-play in decision making in complex and ill-structured situations. Using puppetry with multiple puppets creates a psychological distance from the player's identity, allowing the players to play various roles based on their various perspectives. The case study of the puppetry role-play shows that the players can play various roles as though in a realistic situation. The possibility of puppetry as a catalyst interface for face-to-face CSCL systems is discussed.

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Children learn music mainly either in a school music room environment or, on evenings or at weekend, at music schools run by either companies or individual music teachers. This paper introduces examples of an informal approach to learning music that makes good use of information and communication technology (ICT). Specifically, (1) the paper presents articles published in piano teaching journals that refer to the use of ICT, and describes how ICT is used at the author's own music school and music education in public schools. (2) Due to the increased opportunities children have to hear music using ICT and their high level of ICT skills, their approach to music performance is in a state of constant change. It is noteworthy that this change is being driven spontaneously by children taking piano lessons at school, traditionally a conservative area. (3) Finally, the paper discusses future issues, including the background to, and requirements for, the development of informal learning in children's music study, and difficulty in certifying the skills children acquire.

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This paper reviewed previous research on the educational use of games in research approaches and evaluation methods. As a result, it is indicated that evaluation methods must be developed for the use of data collection tools and network technologies. Future directions of research in this field are also discussed.

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