E-science, E-research and E-learning:
New Perspectives for Graduate Studies
The quality of education for doctoral students is closely linked to the quality of the research they undertake. Benefiting from technological advances, new distributed and collaborative research practices can be witnessed. The concept of e-science has emerged and evolved to the concept of e-research. These concepts bring about a new research philosophy and the notion of collaboratory. Our research project aims to develop a renewed doctoral training approach and to facilitate researchers' adoptio
Multicultural Classroom - The Potential of ICT for Intercultural Integration of Children in Primary
Migration is a worldwide phenomenon these days. Thus schools and in particular primary schools have to face the challenge of multicultural classrooms. Information and communication technologies can support the integration process of those children, as they can contribute to the main issues of intercultural integration.
Remote engineering implies a new strategy of assessment?
When we spoken about remote engineering as a new methodology used in the cyberspace with the final goal of the teaching/learning improvement and cost sharing, we are obliged to approach all of the process sides. Assessment is one of these sides and there is considered the most powerful tool for illustration, in the qualitative and quantitative ways, the learners responds at educational objectives offered by the remote engineering learning environment. In the present paper the authors have the in
The Use of Multiple Student Modeling to Parameterize Group Learning
Recent criticism of ITS research for neglecting social aspects of learning is constructively answered by a practical attempt to extrapolate student modeling and intelligent learning support to group situations. The central focus is on using individually assessed student models to anticipate and parameterize group learning situations. This requires the integration of knowledge from individual models. Aspects of system architecture and dialogue design are discussedbased on an example of a replicat
Graphical Jogthrough: expert based methodology for user interface evaluation, applied in the cas
Walkthrough and Jogthrough techniques are well known expert based methodologies for the evaluation of user interface design. In this paper we describe the use of Graphical Jogthrough method for evaluating the interface design of the Network Simulator, an educational simulation program that enables users to virtually build a computer network, install hardware and software components, make the necessary settings and test the functionality of the network. Graphical Jogthrough is a furth
Designing and evaluating collaboration in a virtual game environment for vocational learning
Especially in vocational education, attention should be paid not only to the use of new technological solutions but also to collaborative learning and cooperative working methods in order to develop students skills for their future jobs. This study involves a design experiment including the design process of a new game environment, description of the script developed for this game, as well as the empirical study with multiple data collection methods, data analysis, results and conclusions for
Cowos: A Model of Collective Work Situations to Support Modelling and Simulation Based Approaches of
This paper describes an operational model of collective work situations. This model is rooted in the CHAT theory. It allows creating multi-agent simulations where the agents behaviour is defined in terms that make salient organization issues, and allows building learning situations that focus on making students consider explicitly these issues.
Structural Awareness for Collaborative Learning Environments
In this paper we propose a peer-to-peer support approach that we call structural awareness support. The structural awareness aims to support the communication that takes place in virtual learning communities. Its emphasis is on revealing the group structure to its participants in order to promote collaborative interactions. This support has been implemented on a forum type tool called Mailgroup. It has been tested twice in different contexts, obtaining initial feedback of its pertinence accordin
PRAXIS - Pervasive Rehabilitation of Aphasia with an eXtensible Interactive System
This thesis describes computer-assisted (CA) methods for the treatment of acquired language impairment in adult aphasics. A key design objective of this project was the elimination of the indirect manipulation of keyboard and mouse (in CA speech language therapy sessions) in favour of the direct manipulation of virtual and physical objects afforded by touchscreen display and radio frequency identification technology (RFID).
While computer-assisted treatment of aphasia has been used since the 196
Providing Efficient Event Information Management to CSCL Applications
This work aims to explore the importance of carrying out an efficient management of the event information generated from CSCL applications during the collaborative learning process. The achievement of this task first involves the design of a conceptual model of collaborative learning interaction that captures and distinguishes several high-level collaborative learning processes, which in turns leads to a computational model. To achieve that, we first define the main types of event information ge
Regulative support during inquiry learning with
simulations and modeling
Many factors impact learning; the environment and resources available, the domain, how much prior-knowledge a student has, and how well they make use of their metacognitive skills, all of these factors impact new knowledge creation. The series of studies described in this dissertation focuses on the latter; i.e. the metacognitive skillfulness of students. Known collectively as self-regulation, planning, monitoring, and evaluation, when applied appropriately will enhance learning. Students who m
Collaborative distributed environments for learning design tasks by means of modelling and simulatio
The Simulation discipline has to face new challenges such as the incorporation of Collaborative Technologies for professional use as well as for teaching purposes. This integration permits the creation of new kinds of support for collaborative learning processes. In this paper, we explore the potential of this synergy with DomoSim-TPC, a synchronous distributed collaborative environment for the teaching and learning of Domotics. The system supports an active, simulation-based and problem-based a
Towards a Generic Platform for Developing CSCL Applications Using Grid Infrastructure
The goal of this paper is to explore the possibility of using CSCL component-based software under a Grid infrastructure. The merge of these technologies represents an attractive, but probably quite laborious enterprise if we consider not only the benefits but also the barriers that we have to overcome. This work presents an attempt toward this direction by developing a generic platform of CSCL components and discussing the advantages that we could obtain if we adapted it to the Grid. We then pro
A Parallel Grid-based Implementation for Real Time Processing of Event Log Data in Collaborative App
Collaborative applications usually register user interaction in the form of semi-structured plain text event log data. Extracting and structuring this data is a prerequisite for later key processes such as the analysis of interactions, assessment of group activity, or the provision of awareness and feedback. Yet, in real situations of online collaborative activity the processing of log data is usually done offline since structuring event log data is, in general, a computationally costly process
A Model for the Efficient Representation and Management of Online Collaborative Learning Interaction
This study aims to explore the importance of the efficient representation and management of the event information generated from group activity in online collaborative learning practices so that we can use it to provide awareness about individual and group behaviour. The achievement of this goal first involves the design of a conceptual model of collaborative learning interaction that structures and classifies the information generated in an online collaborative learning situation at several lev
Supporting Effective and Useful Web-based Distance Learning
Learners interacting in a Web-based distance learning environment produce a variety of information elements during their participation; these information elements usually have a complex structure and semantics, which makes it rather difficult to find out the behavioral attitudes and profiles of the users involved. User modelling in on-line distance learning is an important research field focusing on two important aspects: describing and predicting students actions and intentions as well as ada
Gridifying IBM's Generic Log Adapter to Speed-Up the Processing of Log Data
Problem determination in today's computing environments consumes between 30 and 70% of an organizations IT resources and represents from one third to one half of their total cost of ownership. The first step to cutting down costs in this area and to enable autonomic computing systems is to have all parts of the system report status in a common log data format and semantics in order to be able to exploit the status information of the system as a whole. The Generic Log Adapter (GLA) is a generic
Exploring Semantic Description and
Matching Technologies for Enhancing the
Automatic Composition of
In the implementation of e-learning frameworks, a problem still unsolved is how to use and integrate low-level learning services to compose more complex high-level services or tools that make sense to both tutors and learners. In that sense semantic description of Grid learning Services appears like a powerful tool to be used for discovering and matching learning services depending of a set of parameters inside the learning framework. These parameters must represent significant functional charac
Efficient Embedding of Information and Knowledge into CSCL Applications
This study aims to explore two crucial aspects of collaborative work
and learning: the importance of enabling CSCL applications, on the one hand,
to capture and structure the information generated by group activity and, on the
other hand, to extract the relevant knowledge in order to provide learners and
tutors with efficient awareness and support as regards collaboration. To this
end, we first identify and define the main types of information generated in online
group activity and then propose
Towards automatic glossarization: automatically constructing and administering vocabulary assistance
We address an important problem with a novel approach: helping children learn words during computer-assisted oral reading. We build on Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor, which is a computer program that adapts automatic speech recognition to listen to children read aloud, and helps them learn to read (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~listen). In this paper, we focus on the problem of vocabulary acquisition. To learn a word from reading with the Reading Tutor, students must first encounter the word and then l
