La sélection collaborative de pages Web pertinentes
A l'aide d'une étude expérimentale, nous avons testé les impacts d'un dispositif informatique simple pouvant aider à la recherche collaborative de pages Web pertinente chez les étudiants. Dans l'une des conditions expérimentales, les membres d'un même groupe d'étudiants pouvaient avoir des indications quant aux pages Web déjà visitées par les autres membres de leur groupe. Plusieurs indicateurs comportementaux et de performances des utilisateurs (nombre de pages consultées, temps pou
Hitler and the Third Reich
This is a module framework. It can be viewed online or downloaded as a zip file.
As taught in Spring Semester 2010.
The Third Reich is one of the most notorious, discussed and horrific periods of our age and although it is also very well researched, still raises many questions: How could a man like Hitler gain so much power? How could a whole nation ‘fall’ for the Nazi ideology? Why the Jews ..?
In this module we will aim to deal with these and other questions about the time between 1933
Knowledge convergence in collaborative learning: Concepts and assessment
In collaborative learning the question has been raised as to how learners in small groups influence one another and converge or diverge with respect to knowledge. This article conceptualizes knowledge convergence and further provides measures for its assessment prior to, during, and subsequent to collaborative learning. In an exemplary study in the field of computer-supported collaborative learning with forty-eight (48) locally distant participants in 16 groups of three, we apply these measures
Computer-Supported Collaborative Video Analysis
Video can serve as a powerful medium for analyzing interactions involved in learning activities, for capturing records of teaching for uses in professional development, and for learners to construct or interact with videos expressively, but there have been many barriers to its collaborative uses. The DIVER Project is tackling core problems in advancing computer-supported collaborative video analysis. DIVER establishes a unique video platform for users to control a “virtual camera window” on
CML - The ClassSync Modeling Language.
The ClassSync Modeling Language (CML) addresses the problem of creating a controlling overlay to classroom learning activities, or e-leaming workflows. Our aim is to allow authors and teachers to generate a mapping from activity design to its implementation in a wirelessly networked classroom with ubiquitous use of handheld computers for information exchange. CML models e-learning workflows with three major components: actors, data objects, and interaction networks. Actors are the diverse perfon
Reactive Learning Objects for Distributed e-Learning Environments
We present a concept of reactive learning objects that goes away from the hydraulic view of e-learning and gives to students activity a central place. First experimentations suggest that this concept should be enlarged to include distributed computation, distributed storage and Web services.
Towards a Generic Service Oriented Framework for Integrated User Management of Virtual Communities
A central Service layer for the European eLearning Grid Infrastructure (ELeGI) is the one for the management of members and the provision of collaborational services (Virtual Community Services).
Because it is a lot of effort to totally newly (re-)write the collaboration services like e.g. a videoconferencing service, it is much more desirable to take existing applications and just to wrap them with a Web Service interface to programmatically access the existing functionality relevant to user m
The impact of simulator-based instruction on the diagramming of the interaction of light and matter
We examine the conceptual development resulting from an instructional experiment with an interactive learning environment in geometrical optics for introductory high school physics. How did teaching-learning processes come to change the ways in which students depicted various everyday optical situations in paper and pencil graphical representations? We view conceptual development as a process resulting in part from increasingly aligning one's practices to a target community by means of participa
Learning Scientific Concepts Through Material and Social Activities: Conversational Analysis Meets C
The number of analyses of cognitive activity situated in a material and social world has increased. It has been particularly challenging to the theoretician and researcher to make the bridge from macrosocial theories of cultural learning to microanalytic details of situated human activities for learning in specific subject domains. The ontogenesis of conceptual change in scientific thinking provides a central case for examining this problem. A sociocultural framework informed by studies of conve
Augmenting the Discourse of Learning with Computer-Based Learning Environments
Computer tools for learning are often thought of as providing practice in working with symbolic representations. We exemplify a different perspective in which the technology augments the kinds of learning conversations that can take place. Research from the Optics Dynagrams Project illusmates contributions from this perspective. I will describe pre-intervention learning environment characteristics and student learning, our design strategy for new activities and technologies to address problems w
The Collaborative Visualization Project: Shared-technology learning environments for science learnin
Project-enhanced science learning (PESL) provides students with opportunities for "cognitive apprenticeships" in authentic scientific inquiry using computers for data-collection and analysis. Student teams work on projects with teacher guidance to develop and apply their understanding of science concepts and skills. We are applying advanced computing and communications technologies to augment and transform PESL at-a-distance (beyond the boundaries of the individual school), which is limited toda
Synthesizing instructional technologies and educational culture: exploring cognition and metacogniti
This research was initiated to examine instructional technologies and educational cultures in relation to identified cognitive and metacognitive strategies uses in school tasks. The project involved activities from the social studies curricula that were presented through two new software programs intended to support the development of problem-solving and reasoning strategies - IDEA [Interactive Decision Envisioning Aid, Pea (76)] Notecards (34) - and through instructional approaches bases upon "
Extracting the Far West in the Nineteenth Century 3 from the course American Environmental and Cultu
American Environmental and Cultural History - Fall 2006. This course presents a history of the American environment and the ways in which different cultural groups have perceived, used, managed, and conserved it from colonial times to the present. Cultures include American Indians and European and African Americans. Natural resources development includes gathering-hunting-fishing; farming, mining, ranching, forestry, and urbanization. ...
Creatures of Habit: A Computational System to Enhance and Illuminate the Development of Scientific T
Creatures of Habit is a computer-based microworld designed to engage middle-to-high school students in the process of scientific inquiry. The system depicts a universe of interacting programmable “creatures” whose individual behavior is guided by simple rules that may model naive psychology, physical laws, chemical affinities, and other domains. Students can create or revise creature rules and explore the resulting (and often surprising) emergent behaviors within “artificial ecosystems”;
A study of the development of programming ability and thinking skills in high school students
This article reports on a year-long study of high school students learning computer programming. The study examined three issues: I) what is the impact of programming on particular mathematical and reasoning abilities?; 2) what cognitive skills or abilities best predict programming ability?; and 3) what do students actually understand about programming after two years of high school study? The results showed that even after two years of study, many students had only a rudimentary understanding o
Children's mental models of recursive logo programs
Children who had a year of Logo programming experience were asked to think-aloud about what brief Logo recursive programs will do, and then to predict with a hand-simulation of the programs what the Logo graphics turtle will draw when the program is executed. If discrepancies arose in this last phase, children were asked to explain them. A prevaient but misguided "looping" interpretation of Logo recursion was identified, and this robust mental model persisted even in the face of contradiction be
Integrating Human and Computer Intelligence
The thesis to be explored in this chapter is that advances in computer applications and artificial intelligence have important implications for the study of development and learning in psychology. I begin by reviewing current approaches to the use of computers as devices for solving problems. reasoning, and thinking. I then raise questions concerning the integration of computer-based intelligence with human intelligence to seme human development and the processes of education.
Supporting Conceptual Awareness with Pedagogical Agents
This paper describes a series of efforts in building and conceptualizing software agents
for distributed collaborative learning. The agents are referred to as pedagogical agents.
We have integrated pedagogical agents within two collaborative environments,
TeamWave Workplace and Future Learning Environment. The role of agents in these
environments differs from past work on software agents in their function as extended
awareness mechanisms, focusing on task and concept awareness (conceptual a
A symbolic manipulator to introduce pupils to algebra theory
Within the theoretical framework of Vygotsky's theory, the paper presents a new algebra software. The main features of the software are described and their potentialities are discussed. According to the Vygotskian theory, expressions and commands may be thought as external signs of the Algebraic theory, and as such, they may become instruments of semiotic mediation: In other terms they can be used by the teacher, in the concrete realisation of classroom activity, according to the motive of intr
COML (Classroom Orchestration Modelling Language) and Scenarios Designer: Toolsets to Facilitate Col
In a one-to-one collaborative learning classroom supported by ubiquitous computing,
teachers require tools that allow them to design of learning scenarios, and to manage and
monitor the activities happening in the classroom. Our project proposes an architecture for
a classroom management system and a scenarios designer tool, both based on a Classroom
Orchestration Modelling Language (COML), to support these requirements. We are
developing and testing this with the GroupScribbles software using a
