Emerging Social Engineering in the Wireless Classroom
Code It! fosters mathematics learning environments where pre-algebra students use handheld technologies to confidently and enjoyably explore and learn about functions. The resources we developed—server-based and handheld software and paper-based student and teacher texts—were packaged as a 20-session unit on code making and breaking and designed to boost students’ understanding of mathematical functions and their facility with the multiple representations of tables, graphs and symbols. We
Changing How and What Children Learn in School with Computer-Based Technologies
Schools today face ever-increasing demands in their attempts to ensure that students are well equipped to enter the workforce and navigate a complex world. Research indicates that computer technology can help support learning, and that it is especially useful in developing the higher-order skills of critical thinking, analysis, and scientific inquiry. But the mere presence of computers in the classroom does not ensure their effective use. Some computer applications have been shown to be more suc
A Grid Approach to Provide Effective Awareness to On-line Collaborative Learning Teams
Providing collaborative learning applications the possibility to offer continuous awareness to on-line collaborative learning teams is a challenging issue since it is essential to keep participants informed of both what is happening and what happened in the learning group.
Moreover, awareness is the basis to enhance collaboration and improve the individual and group performance since it allows to track and assess the collaborative learning process more objectively and to model students' behavio
The Climate Visualizer: Sense-Making Through Scientific Visualization
This paper describes the design of a learning environment, called the Climate Visualizer, intended to facilitate scientific sense-making in high school classrooms by providing students the ability to craft, inspect, and annotate scientific visualizations. The theoretical background for our design presents a view of learning as acquiring and critiquing cultural practices and stresses the need for students to appropriate the social and material aspects of practice when learning an area. This is fo
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 "
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”;
Grounding Collaborative Knowledge Building
in Semantics-Based Critiquing
In this paper we investigate the use of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), Critiquing Systems, and Knowledge Building to support computer-based teaching of English composition. We have built and tested an English Composition Critiquing System that make use of LSA to analyze student essays and compute feedback by comparing their essays with teacher's model essays.
LSA values are input to a critiquing component to provide a user interface for the students. A software agent can also use the critic fe
Informatics-based Learning Resources for Patients and their Relatives in recovery
In this paper we describe experiences from design of an informatics-based learning resource for patients and relatives. The prototype, REPARERE (learning REsource for PAtients and RElatives during REcovery), aims to support patients and their family recovering from heart surgery in meeting challenges in to daily living post discharge.
Using recovery experiences and patient teaching material, REPARERE includes examples of textual information, video-clips, images and illustrations relevant to th
Categorisation in Knowledge building
In this paper we explore how students talk and reason when they were exposed to a set of
categories taken from scientific discourse. The scientific categories are built into a web-based discussion forum (Fle) as part of a pedagogical and technological design. The scientific categories are based on the concepts of the progressive inquiry model for knowledge building. Socio-cultural theory with a focus on
concepts like categories and prompting is our theoretical framework. In the DoCTA NSS proje
Collaboration and Problem Solving in Distributed Collaborative Learning
Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis are utilised as resources for analysing distributed collaborative learning. Thematically we are interested in how a group of students manage their task, how they keep a joint focus, and how technology features in their activity. We present and analyse extracts of data from a group collaborating in a groupware system called TeamWave Workplace. We conclude that in collaborative problem solving the interpretation of the task and the problem solving process
Advanced Principles of Effective e-Learning
With the global academic community currently focused on student learning outcomes achievement, assessment, and continuous improvement, e-learning strategies provide effective measures than can assist educators and educational administrators in the satisfaction of key objectives. Whether it is creating and incorporating simulations, building courses and curriculum, engaging in virtual team building, managing online programs, concept mapping, developing an electronic portfolio program, creating ac
Elup Editor Conceptual Guide and User Manual
The eLup editor: elearning Quality Process Editor is based on the conceptual model adopted by the E-Quality project (www.e-quality-eu.org). The purpose of the eLup software is to enable the e-learning professional to structure and document the quality approach used in his/her organisation by making use of the approach and findings of the equality project. The eLup software was developed within Montpellier 2 University. The software is a model editor coupled with a database using Java, MySQL and
Uso di manipolatori simbolici nell'introduzione all'algebra: realizzazione e sperimentazione di un p
The thesis presents the theoretical background and the main ideas underlying the design, development and experimentation of L'Algebrista, a prototype of symbolic manipulator to introduce pupils to algebra as a theory. The main theoretical framework refers to the theories of Anna Sfard concerning objectification in mathematics.,Unpublished graduation thesis
A Learning Grid for the multichallenge school ECP
The aim of this presentation is to try to define the requirements of a European Learning Grid that would fit best with the challenges and today and future practices of Ecole Centrale Paris.
In a first part, after a brief presentation of Ecole Centrale Paris, we describe the actual challenges today practices and the interest of an e-learning GRID. In a second part we describe some potential cases of such system and the associated requirements.
We Have Met Technology and It Is Us
The chapter explores the relationship between technology and intelligence with an emphasis on technologies as forms of tool-mediated social practices. This involves the argument that although tools are constituents of a technology, it is the way in which tools are deployed as part of a social practice that is crucial. Artifacts are considered as the foundation blocks of technology.
Pedagogical approaches for technology-integrated science teaching
The two separate projects described have examined how teachers exploit computer-based technologies in supporting learning of science at secondary level. This paper examines how pedagogical approaches associated with these technological tools are adapted to both the cognitive and structuring resources available in the classroom setting. Four teachers participated in the first study, undertaken as part of the InterActive Education project in Bristol; all of them used multimedia simulations in thei
Using online role play to teach internet safety awareness
This paper reports on an evaluation of Net-Detectives, a creative online role play activity aimed at 9–12 year olds. Net-Detectives forms part of Kidsmart, an Internet awareness programme aimed at school children. It was evaluated through a multiple method data collection using questionnaire surveys, follow up telephone interviews with teachers and observation in use in three UK schools during the summer term of 2003.
All sources of data collected agreed that a number of benefits arise from p
