Intelligent Tutoring Goes To School in the Big City
This paper reports on a large-scale experiment introducing and evaluating intelligent tutoring in an urban High School setting. Critical to the success of this project has been a client-centered design approach that has matched our client's expertise in curricular objectives and classroom teaching with our expertise in artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. The Pittsburgh Urban Mathematics Project (PUMP) has produced an algebra curriculum that is centrally focused on mathematical anal
Task and Interaction Regulation in Controlling a Traffic Simulation
In collaborative problem solving, metacognition not only covers strategic reasoning related to the task but also reasoning related to the interaction itself. The hypothesis underlying this work states that regulation of the interaction and regulation of the task are closely related mechanisms and that their co-occurrence facilitates collaborative problem solving. These assumptions are tested experimentally with a traffic simulator. The results show that co-occurrence of task and interaction regu
Elaborating new arguments through a CSCL scenario
The CSCL community faces two main challenges with respect to learning and argumentation. The scientific challenge is to understand how argumentation produces learning, that is to discover which cognitive mechanisms, triggered by argumentative interactions, generate new knowledge and in which conditions. The engineering challenge is to determine how to trigger productive argumentation among students. These two challenges are often investigated in parallel, but this contribution focuses on the lat
An approach to distance learning curriculum appropriation
The work presented aims at supporting distance learning students in their appropriation of a curriculum. We propose an approach that consists in helping students to construct individual projects. We dissociate different aspects (planning, evaluation and regulation) that can be useful for this purpose, propose a technological approach (epiphyte system, ontology-based model) and example of tools currently provided by the Saafir framework.
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 agentsÂ’ behaviour is defined in terms that make salient organization issues, and allows building learning situations that focus on making students consider explicitly these issues.
Enhancing the Adaptivity of an Existing Website with an Epiphyte Recommender System
In this paper we propose an approach to enhance the adaptivity of an existing Website by plugging on top of it (“epiphyte approach”) a recommender system that displays additional
tips and functionalities in a separate window. The recommender system analyzes the way the user browses through the Website according to predefined prototypical ways of using the Website (“models of use”) and then proposes information or functionalities that appear useful according to this model of use. Different mo
Understanding weblog communities through digital traces: a framework, a tool and an example
Often research on online communities could be compared to archaeology [16]: researchers look at patterns in digital traces that members leave to characterise the community they belong to. Relatively easy access to these traces and a growing number of methods and tools to collect and analyse them make such analysis increasingly attractive. However, a researcher is faced with the difficult task of choosing which digital artefacts and which relations between them should be taken into account, and h
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
Open Distance Inter-University Synergies Between Europe, Africa and the Middle East (ODISEAME)
The challenge facing new technologies is whether they can contribute to a qualitative step up and to education for all as a process of facilitating the development of creative people with the ability to think critically and to engage in socially relevant decision making. In this paper, we describe a project whose purpose is to develop a learning environment that takes into account current expertise in learning theory in order to facilitate productive collaboration in a way that leads to active c
Designing biases that augment socio-cognitive interactions
This chapter questions the assumption that the best environment for computer-supported collaborative learning is the one that most closely reproduces the features of face-to-face collaboration. Empirical studies have failed to establish the superiority of group interaction with richer media. Instead, the chapter explores media features that do not exist in face-to-face interactions and explains how these features might augment group cognition. The first feature, the persistency of the informatio
Sharing solutions: persistence and grounding in multi-modal collaborative problem solving
This article reports on an exploratory study of the relationship between grounding and problem solving in multimodal computer-mediated collaboration. This article examines two different media, a shared whiteboard and a MOO environment that includes a text chat facility. A study was done on how the acknowledgment rate (how often partners give feedback of having perceived, understood, and accepted partner's contributions) varies according to the media and the content of interactions. It was expect
Mechanisms of common ground in case-based web-discussions in teacher education
Previous studies suggest that before the participants in Web-based conferencing can reach deeper level interaction and learning, they have to gain an adequate level of common ground in terms of shared mutual understanding, knowledge, beliefs, assumptions, and presuppositions (Clark & Schaefer, 1989; Dillenbourg, 1999). In this paper, the main purpose is to explore how participants establish and maintain common ground in order to reach deeper level interaction in case-based Web-discussions. The s
New Media and Open and Distance Learning: New challenges for Education in a Knowledge Society
The "digital society" provides not only with new technology, but also with new concepts. Information plays a central role and becomes a valuable good, but knowledge cannot be reduced to information, and one aim for educators is to contribute in a "knowledge society", not only an "information society". A knowledge society is structured in networks, enriching the traditional hierarchies; a knowledge society promotes a kind of "collective intelligence". In such a society, open and distance learning
Towards educational data mining: Using data mining methods for automated chat analysis to understand
In this paper we investigate the application of data mining methods to provide learners with real-time adaptive feedback on the nature and patterns of their on-line communication while learning collaboratively.We derived two models
for classifying chat messages using data mining techniques and tested these on an actual data set [16]. The reliability of the classification of chat messages is established by comparing the models performance to that of humans. Results indicate that the classificatio
Training programme for geography teachers
This paper contains a description of a Geography teacher-training program for in-service education. The program is a variant for incorporating the methodology of the Minerva- project “Innovative Didactics via Web-based Learning” (further abbreviated as IDWBL) so that the Geography teachers at work can be adequately prepared for integrating ICT in geography education at secondary schools via web-based education. The theme may seem at first glance as a variation of a known subject… But for the
E-learning environments in medical education: how pervasive computing can influence the educational
As pervasive computing is integrated incrementally with all facets of everyday life, it is reasonable to expect that its further proliferation may influence educational activities as well. Several such arguments have been thoroughly discussed in literature and several projects have been developed. However, little work has been done to investigate how pervasive computing can influence the medical educational process using e-learning platforms, and the prerequisites for such endeavours. In this pi
Aspects of Speech Act Categorisation: Towards Generating Teachers' Language
In this paper we examine a possible method for classifying speech acts produced by human teachers, with a view of informing the designs of intelligent natural language tutors and of providing the basis for a formal analysis of the effects that teachers' language has on students' learning. We argue that traditional means as initiated by the Ordinary Language Philosophers such as Austin (1962), Grice (1975) and Searle (1979) are not sufficient to account for all types of linguistic phenomena occur
Supporting Social Interaction in an Intelligent Collaborative Learning System
Students learning effectively in groups encourage each other to ask questions, explain and justify their opinions, articulate their reasoning, and elaborate and reflect upon their knowledge. The benefits of collaborative learning, however, are only achieved by active, well-functioning teams. This paper presents a model of collaborative learning designed to help an intelligent collaborative learning system identify and target group interaction problem areas. The model describes potential indicato
An Intelligent SQL Tutor on the Web
The paper presents SQLT-Web, a Web-enabled intelligent tutoring system for the SQL database language. SQLT-Web is a Web-enabled version of an earlier, standalone ITS. In this paper we describe how the components of the standalone system were reused to develop the Web-enabled system. The system observes students' actions and adapts to their knowledge and learning abilities. We describe the system's architecture in comparison to the architectures of other existing Web-enabled tutors. All tutoring
An Intelligent Tutoring System for Entity Relationship Modelling
The paper presents KERMIT, a Knowledge-based Entity Relationship Modelling Intelligent Tutor. KERMIT is a problem-solving environment for the university-level students, in which they can practise conceptual database design using the Entity-Relationship data model. KERMIT uses Constraint-Based Modelling (CBM) to model the domain knowledge and generate student models. We have used CBM previously in tutors that teach SQL and English punctuation rules. The research presented in this paper is signifi
