Accepted contributions
A Motivation for 'Ubuntu' to Enhance e-Learning Social Network Services in South Africa.
Mici Halse, Brenda Mallinson
This paper acknowledges the move from the content-centric to the network-centric approach to teaching and learning using Social Network Services (SNSs) in Higher Education. The South African cultural context is explained with a view to reconciling this with current SNSs. Finally, a way forward is proposed for developing SNSs particular to the Southern African cultural context.
As We May Remix. REFF Book and the Augmented Press Experience
Luca Simeone, Salvatore Iaconesi, Federico Monaco
This paper explores augmented reality as a set of technologies and processes to weave hypermedial content into printed publications thus fostering new educational practices. In particular this paper focuses on augmented reality as a bridge to extend traditional hypermediality to paper-based educational tools, analyzing as a case study a book recently released by the Italian publisher FakePress. The book addresses the concept of remix as a political and educational practice and is based on an extensive use of QR codes and fiduciary markers that act as triggers to retrieve and show additional content published by both authors and readers through an open CMS (Content Management System). The QR codes and the fiduciary markers work as gates to hypermedial remixes that extend the limits of traditional educational text books.
Foreseeing the Transformative Role of IT in Lectures
Telmo Zarraonandia, Paloma Dìaz, Ignacio Aedo
One of the most widely used methods for teaching is the lecture. During the last few decades lecturers and students have taken advantage of the progressive introduction of new technology for supporting these lectures. As this trend is very likely to continue, in this paper we will try to foresee some possible technology enriched future lecture scenarios.
Improving Role Assignment in CSCL Script using SNA and Semantic Web
Anna Pierri, Nicola Capuano, Giuseppe Laria, Giuseppina Rita Mangione, Elvis Mazzoni
The research field on TEE suggests that the collaborative dimension is one of the most important factors to take into account when thinking of ensuring a high level of sustainability of e-learning. Designing effective CSCL processes is a complex task that can be supported by existing good practices formulated as pedagogical patterns or script. Over the past years the TEE research has shown that the aforementioned patterns act as Mediating Artifacts (MA) supporting, guiding, and scaffolding the collaborative processes. In order to take advantage from the opportunities offered by the CSCL scripts, the scientific community asserts that collaborative learning process can be facilitated by designing educational scenarios and structuring and prescribing roles and activities. In this work an approach, based on Social Network Analysis and Semantic Web, is proposed in order to improve definition and instantiation phases of IMS-LD scripts.
InfoCoral: Open-Source Hardware for Low-Cost, High-Density Concurrent Simple Response Ubiquitous Systems
Imran A. Zualkernan
A Clicker or a wireless student response system is an example of a high density simple response ubiquitous system that processes real-time simple responses from a large number of students in a controlled environment like a classroom. Currently such systems are expensive and use proprietary hardware which makes it difficult to extend them for novel learning scenarios. This paper presents the design and implementation of a hybrid low-cost open-source hardware platform called InfoCoral that uses the 1-Wire wired protocol in conjunction with Bluetooth or a Zigbee wireless interface. The hardware also employs the open-source Arduino software for ease of programming and customization. A Case study of applying this platform to build a low-cost clicker system for a K-12 classroom is also presented.
Monitoring Affective and Motivational Aspects of Learning Experience with the Subtle Stone
ChanMin Kim, Madeline Balaam
Providing students with timely and meaningful feedback is an important part of the learning process. In providing formative feedback, it is important that the teacher take the full complexity of the student into account, examining not only what the student learned or failed to learn but also why. There are numerous factors that are associated with why students did learn or fail to learn, and affective and motivational factors are considered especially important. However, these factors are often difficult for teachers to assess in the classroom, and as such can be overlooked in efforts to promote student success.
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the need for formative assessments that take affective and motivational factors into consideration. In doing so we introduce a non-commercial tool, the Subtle Stone, that can be integrated into the classroom to make the affective and motivational experience of students more readily available to teachers. We seek to explore whether the addition of such a tool to the classroom can enable teachers to take account of the holistic experience of students in their formative assessment activities.
Supporting cooperative learning in the classroom: Exploiting large multi-touch displays
Alessandra Agostini, Elisa Di Biase
The main goal of our project is stimulating, by means of technology-enhanced tools, students’ engagement and participation in the educational process. We exploit the affordances of large multi-touch displays, posed in a technology-pervaded environment, to allow new cooperative learning opportunities for students in everyday classroom activities. Our preliminary work in designing for Interactive WhiteBoards emphasizes issues largely neglected in these kinds of applications.
Toward a general model of the learning experience
Carlo Giovannella, Fabrizia Moggio
In this paper we extend our previous bi-dimensional model of the experience - integrating experience styles and process characteristics - to account also for the peculiarities of the place. To each voxel of the resulting 3D space of representation can be associated a time dependent density that accounts for the relevance of such voxel at any time one takes a snapshot of the 3D space. Extrinsic and intrinsic forces (density gradients) are needed to make the system evolve from the initial state to a given final state (i.e. to origin the dynamics of educational processes)
