Ana Luiza Dias

Bridging the gap among cultures: the challenge faced by teachers on producing content for computer-aided education

Considering computer-aided education, the creation of educational content is still a hard task for teachers. Computational tools are necessary to support authors in creating suitable material for learners from different cultures, allowing effective learning. Aiming to help teachers with such hard task of generating contextualized content to stimulate learners from different places and communities to engage into their own apprenticeship, it has been under development a computational tool called Cognitor, a content editor supported by cultural knowledge expressed on common sense. This paper presents a usability test on Cognitor and discusses preliminary evaluations on it.

Filling out learning object metadata considering cultural contextualization

This paper presents Cognitor, a common-sense aided framework for the Cog-Learn Pattern Language that aims to help content editors create and contextualize e-learning content through the generation of hyper documents that comprise pedagogical issues, producing learning objects (LO) compatible with the SCORM standard. Cog-Learn have been developed from Learning and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Theories. The goal of Cognitor is to allow for the design of digital learning material with better organization of the content that will be explored by learners, aiming to make easier the interaction with it, addressing HCI issues, as well as the interaction between learners and teachers, addressing Human-Human Interaction (HHI) issues. To reach that, it is important that the LO created in Cognitor be easy to reuse, helping creators to fill out the metadata aiming at addressing cultural issues related to the context in which the LO can be adopted and reused. For that, suggestions coming from a common sense knowledge base automatically appear in some SCORM metadata fields in order to help the task of filling out culturally contextualized metadata.

Providing culturally contextualized metadata to promote sharing and reuse of learning objects

This paper presents some proposals to formalize the creation of Learning Objects (LO) that define rules concerned to the content organization and/or the set of metadata used to describe and to document the LOs. This paper presents Cognitor (COGNItive strategies-based EdiTOR), a common-sense aided framework for a certain Pattern Language that aims to help educators create and contextualize e-Learning content as hyper documents, considering cognitive, pedagogical and cultural issues, packaging the LOs according to SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) standard, the most known and probably most used standard for LO creation. The LOs created by Cognitor are intended to be easy to share and reuse, mainly because Cognitor helps editors fill out the LO metadata using concepts that are culturally contextualized on the main target learners culture through suggestions coming from a common sense knowledge base that are used to support filling in specific metadata fields.

Processing common sense knowledge to develop contextualized computer applications

This paper describes how to use and to collect the common sense knowledge and how to process such information to create semantic network and to available it for applications. In this context, it is also presented an educational application which uses this knowledge to create a contextualized stories, because this game allows educators being co-authors on creating the story context taking into account their goals, pedagogical approach and the students cultural reality. Then, teachers can adopt values, metaphors, cause and consequence relations or even a common vocabulary before and during the narrative game and, consequently, enabling students to feel identified in that story context being considered and get interested and engaged in collaborating with the teacher and other students to develop the story. In order to observe the use of this game in an educational environment and collect the target group opinion, a study case was performed at school with teachers and children, and is described in this paper.

COMMON SENSE KNOWLEDGE BASE EXPANDED BY AN ONLINE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT

The computers games use on educational field have been growing as a potential tool to facilitate the teaching-learning process. In the “What is it?” environment, presented in this article, the teacher can be coauthor of a guess game based on cards, in which, the common sense knowledge support the teacher to be aware of students’ culture and necessities. The environment also proposes a way to collect common sense statements, where engines on editor’s module and player’s module store all user interaction and combine this information to make new relations into Brazilian Open Mind Common Sense project (OMCS-Br) knowledge base. A study case was done by teachers and students from two different public schools, whose result point out the potential of this new way to collect common sense statements naturally through a web

APLYING COLORS BASED ON CULTURE KNOWLEDGE TO MOTIVATE COLLABORATION ON THE WEB

Collaborative and Participatory work via Web tends to increase due to teams of professionals’ needs in accomplishing tasks separated by distance and time, which demands more effort and stronger commitment from each person. In this context, it must be considered cultural differences, which interfere with the performance of each individual and either promote or deny the communication intended for the group. This paper aims to discuss a multidisciplinary analysis about colors and stimuli in computing environment using Common Sense knowledge, considering the cultural association people make between colors and actions, emotions and objects, showing how it can motivate users to access and participate in collaborative tasks through stimuli using color symbolically built in the culture.

Cognitor: o que os Professores têm a dizer

Resumo: A pesquisa teve como objetivo verificar as relacoes sociais entre os individuos, numa disciplina presencial, quando suportadas por um ambiente virtual. Foi aplicado um questionario semi-estruturado com 17 alunos de uma disciplina de um curso de Mestrado. A analise constatou indicios de uma comunidade presente nas trocas existentes entre os alunos da disciplina. Abstract: The research aimed to investigate social relationships between students and teahcer in a classroom setting when using a Virtual Learning Environment. A survey was conducted with 17 students from a graduate course. The results indicate traces of a community in the exchange between students.Resumo: Este artigo apresenta os resultados do curso “Introducao ao Estudo da Dislexia” desenvolvido na plataforma MIRANTE - Midia Interativa com Recursos de Acessibilidade, que se destina a capacitacao de professores para trabalharem com alunos dislexicos. Analisa o desempenho dos cursistas, nao so na apropriacao do conteudo do curso, mas tambem no ambiente virtual interativo que permite a flexibilizacao do ensino e a promocao de processos individuais de aprendizagem. Abstract: This article describes the first module of a teachers’s capacitation courser available in the long-distance education enviroment MIRANTE - Interactive Media with the Accessibility Resources of NTE. Its subject is the Dyslexia, which represents, at the current moment, a serious problem a mong student. Education professionals are, each time, more aware of it. To capacitate long-distance teachers, discussing the characteristics of Dyslexia end pointing out the resources for the inclusion of those students and the development of methods and technologies, which may help students with learning problem, is the aim of this course.Resumo: Este artigo resumido descreve a experiencia do Curso “A Literatura Infantil e o Livro Eletronico” desenvolvido no Nucleo de Tecnologia Educacional de Sao Pedro da Aldeia – NTE RJ 10 com alunos do Curso de Formacao de Professores. Abstract: This summarized article describes the experience of the Course “The Infantile Literature and the Eletronic Book” developed into the Nucleo de Tecnologia Educacional de Sao Pedro da Aldeia – NTE RJ 10 with students of the Teacher Training Course.Resumo: Este artigo aborda o ensino da Arte atraves do trabalho com projetos e utilizacao do ambiente colaborativo SOCRATES. A pesquisa foi realizada numa escola da rede municipal de ensino de Fortaleza, com alunos do 7o ano. Os dados apresentados compoem os foruns de discussao realizados durante o projeto A Arte pela Arte. Dentre os resultados, enfoca-se a interacao constante, a aprendizagem colaborativa e o uso intensivo dos recursos tecnologicos. Tais dados indicam que trabalhar com projetos tendo o SOCRATES como suporte constitui-se em alternativa viavel para a dinamizacao da Arte como disciplina dos curriculos. Abstract: The study investigated a project-based approach for art teaching with support of a virtual environment called SOCRATES. The research was conducted in a public school in Fortaleza with 7th grade students. Data was composed of messages from the SOCRATES forum during a Project called “Art by Art”. Results indicate the presence of constant students’ interaction, collaborative learning and intensive use of technological resources. Such data indicate that the project based approach, supported by SOCRATES, is a viable alternative to promote Arts as a discipline in school curriculum.