Ben Chang

Students' Competitive Preferences on Multiuser Wireless Sensor Classroom Interactive Environment

The study reports a highly interactive classroom environment in which the students do not use the desktop, laptop or PDA with keyboard, mouse, or pen, but the hand-motion as an input method. The classroom setting is no more one student with one computer, but the whole class with a large shared display and all the students interact with their peers on the display waving their hand and competing with each other simultaneously. Twelve undergraduate students were involved in this study, and their competitive preferences were elaborated. The usability test indicated that the system was acceptable, and the sociability evaluation showed that the classroom climate was changed dramatically.

Applying Role Reversal Strategy to Conduct the Virtual Job Interview: A Practice in Second Life Immersive Environment

College students are going to face a new stage career as soon as they graduate from school, and how to assist college students to step into the career well is a very crucial issue in the college career counseling programming. Regarding the college career counseling programming, in general, the student-oriented activity helping the student to have the self-reflection is considered as a much more effective approach. Among the student-oriented activities, the role reversal strategy is the one that encourages students to actively take part in the activity and help students organize their thinking skills. Moreover, the role reversal strategy makes students have the empathy ability to make a right response in an opposite position. The study aims to apply the role reversal strategy to conduct the virtual job interview in Second Life immersive environment. Second Life which is an immersive technology can provide the innovative learning method and situated learning to reduce the obstacles where happened in the traditional classroom when applying role play and role reversal activities. Twenty-eight undergraduate students were recruited in the study. The study result indicates that most of the students prefer being the interviewers than to being the interviewees. And that they like to play role reversal activity in Second Life immersive environment to gain the interview experiences and improve their interview skills.

Distributed weather net: wireless sensor network supported inquiry-based learning

In 2004, a city-wide weather wireless sensor network, Taipei Weather Inquiry-Based Learning Network, composed of sixty school-based weather sensor nodes and a centralized weather archive server was established to facilitate students having weather science inquiry-based learning. The network covers the whole Taipei City, collects the citys weather status, and opens the weather data to the general public. A series of annual weather inquiry-based learning tournaments was held since 2006 to engage the students to use the networks resource. Until now, there have been 171 registered teams which include 447 grade 4-9 students and 220 teachers involved in it. The study of the tournaments data indicated that the usability of the network was satisfied.

MatrixDesks: interactive computing desks toward one-on-two educational computing environments

The era of 1:1 educational computing environment where each student has one mobile computing device is not far away. When such technology designed for individuals is applied to group learning, several student grouping problems could be encountered. In this paper, three issues are identified to illustrate the vision of the 1:2 educational computing environments. In a 1:2 classroom, besides the mobile devices, students also have their own computing desks, i.e. MatrixDesks, to solve the potential student grouping problems. By putting MatrixDesks together, a small group can form a shared working space with the combined desktops immediately and they can use their own digital pens as the input devices to work on and talk over it. Meanwhile, the students use their mobile devices to handle the related individual tasks. MatrixDesks is a coordination of applying the mobile computing and invisible computing to collaborative learning, which will lead to the accomplishment of 1:2 educational computing environments.

The potential of Second Life for university counseling: a comparative approach examining media features and counseling problems

This study explored the potential of Second Life (SL), a popular multi-user virtual online environment, for university counseling. University students (n = 312) were asked to evaluate three counseling channels (i.e., traditional face-to-face, internet, and SL) based on a range of media features deemed relevant and important to counseling and to assess their relative preferability when faced with different counseling problems. For the purposes of this study, counseling rooms with different styles were built, virtual counselors with different genders, ages, and styles were created, and short video recordings of scripted counseling sessions were produced in SL. For the media feature comparisons, the collected data were analyzed by the multivariate analysis of variance, followed by the analysis of variance and post hoc comparisons when significant differences were found, whereas for counseling problem comparisons, repeated-measure analysis of variance and post hoc comparisons were used. The results for the media feature comparisons showed that SL counseling significantly out-rated traditional counseling in all of the examined media features, with the exception of the interactivity dimension. Additionally, while SL and internet counseling were both perceived as significantly better than traditional counseling in areas that are unique to computer-mediated communications, including anonymity, convenience, and flexibility with regard to time and space, as well as privacy of the counseling site, SL was perceived as distinctly superior to internet counseling in five areas due to its unique affordances, including the choice of appearance, choice of counselors, interactivity, diversity of counseling sites, and availability of counseling object dimensions. Furthermore, traditional counseling was regarded as better able to support more fluent and versatile interaction between the counselor and client than the other two computer-mediated channels. As for the results of counseling problem comparisons, SL was rated as least preferred for six out of the seven counseling problems (except for gender identity issues), despite its media affordances. Suggestions for practitioners and future research are provided based on the current findings.

Scaffold Seeking A Reverse Design of Scaffolding in Computer-Supported Word Problem Solving

Although well-designed scaffolding may assist students to accomplish learning tasks, its insufficient capability to dynamically assess students’ abilities and to adaptively support them may result in the problem of overscaffolding. Our previous project has also shown that students using scaffolds to solve mathematical word problems for a long time may regard problem solving as a repetitive job and eventually became bored. To avoid the problem, this study redesigns the activity model of scaffolding by adopting a reverse rationale and incorporating the concept of helps seeking. Furthermore, this study proposes the activity model of scaffold seeking and designs a system that empowers students to seek scaffolds for solving mathematical word problems. A case study shows that the model may encourage students to solve problems by themselves rather than abusing scaffolds. Besides, the result also suggests that students are potential to express their thinking without the limitation of scaffolds.

Potential of second life for psychological counseling: a comparative approach

The present study explores the potential of Second Life as an alternative channel for university psychological counseling. The media affordances of traditional face-to-face counseling, internet counseling and Second Life counseling were rated along nine distinct features identified as most relevant to psychological counseling. Data collected from a group of 312 university students are being analyzed at the present time. Results shall be able to empirically examine the comparative affordances of the three counseling channels and the potential of Second Life for psychological counseling.

Pilot Study of Past Decade Game-Based Learning Journal Papers Survey from the Technology Perspective

The potential of involving video game in learning is being increasingly acknowledged. In order to study the last decade game-based learning development spectrum, a meta-research based on four hundred and thirteen journal papers collected from more than seventeen technology enhanced learning journals was applied. Different perspectives, such as technology, design, process, outcome, social culture, and individual differences, were applied to analyze the game-based learning papers. To simplify, this work studied the four hundred and thirteen journal papers from the technology perspective. The preliminary result indicates that game-based learning is a prosperous research area after 2005 in America, Europe and Asia. The study also finds that game-based learning research is highly affected by the technology evolution.