Denise Filippo

Is the unfolding of the group discussion off-pattern? Improving coordination support in educational forums using mobile devices

A forum is a valuable tool to foster reflection in an in-depth discussion; however, it forces the course mediator to continually pay close attention in order to coordinate learners activities. Moreover, monitoring a forum is time consuming given that it is impossible to know in advance when new messages are going to be posted. Additionally, a forum may be inactive for a long period and suddenly receive a burst of messages forcing forum mediators to frequently log on in order to know how the discussion is unfolding to intervene whenever it is necessary. Mediators also need to deal with a large amount of messages to identify off-pattern situations. This work presents a piece of action research that investigates how to improve coordination support in a forum using mobile devices for mitigating mediators difficulties in following the status of a forum. Based on summarized information extracted from message meta-data, mediators consult visual information summaries on PDAs and receive textual notifications in their mobile phone. This investigation revealed that mediators used the mobile-based coordination support to keep informed on what is taking place within the forum without the need to log on their desktop computer.

Enacting collaboration via storytelling in second life

This work presents a collaborative educational game, Time2Play, developed in Second Life, which allows the creation of stories in a collaborative fashion, offering a new form of expression in education. This game is projected for children from 7 to 12 years old, enabling them to express their creativity and imagination by creating and enacting stories of their own. The proposed game can become a resource for implementing collaborative projects in school activities.

Notificação-ação: Informação e Acesso ao Ambiente de Aprendizagem através de Notificações para Suporte à Coordenação de Fóruns de Cursos a Distância

In this work, notifications to provide learners and mediators of an online course with awareness information regarding the unfolding of forums and other participantspsila activities are investigated. In an asynchronous setting, participants need to check the forum frequently to know if there are new messages and whether and when mediators and learners are working. In the absence of this information, participants cannot organize their activities according to the group and waste opportunities to interact with each other. This paper presents two action research cycles in the context of the Information Technology Applied to Education online course and of the AulaNet LMS environment. Notifications presented in popup windows evolved into ldquoaction notificationsrdquo as they enable direct access to services in the AulaNet web interface through links and buttons.

Immersive Collaborative Storytelling: Time2Play in Second Life

This paper presents a collaborative educational game, Time2Play, developed in the 3D virtual environment of Second Life, which enables the creation and enact stories collaboratively, contributing to a new form of expression between the different languages used in education. This game is designed to enable children aged 9 to 12 years to express their creativity and imagination to “create enacting” a story in groups. Thus, the Time2Play becomes a resource to be used in school activities whose purpose is to carry out collaborative projects in which participants are able to act in different roles as creator of the story, director, set designer, costume designer, actor, narrator and spectator. In this paper we present a case study that investigates how the 3 dimensions of collaboration - communication, coordination and cooperation - are performed by groups of children during play Time2Play.