Emmanuel G. Blanchard

On the WEIRD nature of ITS/AIED conferences: a 10 year longitudinal study analyzing potential cultural biases

Arnett (2008) confirmed that research production (authorship, samples) in major psychology journals is strongly dominated by Western societies that are not cognitively representative of the whole mankind (Henrich et al., 2010). In this paper, results from a ten-year analysis of paper production in ITS/AIED conferences suggest a similar bias in the AIED research field.

Infusing Cultural Awareness into Intelligent Tutoring Systems for a Globalized World

In a global economy, with increasing immigration and cross-cultural interaction, the impact of culture in educational settings cannot be ignored. The impact is two-fold: students from diverse cultural backgrounds will be using the same educational technologies, and intercultural competence will become an increasingly important domain of instruction. In response, this chapter introduces what it means to adapt Intelligent Tutoring Systems for users with diverse cultural backgrounds, and how Intelligent Tutoring Systems can be used to support instruction in culture. We then discuss the major research issues involved in modifying Intelligent Tutoring Systems in support of these efforts. To provide insight into the current landscape of the field, we briefly outline several recent research achievements. In conclusion, we highlight significant current and future issues that arise in the integration of cultural concerns and educational technology.

Is It Adequate to Model the Socio-cultural Dimension of E-learners by Informing a Fixed Set of Personal Criteria?

Over the past few years, interest has increased in proposing efficient techniques to capture and model cognitive and affective characteristics of e-learners. More recently, research has started investigating the development of culturally-aware educational technology. Indeed, cultures are known to strongly impact how people interpret their surrounding environment, hence generating cognitive and affective biases that could impact computer-supported educational activities. Consequently, educational technologies trying to become culturally-aware need to develop a socio-cultural model of their learner. In this regard, many previous projects have used a fixed set of socio-cultural criteria. It is the purpose of this paper to show that this approach is not necessarily good since the acceptability and relevance of many criteria may vary from one cultural context to another.

Socio-Cultural Imbalances in AIED Research: Investigations, Implications and Opportunities

This paper investigates international representations in the Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) research field. Its methodological and theoretical groundings are inspired by Arnett (2008) and Henrich et al. (2010a) who addressed the same issue in psychology, and respectively a) discovered massive imbalances in representation in top-tier psychology journals, and b) clarified risks of this situation. Data on research production collected on 2 top-tiers AIED conferences indicate that relatively similar imbalances exist in AIED. Potential threats and challenges induced by that situation are discussed as well as additionally identified phenomena related to the culture of the AIED community.

Addressing the Interplay of Culture and Affect in HCI: An Ontological Approach

Culture and affect are closely tied domains that have been considered separately in HCI until now. After carefully reviewing research done in each of those domains, a formal ontology engineering approach brings us to identify and structure useful concepts for considering their interplay.

Enhancing In-Museum Informal Learning by Augmenting Artworks with Gesture Interactions and AIED Paradigms

This paper presents a computer-supported approach for providing ‘enhanced’ discovery learning in informal settings like museums. It is grounded on a combination of gesture-based interactions and artwork-embedded AIED paradigms, and is implemented through a distributed architecture.

Ontology for Cultural Variations in Interpersonal Communication: Building on Theoretical Models and Crowdsourced Knowledge

The domain of cultural variations in interpersonal communication is becoming increasingly important in various areas, including human–human interaction (e.g., business settings) and human–computer interaction (e.g., during simulations, or with social robots). User‐generated content (UGC) in social media can provide an invaluable source of culturally diverse viewpoints for supporting the understanding of cultural variations. However, discovering and organizing UGC is notoriously challenging and laborious for humans, especially in ill‐defined domains such as culture. This calls for computational approaches to automate the UGC sensemaking process by using tagging, linking, and exploring. Semantic technologies allow automated structuring and qualitative analysis of UGC, but are dependent on the availability of an ontology representing the main concepts in a specific domain. For the domain of cultural variations in interpersonal communication, no ontological model exists. This paper presents the first such ontological model, called AMOn+, which defines cultural variations and enables tagging culture‐related mentions in textual content. AMOn+ is designed based on a novel interdisciplinary approach that combines theoretical models of culture with crowdsourced knowledge (DBpedia). An evaluation of AMOn+ demonstrated its fitness‐for‐purpose regarding domain coverage for annotating culture‐related concepts mentioned in text corpora. This ontology can underpin computational models for making sense of UGC.

On the definition and management of cultural groups of e-learners

One objective of our ongoing research is to be able to culturally adapt e-Learning. This paper is focused on describing a methodology to represent cultural groups of learners and adapt the learning session depending on the membership of learners to one or more cultural group.

The Deteriorating Patient Smartphone App: Towards Serious Game Design

Few hospitalized patients suffering an unmonitored cardiac arrest survive. 60 % of these patients show deteriorating vital signs for hours to days before the final cardiac arrest. Medical students entering their first year of postgraduate training feel unprepared to care for these emotion-laden situations when on call. The few published teaching interventions that focus on the recognition of and response to an acutely deteriorating hospital ward patient before a cardiac arrest occurs use live simulations that evoke learners’ emotions as they apply expert frameworks to stabilize a deteriorating patient situation. One of these simulations, the Deteriorating Patient Activity (DPA), uses learners’ achievement emotions as an explicit educational design element but like other approaches requires live tutors for small learner numbers with limited opportunity for deliberate practice with feedback. This led to the iterative design of the Deteriorating Patient smartphone app (DPApp), a serious game (SG) designed to elicit learners’ achievement emotions and support deliberate practice with online feedback using smartphone-based deteriorating patient virtual case narratives. We demonstrate how we adapted and applied a “node and weave” model of narrative medical SG (NMSG) design by presenting a walkthrough of the DPApp graphic user interface. The node and weave model portrays the most difficult and time consuming part of SG design, that of making decisions on instructional, emotional, technology, and game designs coordinate in explicit subservience to educational goals. The most effective “playing field” for conceiving and testing an SG is the live teaching environment where it is intended to function.

The Fourth International Workshop on Culturally-Aware Tutoring Systems

The 4th international workshop on Culturally Aware Tutoring Systems (CATS2013) is a follow-up to the three previously successful CATS workshop editions, organized in conjunction with ITS2008, AIED2009, and ITS2010. It discusses the place of culture in AIED research. Considering culture in this field is important because it is known to have a strong impact on many cognitive and affective processes including those related to learning. Furthermore, people with different cultural backgrounds develop alternative interpretations and strategies and do not similarly appraise their environment, which naturally reflects in their interactions with AIED systems.