Gord McCalla

A process model for building social capital in virtual learning communities

Social capital adds significant value to learning in virtual learning environments. Social capital is created when learners interact with each other, by exchanging rich and thoughtful experiences among themselves through storytelling. Little research has focused on how this stock of capital is valued in virtual environments. The goal of this paper is to describe how social capital is created, through storytelling. Trust is essential for building social capital in virtual learning environments. This paper presents a process model for creating and maintaining social capital in virtual communities based on trust.Social capital is a significant value-added to learning in virtual learning environments. It is created when learners interact with each other in the community, by exchanging rich and thoughtful experiences among themselves through storytelling. Little research has focused on how this stock of capital is valued in virtual environments. The goal of this paper is to describe how social capital is created, singling out trust as basis for building social capital in virtual learning environments. The paper argues that storytelling can be a protocol for the exchange of experiences, which in turn can be avenue for the cultivation of trust. Trust is then an enabler of social capital. The paper is organized as follows. First the concept of virtual learning community is examined. This leads into the description of the essential elements of virtual learning community. Second, the paper describes how social capital is grounded on trust and this is presented through a process model. The rest of the paper will then discuss this model and the significance of social capital in virtual communities.

The emergence of student models from an analysis of ethical decision making in a scenario-based learning environment

Too often, professional ethics issues are trivialized in software engineering education. To begin to remedy this situation, we have built two interactive, adaptive learning scenarios that place students in the role of a software project manager confronting many critical project decisions, each with an ethical dimension. As students move through a scenario, making and justifying their decisions, their behaviour can be monitored and used both to adapt the scenario to each student as they proceed, and in post hoc analysis to identify different classes of ethical behaviour. In this paper we discuss five different classes of student behaviour that emerged from the analysis of protocols collected during the use of these scenarios in a third year undergraduate software engineering class. We speculate that the existence of these general student models can be used in several ways to further enhance the learning of ethics

Simulated Learners

Simulated learners will play an increasingly important role in the design of learning environments in the coming years. Here, current research and remaining issues are considered.