Jan Dolonen

Integrating Software Agents with FLE3

This paper presents an approach to integrating a software agent with FLE3 — a distributed CSCL environment. We discuss two complementary ways the agent system can present feedback to the users (students and instructors). On the one hand, the agent system identifies possible problems and gives advice to each student based on principles of collaboration and knowledge building. On the other, it computes statistics for viewing and presents possible problems and advice to the instructor which the instructor can use to engage in a dialog with the students.

Supporting Conceptual Awareness with Pedagogical Agents

This paper describes a series of efforts in building and conceptualizing software agents for distributed collaborative learning. The agents are referred to as pedagogical agents. We have integrated pedagogical agents within two collaborative environments, TeamWave Workplace and Future Learning Environment. The role of agents in these environments differs from past work on software agents in their function as extended awareness mechanisms, focusing on task and concept awareness (conceptual awareness). Our approach is stimulated by Mead’s theory of the ‘Generalized Other’. The agents collect statistical information on user activity and analyze the information based on principles of collaboration and knowledge building (participation, group interaction, and scientific discourse). Furthermore, the agents define a trajectory in a pedagogical agent design space, which we define in terms of four dimensions: presentation, intervention, task, and pedagogy. We end the paper by comparing our approach with related work.

Supporting Collaborative Knowledge Building with Intelligent Agents

In the process of collaborative knowledge building, it is usually difficult for students to be aware of others’ activities, for instructors to overview the process and to regulate the collaboration In order to facilitate collaborative knowledge building, intelligent agents were developed to support the awareness and regulate the collaboration. This paper discusses the role of intelligent agents and how they support both students and instructors in collaborative knowledge building. By monitoring the collaboration, the agents compute the statistics, detect possible problems and give advice synchronously and asynchronously to the students and instructor based on their activities and requests.

Analysing design suggestions and use of resources in co-design of educational software: A case study

This naturalistic study focuses on how the co-design of educational software is an activity mediated by and through communicative resources. The aim is to identify how design suggestions and the use of resources emerge in co-design. This study contributes to the growing interest in understanding aspects of collaboration in design. To understand the phenomenon of collaboration in design, we apply interaction analysis, dialogism and the sociocultural perspective to show which resources the participants use and how they negotiate design suggestions. We argue that such understanding is only visible through detailed analysis of naturally occurring co-design activities. We find that the design trajectory varies in how the participants orient themselves to each other and in relation to the design artefacts. Tensions make visible which communicative resources are sensitive to what the participants interpret as relevant in the context of their institutional norms and values. Their different positions must be negotiated. Together, these aspects orient the design and mediate the emerging consensus and design artefact.

Teacher Support in Technology-Based Science Learning

This chapter focuses on the support provided by a teacher in a setting where primary school students worked on a technology-based science project. This setting involved open-ended tasks to be solved through project work, peer collaboration, and the use of various information resources. In today’s schools, this type of instructional setting is quite common, which makes them interesting to study. From an early age, students are exposed to conceptual tasks that pose complex multidisciplinary problems, usually involving integration of relevant information by the use of multiple digital and non-digital resources.