Khairul Shafee Kalid

Semantic Web Technologies for Pre-School Cognitive Skills Tutoring System *

Current teaching strategies mainly follow instructional or constructive pedagogical models. In instructional model learning, contents are authored for teaching and evaluation of a concept. Whilst in constructive model, a student is exposed to the learning environment that allows him to learn new concepts, and his actions provide an evaluation of his understanding of the concept. Manual authoring of such learning contents not only requires specialized skills, thinking and dedication, but they also take large amount of time. Similarly within instructional environment, authoring any new content that supports the current teaching activity is very difficult. This paper presents an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) that facilitates the authoring of learning contents for both instructional and constructive teaching strategies. Proposed ITS uses semantic web formalism, namely ontology, for knowledge representation. This work shows that ontologies correctly and consistently models the domain knowledge that supports pedagogical activities, software development activities, ITS user friendly interface and provides robust reasoning facility for creation of dynamic contents. The proposed ITS provides authoring facility explicitly for teaching cognitive skills such as classification, relatedness, comparison (sequencing, discrimination, size etc.) and reasoning. With the use of ontologies, cognitive skills are translated into concepts/classes and properties/roles with restrictions. Reasoning and inference provided by ontologies are used for dynamic authoring of learning contents. Finally evaluation of proposed ITS is conducted for its correctness and consistency of domain knowledge, usability and efficiency & effectiveness of contents authoring.

Heuristics Evaluation of Preschool Cognitive Skills Learning System

The ubiquitous use of computer by children is highly perceptible in current research. Therefore, providing the increasing interaction to computer technologies demands a careful designing of these technologies keeping in view the pedagogical aspects, psychology, abilities and interests of the children. These requirements make development of such applications a very complex job. Therefore, existing applications follow the content delivery model i.e. previously crafted contents are stored to deliver to a user. This limits the effective learning of the children. The present work proposed a rule-based system utilizing semantic web technologies (Ontologies) as a domain knowledge and semantic web rule language (SWRL) for rules representation. The proposed system overcomes the complexity of developing the intelligent and interactive applications for children. Evaluation is performed by using formal usability evaluation heuristics over an application developed using our proposed system for preschool cognitive skills tutoring. Results provided here demonstrates that the underlying knowledge modeled through the use of Ontologies is highly supported to flexible and child-friendly interfaces and pedagogical and playability activities (motor, reasoning) for cognitive skills tutoring.

Automated Multi-factor Analytics for Cheat-Proofing Attendance-taking

A potential application of smartphone is as a tool to prevent attendance cheating. This paper proposes an automated multi-factor analytics using common smartphone features to identify cheating. The first factor is using Quick Response (QR) code as a unique token for validation. The second factor checks for the phones unique International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number. The third factor checks attendance time using server time. The fourth factor is geo-location of the student. Algorithm analyzes geolocation statistical variance after passing the first two factors. The algorithm is implemented as a proof of concept in a typical university lecture and lab attendance taking. The proposed algorithm has shown promising efficiency and feasibility of implementation. User survey has indicated reasonable acceptance and potential issues.

The design of a schoolchildren identification and transportation tracking system

In Malaysia, five million children commute to school daily. There are approximately 40 percent of children use public and private vehicles to school. The busy schedule and hectic working lives of the parent are causing them not able to monitor the safety of their children in commuting to and from school. This project presents the design of a prototype, called KidBus.Tracker that tracks schoolchildren in school vehicles. The design includes the use of global positioning satellite (GPS) tracking as a way to track the school vehicle, while passive radio frequency identification (RFID) technology was used to record the childrens presence in the vehicle. The data logged by the hardware would then be extracted and fed to a website in real-time. Parents would be able to monitor the school vehicles movement while their children are on board through the KidBus.Tracker website.

KnowledgeFlood: Sharing volunteers' experience |on flood disaster using storytelling

Floods is a common disaster that happens every year in Malaysia. Relief efforts involving government and non-government agencies are continuously dispatched to affected areas. Volunteers gain experience after participating in disaster relief efforts. Volunteers experience are circulated but not captured. Volunteers are irreplaceable resources in disaster relief efforts because of their valuable experience. In knowledge management, experiences are an example of tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is regarded as one of the main challenges in knowledge management. One of the best ways in sharing tacit knowledge is using storytelling. As part of knowledge management, storytelling offers sharing of a more structured and absorbable form of tacit knowledge. This paper presents the use of storytelling as a medium to share tacit knowledge in the context of flood disaster relief missions among volunteers through a knowledge sharing platform called KnowledgeFlood.

The effectiveness of semantic web based preschool cognitive skills tutoring system: An empirical study

Two groups had participated in a study on the effectiveness of Semantic Web based mobile application for preschool cognitive skills learning. The first group had the traditional method with textbooks and teachers teaching. The second group worked with the proposed application at school along with the classroom sessions. A quasi experimental pre and post tests model was conducted to measure the learning gain for classification and relatedness cognitive skills. The results had shown significant gain by the second group over the first one and hence support the use of the proposed application in practice. The conclusion is that proposed application can be used as teaching support along with formal school learning.

A pragmatic use of Semantic Web technologies for preschool cognitive skills tutoring system

Primarily preschool cognitive skills are abilities of acquiring generic knowledge. Generic knowledge is said to be the knowledge about kinds of things. Currently these cognitive skills are taught through the use of pre-authored (in the form of books or worksheets) learning contents containing the objects and concepts of the real world. This method of teaching is known as instructional pedagogy that has several limitations such as it require specialized skills and a large amount of time for content authoring, thinking and dedication and it does not support individualized learning. As a remedy to the limitations of instructional pedagogy, constructive pedagogical method provides learning through exploration. The present work proposes an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) that follows the constructive approach for preschool cognitive skills tutoring. The proposed ITS uses the Semantic Web technologies namely Ontologies and Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) for the construction of a rule-based ITS. The reason is, Ontologies natively (by definition) provides a formal explicit way of modeling concepts in a domain of discourse specially the real world objects and also support rule base reasoning. Finally shortcomings of the existing knowledge sources (ontologies) and step by step processing of the inference engine to generate learning contents is provided in the present work.

The development of a knowledge management storytelling process framework for the purpose of transferring knowledge

One of the main challenges in knowledge management is to convey tacit knowledge. Furthermore, there is also a possibility that an expert have difficulties in articulating and conveying this tacit knowledge. Nonetheless, storytelling in knowledge management (KM) context is seen as an effective tool to communicate knowledge, particularly tacit knowledge. While people share stories through face-to-face interaction, we cannot assert that people will learn from this interaction. Firstly, this interaction is not captured and secondly, the knowledge exchanged in the interaction tend to be unstructured which would result in the loss of knowledge value. This paper presents the development of a process framework to construct knowledge story. This framework involves the capturing of knowledge and encapsulates that knowledge into a narrative form.

The challenges in transferring technical knowledge: A Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS case study

This paper reports a case study on the challenges of transferring technical knowledge. The study focuses on the challenges of transferring technical knowledge between the lecturers to the students in programming courses conducted at Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP). The purpose of this study is to present academics and practitioners insights on the challenges of transferring technical knowledge to learners. Programming lecturers are considered as a person with technical knowledge because they have the ability to explain theoretically and practically technical concepts and also has theoretical ability to face a technical problem, analyze it, describe it and solve it.