Liz Burd

Multi‐touch tables and collaborative learning

Abstract The development of multi-touch tables, an emerging technology for classroom learning, offers valuable opportunities to explore how its features can be designed to support effective collaboration in schools. In this study, small groups of 10- to 11-year-old children undertook a history task where they had to connect various pieces of information about a mining accident to reach a consensus about who had been responsible. Their interaction using traditional resources was compared with their interaction when using a multi-touch table. Analysis suggests that the design and capabilities of the multi-touch technology offers some key features that supported the collaboration and interaction of the participants, particularly in the early stages of the task. Some of these features appear to provide new opportunities for collaboration and interaction, which were different from the interactions observed in the paper-based groups. These features of the multi-touch surface therefore appear to support effective interaction between the pupils. Practitioner Notes What is already known about this topic • Research suggests that collaborative interaction supports learning. • Features such as the nature of the task and the social interaction influence these outcomes. What this paper adds • This paper looks specifically at the possibilities when a large multi-touch table is used to support collaboration. • It compares paper-based and multi-touch versions of the same activity involving school pupils. Implications for practice and/or policy • Multi-touch surfaces can support collaborative interaction. • The initial stages of the task were significantly different. • Pupils should be encouraged to reach a consensus about what they have to do and how they are going to do it as well as encouraged to produce a joint solution.

A multi-touch interface for enhancing collaborative UML diagramming

Multi-touch interfaces facilitate collaborative learning and, thus, represent a promising educational technology. Their ability to synchronously accommodate multiple users is an advantage in co-located collaborative design tasks. This paper explores the multi-touch interfaces potential in collaborative Unified Modelling Language (UML) diagramming by comparing it to a PC-based tool. The results of the study demonstrate that the use of the multi-touch table enables an increase in the equity of participation, enhanced collaboration amongst team members, and the facilitation of parallel-participative design.

Pedagogic data as a basis for Web service fault models

This paper outlines our method for deriving fault models for use with our WS-FIT tool that can be used to assess the dependability of SOA. Since one of the major issues with extracting these heuristic rules and fault models is the availability of software systems we examine the use of systems constructed through pedagogic activities to provide one source of information.

Using automated source code analysis for software evolution

Software maintenance is one of the most expensive and time-consuming phases in the software life-cycle. The size and complexity of commercial applications probably present the greatest difficulty that maintainers face when making changes to their applications. As a result of the corresponding loss of understanding, business knowledge encapsulated within the system becomes fragmented, and any changes made as a result of new business initiatives become difficult to implement and hence may mean a loss of business opportunities. The paper outlines an approach to regaining understanding of software which has been used in the Release project at Durham University. This approach involves determining the calling structure of a program in terms of a call-graph, and from this call-graph extracting a dominance tree. Various problems which have been encountered during the construction of tools to perform this task are described.

Tag based feedback for programming courses

This paper reports the findings of a preliminary investigation into whether feedback generated by annotating source code with tags is considered useful by undergraduate students. These types of annotations facilitate a new approach to presenting assessment feedback to students in the form of a Web 2.0 tagging environment. This paper highlights the benefits and limitations of this approach as well as details of student reaction and behavior. This investigation focuses on assessment and feedback for an undergraduate Software Engineering Group Project. The preliminary results collected encourage further investigation of this approach.

Using Feedback Tags and Sentiment Analysis to Generate Sharable Learning Resources Investigating Automated Sentiment Analysis of Feedback Tags in a Programming Course

This paper demonstrates how sentiment analysis can be used to identify differences in how students and staff perceive the opinions contained in feedback for programming work. The feedback considered in this paper is conceptually different in that it is given in the form of tags that when associated with a fragment of source code can be considered as a sharable learning resource. The research presented investigates the differences in perception of whether feedback is positive, negative or neutral according to students and examiners. This paper also investigates the adequacy of an automated sentiment analysis engine with a view that sentiment information when combined with the feedback tag and source code may create a more informative sharable learning resource. This paper describes the investigatory technique and presents the initial results. Results indicate that there are important differences between the sentiment of feedback perceived by students and examiners. This paper highlights the benefit of including sentiment data along with feedback.

Guidelines for supporting real-time multi-touch applications

Multi‐touch driven user interfaces are becoming increasingly prevalent because of their intuitiveness and because of the reduction in the associated hardware costs. In recognition of this trend, multi‐touch software frameworks (MSFs) have begun to emerge. These frameworks abstract the low level issues of multi‐touch software development and deployment. MSFs therefore enable software developers who are unfamiliar with the complexities of multi‐touch software development to implement and deploy multi‐touch applications more easily. However, some multi‐touch applications have real‐time system requirements, and at present, no MSFs provide support for the development and deployment of such real‐time multi‐touch applications. The implication of this is that software developers are unable to take advantage of MSFs and, therefore, are forced to handle the complexities of multi‐touch and real‐time systems development and deployment for themselves in an ad hoc manner. The primary consequence of this is that the multi‐touch and/or real‐time aspects of the application may not function correctly. In this paper, guidelines are presented for applying real‐time system concepts to support the development and deployment of real‐time multi‐touch applications using MSFs. This serves to increase the probability that the application will meet its timing requirements while also reducing the complexity of the development and deployment process associated with multi‐touch applications. Copyright

Towards a constructivist approach to learning from hypertext

How to help learners construct knowledge from hypertext and plan a navigation process on the Web are important issues in Web based learning. To provide solutions to these issues, this paper presents Knowledge Puzzle, a tool for knowledge construction from the Web. Its main contribution to Web-based learning is the personalization of information structure on the Web to cope with the knowledge structure in the learners mind. Self-directed learners will be able to adapt the path of instruction on the Web to their way of thinking, regardless of how the Web content is delivered. The way to achieve that is to provide learners with a meta-cognitive tool that enables them to bring knowledge gained from the Web to the surface and visualize what they have in mind. Once we get the learners viewpoint externalized, it will be converted to a hypermedia layer that will be laid over the Web pages visited by the learner. The attached layer adapts the views of Web pages to the learners information needs by associating information pieces that are not already linked in hyperspace and attaching the learners notes to the page content. Finally, a hypertext version of the whole constructed knowledge is produced to enable fast and easy reviewing.

Aural instruction with visualization in E-Learning

This research investigates the effectiveness of using aural instructions together with visualisation in teaching some concepts of data structures to novice computer science students. A prototype learning system, known as the Data Structure Learning (DSL) tool, was developed and used first in a short mini study that showed that, used together with visualisations of algorithms, aural instructions produced faster student response times than did textual instructions. This result suggested that the additional use of the auditory sensory channel did indeed reduce the cognitive load. The tool was then used in a second, longitudinal, study over two academic terms in which students studying the Data Structures module were offered the opportunity to use the DSL approach with either aural or textual instructions. Both the quantitative data provided by the automatic recording of DSL use and an end-of-study questionnaire showed appreciation by students of the help the tool had provided and enthusiasm for its future use and development. These findings were supported by qualitative data provided by student written feedback at the end of each task, by interviews at the end of the experiment and by interest from the lecturer in integrating use of the tool with the teaching of the module.

Collaborative software design using multi-touch tables

The use of multi-touch interfaces for collaborative software design has received significant attention. Multi-touch surfaces can accommodate more than one user synchronously which is particularly useful for collaborative design tasks with open-ended nature. In this paper, we explore the potential of using multi-touch technology for Unified Modeling Language (UML) software design by comparing it with PC-based collaborative software design. Results show that the use of multi-touch table enhanced collaboration amongst the team members and increased shared contribution.