Marcos Alexandre Rose Silva

Promoting Collaboration through a Culturally Contextualized Narrative Game

This paper describes a research about developing web narrative game to be used at school by teachers, considering students’ culture expressed in common sense knowledge, for storytelling, allowing teacher to create stories according to student’s cultural reality, and consequently enabling students to identify and get interested in collaborating with the teacher and other students to develop the story, being co-authors. Therefore this game can allow students to learn how to express themselves, which means to leave their imagination flow and to allow them to adequately understand and elaborate situations experienced in school, family and community with no impact on their real life. Through stories students also can learn how to work collaboratively, to help, and to be helped by their friends and teacher. This context is also applicable on companies, considering teamwork and the necessary role each one has to play for collaborative work.

Ambiente para criação de jogos educacionais de adivinhação baseados em cartas contextualizadas

Resumo: A pesquisa teve como objetivo verificar as relacoes sociais entre os individuos, numa disciplina presencial, quando suportadas por um ambiente virtual. Foi aplicado um questionario semi-estruturado com 17 alunos de uma disciplina de um curso de Mestrado. A analise constatou indicios de uma comunidade presente nas trocas existentes entre os alunos da disciplina. Abstract: The research aimed to investigate social relationships between students and teahcer in a classroom setting when using a Virtual Learning Environment. A survey was conducted with 17 students from a graduate course. The results indicate traces of a community in the exchange between students.Resumo: Este artigo apresenta os resultados do curso “Introducao ao Estudo da Dislexia” desenvolvido na plataforma MIRANTE - Midia Interativa com Recursos de Acessibilidade, que se destina a capacitacao de professores para trabalharem com alunos dislexicos. Analisa o desempenho dos cursistas, nao so na apropriacao do conteudo do curso, mas tambem no ambiente virtual interativo que permite a flexibilizacao do ensino e a promocao de processos individuais de aprendizagem. Abstract: This article describes the first module of a teachers’s capacitation courser available in the long-distance education enviroment MIRANTE - Interactive Media with the Accessibility Resources of NTE. Its subject is the Dyslexia, which represents, at the current moment, a serious problem a mong student. Education professionals are, each time, more aware of it. To capacitate long-distance teachers, discussing the characteristics of Dyslexia end pointing out the resources for the inclusion of those students and the development of methods and technologies, which may help students with learning problem, is the aim of this course.Resumo: Este artigo resumido descreve a experiencia do Curso “A Literatura Infantil e o Livro Eletronico” desenvolvido no Nucleo de Tecnologia Educacional de Sao Pedro da Aldeia – NTE RJ 10 com alunos do Curso de Formacao de Professores. Abstract: This summarized article describes the experience of the Course “The Infantile Literature and the Eletronic Book” developed into the Nucleo de Tecnologia Educacional de Sao Pedro da Aldeia – NTE RJ 10 with students of the Teacher Training Course.Resumo: Este artigo aborda o ensino da Arte atraves do trabalho com projetos e utilizacao do ambiente colaborativo SOCRATES. A pesquisa foi realizada numa escola da rede municipal de ensino de Fortaleza, com alunos do 7o ano. Os dados apresentados compoem os foruns de discussao realizados durante o projeto A Arte pela Arte. Dentre os resultados, enfoca-se a interacao constante, a aprendizagem colaborativa e o uso intensivo dos recursos tecnologicos. Tais dados indicam que trabalhar com projetos tendo o SOCRATES como suporte constitui-se em alternativa viavel para a dinamizacao da Arte como disciplina dos curriculos. Abstract: The study investigated a project-based approach for art teaching with support of a virtual environment called SOCRATES. The research was conducted in a public school in Fortaleza with 7th grade students. Data was composed of messages from the SOCRATES forum during a Project called “Art by Art”. Results indicate the presence of constant students’ interaction, collaborative learning and intensive use of technological resources. Such data indicate that the project based approach, supported by SOCRATES, is a viable alternative to promote Arts as a discipline in school curriculum.

Culturally sensitive computer support for creative co-authorship of a sex education game

We describe a computer-supported game authoring system for educators to co-author a game to help teaching sensitive content, specifically sex education. Our approach provides educators the ability to co-author the game to tailor it to the class based on a computer-supported interface that draws upon a large, cultural database. By targeting the game to the culture of the students, they feel their values, beliefs and vocabulary are being considered in the game, providing better comprehension of the content, leading to stronger learning engagement that is helpful for highly charged, sometimes uncomfortable and sensitive material such as sex. We studied our design in the classroom and observed that giving educators co-authorship of the game helps them adopt using online games.

Filling out learning object metadata considering cultural contextualization

This paper presents Cognitor, a common-sense aided framework for the Cog-Learn Pattern Language that aims to help content editors create and contextualize e-learning content through the generation of hyper documents that comprise pedagogical issues, producing learning objects (LO) compatible with the SCORM standard. Cog-Learn have been developed from Learning and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Theories. The goal of Cognitor is to allow for the design of digital learning material with better organization of the content that will be explored by learners, aiming to make easier the interaction with it, addressing HCI issues, as well as the interaction between learners and teachers, addressing Human-Human Interaction (HHI) issues. To reach that, it is important that the LO created in Cognitor be easy to reuse, helping creators to fill out the metadata aiming at addressing cultural issues related to the context in which the LO can be adopted and reused. For that, suggestions coming from a common sense knowledge base automatically appear in some SCORM metadata fields in order to help the task of filling out culturally contextualized metadata.

e-Rural: a framework to generate hyperdocuments for milk producers with different levels of literacy to promote better quality milking

We created and tested e-Rural, an approach to allow educators to dynamically adjust the target literacy level for their online learning content using a combination of three tools: PACO-T for planning, COGNITOR for editing hyper documents and Simplifica for text simplification. PACO-T and COGNITOR use the Brazilian Open Mind Common Sense knowledgebase (OMCS-Br) to provide access to commonly held understandings and beliefs on a diverse set of topics associated with a large range of Brazilian demographics, including, people with low literacy. We tested our experiment with 13 users that were creating hyperdocument-based learning content to describe important methods to milk production. We chose milk production as this is one of Brazils primary agricultural products and yet it has been established that there is a wide gap between the content from researchers with methods to greatly enhance the quality and economic power of milk production and the tacit knowledge and procedures of the farmers who actually produce the milk who are often at low literacy levels consistent with Brazils low literacy levels being around 75% of the population. Our experiments reveal that educators are able to produce milk related learning content geared towards different literacy levels using our tools with a very satisfying efficacy and efficiency levels. Thus, we believe that the use of our approach that introduces demographically sensitive common sense holds promise to bridge the gap between high literacy researchers with evidence-based approach to milk production and tacitly-based, low-literacy milk producers to better develop the milk industry in Brazil.

Processing common sense knowledge to develop contextualized computer applications

This paper describes how to use and to collect the common sense knowledge and how to process such information to create semantic network and to available it for applications. In this context, it is also presented an educational application which uses this knowledge to create a contextualized stories, because this game allows educators being co-authors on creating the story context taking into account their goals, pedagogical approach and the students cultural reality. Then, teachers can adopt values, metaphors, cause and consequence relations or even a common vocabulary before and during the narrative game and, consequently, enabling students to feel identified in that story context being considered and get interested and engaged in collaborating with the teacher and other students to develop the story. In order to observe the use of this game in an educational environment and collect the target group opinion, a study case was performed at school with teachers and children, and is described in this paper.

A narrative game as an educational entertainment resource to teach words to children with learning deficits: a feasibility study

We describe the use of an entertainment computer narrative game to teach words to a child in a special education process. In order to observe the potential of this kind of game, we chosen a child who has difficult to learn some words using a basic computer tool at writing learning special education environment. The results showed that narrative games and its entertainment resources can be a good way to allow child reads and writes words considering different sentences and contexts, as well as, resources of the game can be a useful strategy to engage child on the storytelling.

Using culture to help people communication throught computer games in educational and therapeutic environment

This paper describes the use of common sense knowledge to develop both interface and content of the applications taking into consideration peoples cultural background. People can easily understand whole information presents in application when they are in a familiar and natural language. Because of this, it is important to consider peoples culture, values and language during applications developing to allow them to use these applications in a familiar way to work or to interact with others people. To illustrate this possibility, it is presented here two applications with different objectives but both need to stimulate people to interact and to cooperate with each other. These two applications, called: Contexteller and FamilySense, use common sense knowledge to allow people feel themselves more interest to interact with computer and with others people through computer.

A game to support childrens´ expression and socialization considering their cultural background

This paper describes Contexteller, a collaborative educational system for storytelling that supports teachers in configuring and adapting stories to match childrens cultural background, by means of exploiting common sense knowledge. This game is meant to support teachers to interact with students with different social and cultural backgrounds, allowing her/him to create stories according to the students´ cultural reality, expressed in their common sense knowledge, and consequently enabling them to get interested in helping the development of the story. This cultural sensitive storytelling environment intends to promote a closer contact between teacher and students and among students themselves giving them a computer tool to help children to freely express their thoughts, desires and to support them to cooperative work with teachers what is desirable for their intellectual and cognitive development. Contextualization and the narrative are supported by the OMCS-Br common sense knowledge base, which gives to the teacher some resources to perform an activity according to the pedagogical goals

Guideline for Designing Accessible Systems to Users with Visual Impairment: Experience with Users and Accessibility Evaluation Tools.

Nowadays, society uses computer systems in diverse day to day activities, such as shopping, social interaction, study, research, etc.; however, a considerable number of the population, who has some kind of special necessity, faces difficulties in using those systems for various reasons, for example, there are codes not written in a way that allows screen readers to identify the menus, contents, etc., to make the correct reading for users. In that context, this paper contains the description of a research done to identify guidelines and/or techniques that address a code document to facilitate interaction between the visually impaired and computer. By applying those guidelines to a prototype and then submitting it to testing with visually disabled users, it was observed that the source code was more legible for screen readers and user interaction was facilitated; however, during user testings, improvements that could be applied to the existing guidelines were observed. Beside user testings, this paper reports a research on automated validators and their criteria on source codes accessibility. It is noted that this automated verification does not exclude tests involving users, because both tests are important in the process of accessibility assurance.