Miikka Miettinen

EDUCO - A Collaborative Learning Environment Based on Social Navigation

Web-based learning is primarily a lonesome activity, even when it involves working in groups. This is due to the fact that the majority of web-based learning relies on asynchronous forms of interacting with other people. In most of the cases, the chat discussion is the only form of synchronous interaction that adds to the feeling that there are other people present in the environment. EDUCO is a system that tries to bring in the sense of other users in a collaborative learning environment by making the other users and their the navigation visible to everyone else in the environment in real-time. The paper describes EDUCO and presents the first empirical evaluation as EDUCO was used in a university course.

Evaluating the role of a shared document-based annotation tool in learner-centered collaborative learning

This study presents a shared document-based annotation tool, EDUCOSM. Usefulness of the system is empirically evaluated in a real-life collaborative learning context. Relationships between learners self-rated use of learning strategies, cognitive outcomes, and completion of various tasks in the system are investigated. An empirical study (n=31) was conducted in order to investigate various dependencies between variables from precourse self-rated questionnaire, system log file data collected during the course and postcourse e-mail survey.

EDUCOSM - personalized writable Web for learning communities

Many of the possibilities of Web-based education are still unexplored. It seems that novel ways of thinking about both learning and technology are needed to get beyond the limitations of the traditional classroom setting. In this paper we introduce EDUCOSM, which focusses on the possibilities of collaboration and the open-ended nature of the Web. Its main features include sharing and annotation of arbitrary Web-pages, and an adaptive desktop for accessing the evolving contents of the system. EDUCOSM has been used in a real Web-based course, and the experiences are discussed along with a description of the tool. Although the approach requires both the teacher and the students to rethink their roles, the feedback received so far has been encouraging.

Peer-to-peer learning with open-ended writable Web

In spite of advances in educational technology, most Web-based computer science courses rely on costly pre-made learning materials. By shifting the emphasis to peer-to-peer learning and other student-centred learning principles, more meaningful learning process can be accomplished, without preparing stand-alone Web-courses. A course applying these principles is presented along with a tool built for the purpose. The tool offers the possibility to build a joint information pool and publish new work while constructing knowledge by collaborative annotation of the information or published work. According to our experince, transparency in the learning process is also well-accepted and viewed beneficial by the students.

The role of the learning platform in student-centred e-learning

It is often a case that technologically-oriented research on e-learning stresses the tools and individual features used in e-learning platforms rather than the pedagogical model and the underlying course structures. This study compares the outcomes from a similar course in a similar setting using very different learning platforms designed by the same research group. The tool used in the first course, EDUCO, offers awareness of other learners by real-time social navigation features. The tool used in the second course, EDUCOSM, relies on easy-to-make joint asynchronous annotations on documents. The pedagogical model for the courses was the same: student-centered learning in self-organizing and self-evolving groups using peer support to tackle open-ended large problems. The results suggest that the learning outcomes can vary, especially in a case where the environment is open and transparent in a sense that it enables learners to easily rely on and help each other in peer-to-peer fashion.

Dynamic Profiling in a Real-Time Collaborative Learning Environment

EDUCO is system for collaborative web-based learning. Collaboration is enabled by real-time social navigation and support for social interaction via synchronous and asynchronous discussions. However, the system and the use of the system in collaborative learning could benefit from dynamic profiling as well as active recommendations for the students working in the learning environment. The paper describes the system and discusses the generation of profiles and recommendations.

Supporting open-ended discourse with transparent groupware

Web-based learning communities need tools that provide specific support to their progressive and open-ended efforts. The paper starts with an overview of some fundamental principles and phenomena underlying the activities of learning communities, and suggests openness and transparency as two crucial requirements for effective tools. In particular, learning communities should be enabled to utilise any available information sources effectively and engage in artifact-centred discourse. We introduce a system called OurWeb, describing both its current features and a number of ideas for improvement. We also report our experiences from a university course, where a group of computer science students worked like an expert community using OurWeb.

Evaluating the effect of social cues with automated experiments

Social cues present promising opportunities for facilitating collaboration online. Many interesting ideas and applications have been proposed, but there is still limited empirical understanding of the usefulness of various kinds of social cues. The contribution of this article is twofold. Firstly, we report a detailed evaluation of the social cues available in the collaborative learning environment EDUCO. Our study is based on automated experiments, in which the real social cues were occasionally replaced with artificial ones that were specifically designed for examining particular hypotheses. The results suggest that the users attend to the social cues, but do not make navigation decisions solely on the basis of social cues. Secondly, our study demonstrates the potential of automated experiments in studying behavior in virtual environments. Specific interventions made in natural circumstances can supplement other research methodologies in useful ways.ZusammenfassungDer Einsatz so genannter „social cues“ (soziale Anreize) stellt viel versprechende Möglichkelten zur Unterstützung von Online-Zusammenarbeit dar. Viele interessante Ideen und Anwendungen wurden diesbezüglich vorgestellt, aber empirisch belegte Erkenntnisse zur Nützlichkeit von social cues fehlen bis jetzt völlig. Dieser Artikel leistet zwei wesentliche Beiträge: Zunächst stellen die Autoren eine detaillierte Evaluation von social cues dar, basierend auf Erfahrungen in der Lernplattform EDUCO. Die Studie beruht auf automatisierten Experimenten, in denen reale social cues zufällig durch künstliche ersetzt wurden, um bestimmte Hypothesen zu testen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die End-Benutzer zwar soichen social cues Aufmerksamkeit schenken, aber ihre Navigationsentscheidungen davon nicht ausschließlich abhängig machen. Im Anschluss daran zeigt diese Studie das Potential automatisierter Experimente in Verhaltensstudien virtueller Räume.