Monica Divitini

Blog to support learning in the field: lessons learned from a fiasco

In this paper we report on our experience using a blog to support teacher education. The system has been used to support communication and reflection while students were spending a period of teaching practice. The system has not been used, despite its potential usefulness. In this paper we reflect on this experience to identify strengths and weaknesses of blogs in supporting learning in the field.

Collaborative virtual environments for supporting learning communities: an experience of use

In this paper we present the experiences of usage of Viras, a collaborative virtual environment for social awareness support in educational settings. Collaborative Virtual environments (CVE) have lately been used for learning in different contexts, and offer promising possibilities for supporting social awareness. In our study, we look at how students evaluate CVE in educational settings and investigate the importance of different factors on social awareness.

Language learning: from individual learners to communities

Mobile personal technologies are mostly used to support the mobile learners of a language by promoting anytime anywhere access to learning resources. In our work, we rather focus on the need to look at the communities where the learning takes place and is contextualised. This opens for a complementary usage of mobile technologies to promote anytime anywhere access to other people and the contextualisation of learning resources. In this paper, we present some initial scenarios illustrating different forms of mobility. We then identify key dimensions to understand mobility of learners across multiple communities and draw some initial implications for design of mobile technologies.

Reflections on the Role of Technology in City-wide Collaborative Learning

In this paper we investigate collaborative learning that takes place in a city with the support of mobile and wireless technology. Based on a literature review, we identify and discuss four main roles that technology can play in supporting (1) performance of shared tasks, (2) social networking, (3) active participation, and (4) visibility of learning. We claim that the full potential of new technology emerges by supporting learning that comes from exploration, interaction, and serendipity. Realizing this potential raises a number of technical challenges that are still largely unexplored. In particular, we claim that there is a need to move from applications design to a service-oriented infrastructure that eases the development and adaptation of applications for multiple and interleaved learning experiences. Services that are common across different learning scenarios and can be used as building blocks need to be identified. The aforementioned roles are the first step towards this direction.

Enriching Spaces in Practice-Based Education to Support Collaboration while Mobile: The Case of Teacher Education.

Practice-based education is gaining a growing popularity in fields as diverse as, for example, software engineering, pedagogy and medical studies. In practice-based education learning takes place across different learning arenas and requires cooperation among all the actors involved in the learning process. However, mobility of students across these arenas impact deeply on cooperation patterns, and therefore on the learning process. In this paper we investigate the usage of shared display systems to promote cooperation among students in practice-based education. Our focus is on teacher education and the paper is based on our experiences with the teacher education programme at our university. Based on our observations of students out in practice, we discuss the importance of common spaces and the role of bulletin boards of different types. We then define high-level requirements for a shared display system to support practice-based education and we illustrate the main concepts with a demonstrator. Strengths and weaknesses of our approach are pointed out through an evaluation of the demonstrator.

Sense of community among mobile language learners: can blogs support this?

Language learners have a need to complement their classroom learning activities with experiences outside the classroom and interact with other speakers and learners of the language to practice it. Communities play a major role in supporting language learners. A class of university students studying French is, as such, a community of language learners. A mobile community blog was used to establish and support a sense of community among the students in the classroom as well as outside, particularly when some of the students travel to France as part of their studies. The blog was intended to facilitate active participation, social interaction and collaboration among the members of the community. This paper evaluates the use of the blog and analyses the results to identify the issues that are important in supporting a community of mobile language learners.

MOTUS goes to Africa: mobile technologies to increase sustainability of collaborative models for teacher education

In this paper we outline the research we are currently doing on the usage of mobile and ambient technologies for supporting cooperation in teacher education. Based on this experience, we argue that mobile and wireless technologies can increase the sustainability of cooperative models for teacher education in developing countries.

Reactive Agents for a Systemic Approach to the Construction of Coordination Mechanisms

This paper presents ABACO, an agent-based architecture for the design of systems supporting the articulation of cooperative activities. The architecture is based on the notion of coordination mechanisms. The development of the architecture is driven by the aim of designing systems that can be used within contexts that require different and varying levels of support, fully taking into account the distributed nature of articulation work. This flexibility is achieved in ABACO thanks to a systemic approach where reactive agents are combined into constellations to provide advanced support. In this paper we discuss the use of agents in the context of CSCW systems, and then we present the details of the architecture together with its usage.

A computational model of communication for reducing linguistic opacity based on the language-action perspective

Abstract This paper presents a communication model based on the language-action perspective aiming at reducing what is called linguistic opacity. In particular, the focus is on mechanisms supporting the maintenance of the contexts against which the interpretation of conversations occurs. The mechanisms are based on a communication model where two types of conversations are considered: conversations for action and conversations for possibility. They are used for negotiating commitments that shape the work arrangements in relation to the actions to be performed (the operational context) and the organizational space of possibility for future actions (the organizational context). The proposed computational model takes into account the dynamics of knowledge creation and sharing by describing how conversations modify the operational and organizational context as well as the partial views of them shaped by different actors.