Paul Mulholland

nQuire: Technological Support for Personal Inquiry Learning

This paper describes the development of nQuire, a software application to guide personal inquiry learning. nQuire provides teacher support for authoring, orchestrating, and monitoring inquiries as well as student support for carrying out, configuring, and reviewing inquiries. nQuire allows inquiries to be scripted and configured in various ways, so that personally relevant, rather than off-the-shelf inquiries, can be created and used by teachers and students. nQuire incorporates an approach to specifying learning flow that provides flexible access to current inquiry activities without precluding access to other activities for review and orientation. Dependencies between activities are automatically handled, ensuring decisions made by the student or teacher are propagated through the inquiry. nQuire can be used to support inquiry activities across individual, group, and class levels at different parts of the inquiry and offers a flexible, web-based approach that can incorporate different devices (smart phone, netbook, PC) and does not rely on constant connectivity.

A novel approach to visualizing and navigating ontologies

There is empirical evidence that the user interaction metaphors used in ontology engineering toolkits are largely inadequate and that novel interactive frameworks for human ontology interaction are needed. Here we present a novel tool for visualizing and navigating ontologies, called KC Viz, which exploits an innovative ontology summarization method to support a ’middleout ontology browsing’ approach, where it becomes possible to navigate ontologies starting from the most information-rich nodes (i.e., key concepts). This approach is similar to map-based visualization and navigation in Geographical Information Systems, where, e.g., major cities are displayed more prominently than others, depending on the current level of granularity.

Story fountain: intelligent support for story research and exploration

Increasingly heritage institutions are making digital artifacts available to the general public and research groups to promote the active exploration of heritage and encourage visits to heritage sites. Stories, such as folklore and first person accounts form a useful and engaging heritage resource for this purpose. Story Fountain provides intelligent support for the exploration of digital stories. The suite of functions provided in Story Fountain together support the investigation of questions and topics that require the accumulation, association or induction of information across the story archive. Story Fountain provides specific support toward this end such as for comparing and contrasting story concepts, the presentation of story paths between concepts, and mapping stories and events according to properties such as who met whom and who lived where.

Personal inquiry : orchestrating science investigations within and beyond the classroom.

A central challenge for science educators is to enable young people to act as scientists by gathering and assessing evidence, conducting experiments, and engaging in informed debate. We report the design of the nQuire toolkit, a system to support scripted personal inquiry learning, and a study of its use with school students ages 11–14. This differs from previous work on inquiry learning by its emphasis on learners investigating topics of personal significance supported by a computer-based toolkit to guide school pupils through an entire inquiry process that connects structured learning in the classroom with discovery and data collection at home or outdoors. Findings from the studies indicate that the toolkit was successfully adopted by teachers and pupils in contexts that included teacher-directed lessons, an after-school club, field trips, and learner-managed homework. It effectively supported the transition between individual, group, and whole-class activities and supported learning across formal and informal settings. We discuss issues raised by the intervention studies, including how the combination of technology and pedagogy provided support for the teacher despite difficulties in managing the technology and integrating field data into a classroom lesson. We also discuss the difficulty of altering young people’s attitudes to science.

Using digital narratives to support the collaborative learning and exploration of cultural heritage

Cultural institutions increasingly see the need to play an important role in the lifelong learning of citizens. Recent trends, particularly in science museums, have been toward supporting visitors to actively learn rather than passively receive information. We propose how narrative can be used within the design of new technologies to support lifelong learning in a cultural setting. Narratives can be used to construct explanations and make sense of the world. Narrative is also central to collaboration and the building of community identity. Heritage collections, whether held privately or curated by a cultural institution convey narratives. Our conceptualisation of narrative, learning theory and curatorial practice indicates that new technology in the cultural domain should: support active interpretation; help reveal the context and process underpinning cultural artefacts; support learning and creativity; and address the challenge to provide an experience that is both entertaining and educational.

What can the language of musicians tell us about music interaction design

It is difficult to create good interaction designs for music software or to substantially improve existing designs. One reason is that music involves diverse and complex concepts, entities, relationships, processes, terminologies, and notations. An open challenge for interaction designers is to find systematic ways of channeling the tacit, specialized knowledge of musicians into designs for intuitive user interfaces that can capably support musically skilled users, without excluding those with less technical musical knowledge. One promising new approach to this challenge involves the application of research from the theory of image schemas and conceptual metaphors This theory has already been applied with some success to analyzing musical concepts, mathematical concepts, general-purpose user-interface design, and sound-generation interaction designs involving simple musical parameters such as tempo, volume, and pitch. We propose that by identifying the conceptual metaphors and image schemas used by musical experts when analyzing an excerpt of music, and then assessing the extent to which these conceptual metaphors are supported by existing music-interaction designs, it is possible to identify areas where the designs do not match musicians’ understanding of the domain concepts. This process provides a principled basis for identifying points at which designs could be improved to better support musicians’ understanding and tasks, and for the provisional identification of possible improvements. We present the results of an analysis of dialogue between three musicians as they discuss an excerpt of music. A methodology for the systematic identification of image schemas and conceptual metaphors is detailed. We report on the use of the results of the dialogue analysis to illuminate the designs of two contrasting examples of music software. Areas in which the designs might be made more intuitive are identified, and corresponding suggestions for improvements are outlined. The present research appears to be the first to investigate the potential of conceptual metaphor theory for investigating and improving music-interaction designs that deal with complex musical concepts, such as harmonic progressions, modulation, and voice leading.

How technology resources can be used to represent personal inquiry and support students' understanding of it across contexts

The Personal Inquiry project is an investigation into the role that technologies can play in enabling effective inquiry. Whilst it is generally agreed that inquiry based learning has potential for student learning, especially in science, three main challenges remain. The first is to provide effective support for inquiry learning, for both students and teachers; the second is to be able to support inquiry learning across a range of contexts including formal settings such as classrooms and informal settings such as the home and the final challenge is to support inquiries that engage the students.This paper addresses how inquiry based activities for students and the teacher orchestration of such activities across time and contexts can be supported by technology, using scripting. Personalisation of the inquiries in terms of relevance and providing students with choice about the inquiries they carry out is an important part of the project’s objective to engage students. A framework for the inquiry learning process is presented and how this framework has influenced the design of the software nQuire is illustrated. Examples are drawn from trials with the software in several different settings with children working on science and geography investigations.

A methodological approach to supporting organizational learning

Many organizations need to respond quickly to change and their workers need to regularly develop new knowledge and skills. The prevailing approach to meeting these demands is on-the-job training, but this is known to be highly ineffective, cause stress and devalue workplace autonomy. Conversely, organizational learning is a process through which workers learn gradually in the work context through experience, reflection on work practice and collaboration with colleagues. Our approach aims to support and enhance organizational learning around enriched work representations. Work representations are tools and documents used to support collaborative working and learning. These are enriched through associations with formal knowledge models and informal discourse. The work representations, informal discourse and associated knowledge models together form on organizational memory from which knowledge can be retrieved later. Our methodological approach to supporting organizational learning is drawn from three industrial case studies concerned with machine maintenance, team planning and hotline support. The methodology encompasses development and design activities, a description of the roles and duties required to sustain the long-term use of the tools, and applicability criteria outlining the kind of organizations that can benefit from this approach.

Music and Human-Computer Interaction

This agenda-setting book presents state of the art research in Music and Human-Computer Interaction (also known as Music Interaction). Music Interaction research is at an exciting and formative stage. Topics discussed include interactive music systems, digital and virtual musical instruments, theories, methodologies and technologies for Music Interaction. Musical activities covered include composition, performance, improvisation, analysis, live coding, and collaborative music making. Innovative approaches to existing musical activities are explored, as well as tools that make new kinds of musical activity possible. Music and Human-Computer Interaction is stimulating reading for professionals and enthusiasts alike: researchers, musicians, interactive music system designers, music software developers, educators, and those seeking deeper involvement in music interaction. It presents the very latest research, discusses fundamental ideas, and identifies key issues and directions for future work.

An effective web-based software visualization learning environment

This paper describes the design, implementation and use of an effective web-based software visualization environment for use within a computer science curriculum. Initial design issues focused on providing an environment tightly integrated with other learning resources and carefully considered the needs of the target population. The first example system built in the Internet Software Visualization Laboratory is currently being used on a Masters level programming course, though the generic architecture is able to present a range of visualizations for a number of languages. Our work has led us to devise 11 design principles for effective web-based software visualization which cover teaching requirements, sustainability, ease of use and remoteness.