Rita M. Vick

Japanese and American Students Meet on the Web: Collaborative Language Learning through Everyday Dialogue with Peers

This case study discusses the design, implementation, and results of a series of collaborative Japanese language-learning sessions conducted synchronously and asynchronously via the Internet among globally distributed, cross-institutional teams of students. MUD/MOO-like team-room scenarios required that students engage in more extensive use of language skills than would be required in usual classroom work. This virtual classroom design provided a naturalistic environment for computer assisted language learning (CALL) while motivating students to adapt more readily to interaction with peers in a varied, complex, and uncertain environment. At the same time, the tasks to be accomplished provided students with the opportunity to engage in virtual teamwork with peers in a challenging and enjoyable problem-solving and decision-making context. Within this framework, AI techniques that enhance team memory, sustain workflow processes, and employ user/learner models will play an imp ortant role in the near future.

Methodological issues of real time data acquisition from multiple sources of physiological data

Safe and effective use of monitoring, scheduling, and action-guidance technologies is often dependent upon human operator agency. The cognitive ability of the human operator to control the environment varies depending on the individuals affective and physiological state as well as on situation-dependent temporal and contextual factors. Clearly, there is a need for real-time assessment of cognitive load in order to increase operator effectiveness through adaptive filtering of information. In order to begin assessment of how to flexibly augment human operator capabilities in real time, a study to determine the best practices for intercepting and synchronizing biosensor information from operators engaged in visual search tasks was performed.

Prototyping the Emergence of Collaborative Knowledge

E-learning growth is driven by global, societal, and technological changes that both enable and require increased worker and learner mobility, access to distributed domain expertise, and lifelong learning. Distance learning can deliver course value that cannot be provided in a classroom to trainers, workers, educators and learners. This study presents a prototype for analysis of how knowledge emerges during distributed team decision making. Analysis of ad hoc sharing of individual knowledge during synchronous online text-based group discourse demonstrates how reciprocal knowledge construction can enable emergence of shared understanding. The difficulty of evaluating collaborative knowledge construction in a virtual environment is demonstrated by presenting an annotated discourse episode for a distributed decision making task used to acquaint learners with the nature of virtual teamwork.