Trevor Collins

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.

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.

Storyspace: a story-driven approach for creating museum narratives

In a curated exhibition of a museum or art gallery, a selection of heritage objects and associated information is presented to a visitor for the purpose of telling a story about them. The same underlying story can be presented in a number of different ways. This paper describes techniques for creating multiple alternative narrative structures from a single underlying story, by selecting different organising principles for the events and plot structures of the story. These authorial decisions can produce different dramatic effects. Storyspace is a web interface to an ontology for describing curatorial narratives. We describe how the narrative component of the Storyspace software can produce multiple narratives from the underlying stories and plots of curated exhibitions. Based on the curators choice, the narrative module suggests a coherent ordering for the events of a story and its associated heritage objects. Narratives constructed through Storyspace can be tailored to suit different audiences and can be presented in different forms, such as physical exhibitions, museum tours, leaflets and catalogues, or as online experiences.

Representations for semantic learning webs : Semantic Web technology in learning support

Recent work on applying semantic technologies to learning has concentrated on providing novel means of accessing and making use of learning objects. However, this is unnecessarily limiting: semantic technologies will make it possible to develop a range of educational Semantic Web services, such as interpretation, structure-visualization, support for argumentation, novel forms of content customization, novel mechanisms for aggregating learning material, citation services and so on. In this paper, we outline an initial framework that extends the use of semantic technologies as a means of providing learning services that are owned and created by learning communities.

The Usability of Description Logics

Description Logics have been extensively studied from the viewpoint of decidability and computational tractability. Less attention has been given to their usability and the cognitive difficulties they present, in particular for those who are not specialists in logic. This paper reports on a study into the difficulties associated with the most commonly used Description Logic features. Psychological theories are used to take account of these. Whilst most of the features presented no difficulty to participants, the comprehension of some was affected by commonly occurring misconceptions. The paper proposes explanations and remedies for some of these difficulties. In addition, the time to confirm stated inferences was found to depend both on the maximum complexity of the relations involved and the number of steps in the argument.

Applying software visualization technology to support the use of evolutionary algorithms

This paper describes an approach to supporting the use of evolutionary algorithms through the integration of software visualization into the working practices of evolutionary algorithm users. A case is made for the provision of principled visualization support at an accessible level of abstraction for the user. Henson, a visualization framework for genetic algorithms is introduced that provides multiple levels of abstraction for the development of interactive visualizations. A genetic algorithm visualization tool called Gonzo is then described to illustrate the application of the framework approach and the integration of principled visualization design in an easily adopted visualization environment. This paper concludes with an overview of the approach described and the benefits revealed through the integration of visualization within the software design and development process.

Enabling Remote Access to Fieldwork: Gaining Insight into the Pedagogic Effectiveness of ‘Direct’ and ‘Remote’ Field Activities

This study considers the pedagogical effectiveness of remote access to fieldwork locations. Forty-one students from across the GEES disciplines (geography, earth and environmental sciences) undertook a fieldwork exercise, supported by two lecturers. Twenty students accessed the field site directly and the remainder accessed the site remotely using a computer network. Similar learning outcomes were achieved in relation to both methods of fieldwork, although the students’ attitudes and perceptions were found to vary. Despite these variations in experience, participants in both types of fieldwork exercise identified a range of situations in which remote access might enhance fieldwork provision.

Curate and storyspace: an ontology and web-based environment for describing curatorial narratives

Existing metadata schemes and content management systems used by museums focus on describing the heritage objects that the museum holds in its collection. These are used to manage and describe individual heritage objects according to properties such as artist, date and preservation requirements. Curatorial narratives, such as physical or online exhibitions tell a story that spans across heritage objects and have a meaning that does not necessarily reside in the individual heritage objects themselves. Here we present curate, an ontology for describing curatorial narratives. This draws on structuralist accounts that distinguish the narrative from the story and plot, and also a detailed analysis of two museum exhibitions and the curatorial processes that contributed to them. storyspace, our web based interface and API to the ontology, is being used by curatorial staff in two museums to model curatorial narratives and the processes through which they are constructed.