Yam San Chee

C-VISions: socialized learning through collaborative, virtual, interactive simulations

Todays cheaper personal computers with improved computational power have made the technology of networked desktop virtual reality environments accessible to typical end users, including students. This paper describes C-VISions, a collaborative virtual environment developed to support interactive and collaborative learning using virtual simulations. The research effort is grounded on the principles of active, experiential learning and constructivist/social constructivist ideas, with their attendant commitment to group sense making, discourse-based learning, and community building processes. The paper also provides an overview of the systems design and implementation. Finally, we explain the current status of the research effort and articulate plans for future work.

Cognitive Apprenticeship and Its Application to the Teaching of Smalltalk in a Multimedia Interactive Learning Environment.

With the rise of the situated cognition paradigm in cognitive science, cognitive apprenticeship has become increasingly prominent as a model of instruction. This paper critically reviews traditional approaches to learning and education to motivate the need for fresh ways of thinking about these topics. Cognitive apprenticeship as an approach to improving learning and education is described. We present an overview ofSmallTALKER, a learning environment for Smalltalk programming, and illustrate how the instructional methods of cognitive apprenticeship have been applied in developing that system. The paper concludes with a discussion of issues related to system development effort, evaluation, perceived limitations, and plans for related work.

A survey of distance education challenges and technologies

Distance education, e-learning, and virtual university are similar terms for a trend of modern education. It is an integration of information technologies, computer hardware systems, and communication tools to support educational professionals in remote teaching. This chapter presents an overview of distance education from the perspective of policy, people, and technology. A number of questions frequently asked in distance learning panel discussions are presented, with the suggested answers from the authors. The survey presented in this chapter includes communication, intelligent, and educational technologies of distance education. Readers of this 2 Shih, Hung, Ma, and Jin Copyright

Applying Gentner's theory of analogy to the teaching of computer programming

Abstract This research empirically tests the postulations of Gentner concerning the properties of explanatory analogy. It does so in the context of teaching programming. The factor analogy was operationalized by varying the clarity and systematicity/abstractness of the analogies used. The dependent variables were score obtained on program comprehension and program composition tasks and the time taken to perform the tasks. Research subjects were 15- to 17-year-olds without prior exposure to computer programming. Differences in age were controlled. The results provide empirical support for Gentners postulations on the relative goodness of competing analogies. In particular, good explanatory analogies are characterized by clarity and high systematicity/abstractness.

Refocusing learning on pedagogy in a connected world

Advances in technology provide valuable opportunities for furthering the goals and methods of education. In this paper, we argue that, unfortunately, many of these opportunities are not seized because of restrictive conceptions of education that constrain teachers to viewing the educational mission primarily in terms of providing instruction. Adopting a pedagogical stance on this issue leads us to a fundamental rethink of how technology can and should be used. From this reconsideration, we conclude that using technology predominantly to provide access to learning content is a misguided use of technology. Technology is rendered more powerful for learning objectives when it is used to support learning‐by‐doing. Technological advancement on its own does not lead to better education. Pedagogical guidance is vital if technology is to be productive for human learning.

Embodied tour guide in an interactive virtual art gallery

The technology of embodied conversational agents in virtual worlds provides an attractive way to achieve natural and realistic human-computer interaction if the interaction designs is handled sensitively. In view of this, we aim at building an embodied tour guide that is able to engage conversationally with system users about gallery exhibits, and capable of behaving according to social norms in terms of gesture and facial expression. The research has focused on the attributes of agent autonomy and believability, not truthfulness. To achieve agent autonomy, we present a three-layered architectural design to ensure appropriate coupling between agents perception and action, and to hide the internal mechanism from users. We then work towards agent believability: we utilize the notion of schema to support structured and coherent verbal behaviors; careful attention has also been paid to the design of non-verbal agent interactions that help to establish social facts within the virtual world. Our discussion focuses on how reasoning, planning and generation of the verbal and non-verbal behaviors are performed using the schema-based framework. Finally the agent-user interactions are illustrated with a case study.

Intelligent pedagogical agents with multiparty interaction support

Most current virtual world systems focus on the interaction between a single agent and the user. This simplification does not reflect the richness of a real social environment. The quantitative increment from the simple two-party interaction to a multi-party interaction does not merely increase the difficulty linearly. In fact, it leads to a much more complex situation involving multimodal communication, utterance understanding, and interaction style. Here, we introduce a four-layer agent architecture with multiparty interaction support. A Newtonian law learning environment based on this agent architecture is presented and how multiple agents cooperate to improve user learning is illustrated. The agents interaction ability within a multiparty environment can be realized in three sections: planning and task execution, communication and understanding, as well as learning and coaching. Our entire system can be regarded as a step toward addressing and solving issues related to effective teaching in a multi-user environment within a sophisticated domain.

Grounding concept in percept: learning physics experientially in multi-user virtual worlds

Despite almost 25 years of research related to misconceptions in science education, students today still widely hold erroneous beliefs about natural phenomena and continue to engage in intuitive forms of pseudo-scientific reasoning. In this paper, we stress the importance of grounding concept in percept when students engage learning. We appeal to Kolbs experiential learning theory to guide the design of C-VISions, a collaborative learning environment that provides experientially grounded learning. We report partial results from an empirical study of three students learning kinematics in C-VISions, presenting some quantitative as well as qualitative findings. We discuss our findings in relation to the pervasive misconception referred to in the literature as V-F reasoning. We conclude by pointing to ongoing research to develop pedagogical agent support in C-VISions to complete the conception of experiential learning advocated here.

Discourse-based learning using a multimedia discussion forum

The rapid growth of the Internet, coupled with improved multimedia capabilities in computing, has expanded the options for using technology to support collaborative learning. Asynchronous electronic conferencing is commonly used to support distributed discourse-based learning. Mind Bridges is a Web-based threaded discussion forum with support for embedded multimedia content. This paper describes the Mind Bridges system as well as an empirical study of its use to support science learning. The authors monitored the pattern of usage and the trajectory of collaborative discourse manifested by participants. They found a shift in the percentage of shallow comments and learned facts towards independent thinking statements over time. However, improvement in students conceptual understanding was hindered by their weak reasoning abilities.

COGNITO: An Extended Computational Theory of Cognition

Currently, there are only two detailed theories of cognition: ACT* and its successor PUPS (Anderson, 1983; Anderson, 1989) and SOAR (Laird, Newell, & Rosenbloom, 1987). These theories of cognition only account for learning from a procedural chunking point of view. They exclude other aspects of cognition such as episodic memory and declarative chunking (or schema formation) which are manifested in the learning behavior of people. In this paper, we outline COGNITIO, an extended theory of cognition based on ACT*, that will account parsimoniously for the following phenomena evident in learning: declarative chunking, procedural chunking (or compilation), and problem solving based on episodic memory. We plan to use COGNITIO as a theoretical foundation for guiding the design of the student modeling, diagnosis, and remediation components of an intelligent Smalltalk tutor.