Ebook: Supporting Learning Flow through Integrative Technologies

The 15th International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE 2007) is part of a series of annual conferences encompassing a broad range of issues related to using information technology for learning. Being international in participation, the ICCE conferences are hosted in the Asia-Pacific region and are organized under the auspices of the Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education (APSCE). With this 15^th ICCE, it is our pleasure to announce a return to Japan following up on the last ICCE held in Japan in 1999 in Chiba. This year's conference takes place in the city of Hiroshima, a symbolic place for fostering international understanding and peace. The conference will be held during November 5–9, 2007.

As every yearICCE has invited contributions from the various fields of technology enhanced learning. Within this range, the main theme of ICCE 2007 sets a special focus on “supporting learning flow through integrative technologies”. This theme indicates a move from local support of specific learning activities towards supporting learning and teaching processes in a broader context beyond single tools and individual users, considering user/learner groups on different levels of granularity as well as interoperability mechanisms on the system level. The value of integration is primarily characterized by improving the richness and directness of educational interactions. The integration of interactive media and of learning processes can support a smooth and seamless information flow in and between different learning settings. Ubiquitous computing technologies with smart objects and non standard peripherals allow for flexibly embedding support technologies in adequate physical settings and enable the integration of physical and digital support. Similarly, mobile technologies open up new possibilities for integrating learning activities between formal and informal settings. These and other issues will be taken up by the four distinguished keynote talks and by the conference papers and posters throughout ICCE 2007.

This ICCE 2007 Proceedings volume comprises 53 full and 43 short papers which were selected from 229 paper submissions (full paper submissions: 161, short paper submissions: 68) in a careful peer-reviewing process. All full paper submissions and most short paper submissions had three reviews. Accepted papers are to be presented in the main conference sessions. Additionally, these proceedings feature extended abstracts of 8 selected doctoral student papers and the keynote abstracts. In addition, 36 paper submissions were accepted as poster presentations and are published separately in a Poster Notes volume.

As it was expected, many submissions came from the hosting country (Japan: 115 submissions). Other important contributors are Taiwan (26 submissions), China (18 submissions), Singapore (17 submissions), Australia (11 submissions). European contributions are on about the same level as last year (21 submissions). The total number of contributing countries is 23.

The thematic structure of these proceedings and accordingly of the main conference sessions reflects grown areas of research and current trends in the field of technology enhanced learning. It features the themes of computer-supported collaborative learning with 10 papers in two sessions, adaptive interaction (6), teacher education (6), specific learning technologies (6), assessment and evaluation (6), learning management and organization (6), learning platforms and architectures (5), scaffolding and reflection (5), knowledge management (5), specific learning technologies (5), learning games (5), writing skills (5), authoring (4), learning science (4), media-enhanced interaction (4), mobile and ubiquitous learning (4), learning with hand-held devices (4), programming (4), and language learning (3). We believe that this spectrum represents the field in a significant way; especially it provides a sound blend of educationally oriented and empirical papers as well as innovative technical contributions.

The following pages materialize the numerous efforts that contributed to making this conference a success. We thank the program committee and the additional reviewers for their work which is the essential factor to assure quality and continuity. The program co-chairs also would like to thank the organizing committee and the implementation committee. This conference is jointly hosted by Japanese Society for Educational Technology, the Japanese Society for Information and Systems in Education, and Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications of Japan. Our special thanks go to these hosting organizations.

We look forward to a stimulating and synergetic international meeting in the city of Hiroshima, Japan, November 5–9, 2007.

We begin with the broad realization that despite decades of research and development work in technology-mediated learning that have produced many exciting systems and studies, we have yet to see pervasive, sustainable and scaleable improvements in actual classroom practice. Yet, we persist in the belief that technology-mediated learning will in the near future deliver for our learners, the promise that we have so far only glimpsed upon. There remain very broad issues of why the meaningful use of technology to engage in deep learning has not been widespread in K-12 schools; we believe that one of the crucial reasons for the lack of sustainability in the implementation of technology-enabled pedagogies in schools is the failure to understand or consider the conditions for systemic innovations. In Singapore, we have embarked on our journey in the Learning Sciences Lab to conduct school-based research from the learning sciences perspective to develop point-at-able exemplars of how to enact positive technology-enabled pedagogical innovations through direct engagement with schools. We will discuss some of the innovations we are working on, the learning sciences orientations we have undertaken, and the issues and challenges we have had to address when working with practitioners in adopting these innovations in schools. Implications are then drawn with respect to how we might conduct research work with a view of bridging acceptance amongst various stakeholders, deployment strategies, capacity building and sustainability in the context of Asian countries.

This talk will discuss the main features of social computing (Web 2.0) applications and the resulting tendencies in the design of social learning environments. The main features of Web 2.0 applications are the decentralization of resources, repositories, and control; the autonomy of learners, contributors (authors), and learning organizations; and the need for active participation – the necessary “glue” to make it all work. The power of social computing applications depends on the number of users and active contributors. In a large scale open environment, the autonomy of learners and authors/course developers is a given and nobody can force anyone to use a particular system. Ease of use, power, and respect for the user autonomy are important features in attracting learners and developers of educational software or learning materials.

The need for autonomy powers a move towards service-oriented or agent-based architectures with clear protocols and languages for interaction between services or agents. Such architectures allow for redundancy and dynamic connection of new functionality or people.

The question about ensuring shared meaning is very important. Dictatorial approaches, however, are unlikely to work in an open environment with autonomous participants. To be viable, a standard has to be simple, usable, rich and easily extensible.

User modeling focus shifts from centralized servers to a libraries of decentralized processes carried out by individual agents or services in context, for the purpose at hand and expressed as policies that can be edited by users. Along with modeling learner features relevant to the domain of interest (e.g. knowledge, experience, affective features), modeling trust and reputation becomes very important to allow appropriate selection of services, and protect the integrity and privacy of user data.

Instructional planning focus shifts to the design of incentive mechanisms to stimulate participation. Various such mechanisms have proved successful in attracting participation of desired type – social comparison, visualizing interpersonal relationships, immediate rewards after desirable actions, and even introducing a virtual currency.

I will illustrate all these tendencies with research I have done with my students and colleagues at the University of Saskatchewan.

Recent survey result conducted by National Institute of Multimedia Education (NIME) shows that the number of undergraduate faculties and graduate schools in Japan implementing distance learning through the Internet are increasing, and in this presentation, recent status of e-Learning at higher education institutions in Japan will be shared.

Under the background, the Gateway to Learning for Ability Development (NIME-glad) is introduced for providing and sharing reusable learning objects, where. NIME has tagged large amounts of educational information that is accessible over the Internet with learning object metadata (LOM), and provides this comprehensive, cross-website retrievable information by means of that gateway.

The Federated Search System is also explained to make it possible to search by keyword reciprocally between the Japanese learning gateway (NIME-glad) and gateway MERLOT in the USA, LORNET in Canada, EdNA Online in Australia ARANNE in EU. As a result of developing this Federated Search System, it has become possible to search not only overseas Learning Objects by keyword, but at the same time, Japanese Learning Objects also, using the overseas gateways.

In order to improve the quality of e-Learning, an attempt has been made to classify the approaches to e-Learning quality enhancement at the development stage, for support during actual operation, with respect to organizational structure and by means of evaluation. This does not mean, however, that all of these approaches have to be pursued, but rather, numerous approaches have been brought together on the understanding that universities or other institutions can select and try whatever approaches it needs to adopt.

The rapid advancement pervasiveness of ICT—especially in Norway where use of converging information and communication technologies is one of the highest in the world—is radically changing the possibilities for technology enhanced learning (TEL). Technological advancements, a perspective on knowledge as a cultural artefact, and our understandings of teaching and learning have influenced changes in learning environments during the past four decades. This has created new conditions for society and for its institutions that are challenging our basic assumptions about the nature of learning, teaching and educational activities in modern knowledge societies.

A fundamental challenge for TEL is how to design technology enhanced learning environments sensitive to the complex interconnections between pedagogical, technological and organisational issues and how to understand their use. First, this concerns an understanding of how humans interact and communicate while learning through technologies ranging from web-based applications or mobile devices to advanced multimedia systems and context aware and augmented reality. Second, it concerns further advancements in software applications and multimedia design and a deeper understanding of their affordances for human learning. Third, it concerns pedagogical designs and how central principles of learning and human development must be integrated into innovative learning environments in order to enable productive learning. Fourth, it concerns an understanding of infrastructural issues and how social organisations inhibit or afford the adoption of ICT mediated learning.

In this presentation I will focus on the design and use technology enhanced learning environments. I will show how my Scandinavian experience has influenced my perspective on ICT and on learning, thus helping shape my understanding of Technology Enhanced Learning. I will use examples from some of the projects in which I have been involved, with a focus on collaborative learning in distributed environments.

Efforts to improve performance in mathematics have put pressure on educational evaluators to improve the rigor of their evaluation designs. This paper reports the results of a rigorous evaluation of the Cognitive Tutor Algebra I curriculum, which is substantially based on an intelligent tutoring system. We emphasize the importance of presenting details of the design, implementation and analysis of the study in order to ensure the best possibility of improvement over time.

Many e-learning portals have appeared on the Web to promote distance learning. However the amount of information available on these web sites increases more and more and users do not know where to find the “good” information. It is become necessary to build additional tools to help learner in their learning. Nowadays few works consider the idea to integrate intelligent tutors for such environments in ever-changing evolution and social-constructivism approaches show the importance of interactions between actors (learners, tutors) in the learning process.

To answer these problems, this paper presents CAMELEON, a generic model of embodied conversational agent (ECA) devoted to e-learning portals. This agent is always in interactions with the learner in order to improve his learning task. The agent is only the visible part of an underground multi-agent system, in which several agents interact according to the user actions, the web site evolution and the pedagogical scenarios. All these interactions allow to filter all the available information in order to adapt the ECA behavior to learners.

In the Singapore primary school mathematics curriculum, students are taught using bar diagrams to visualize the problem structure in a given word problem. This approach, often called the “model method”, allows students to solve fairly complex word problems without the need to use letter-symbolic algebra. When these students progress to secondary school, they learn the algebraic way of solving word problems. Studies (for example, Ng, Lee, Ang & Khng, 2006) have shown that poor bridging of students' from the use of bar diagrams to the use of letter-symbolic algebraic methods can hinder their learning of algebra. Working in tandem with the Singapore Ministry of Education, a software tool “AlgeBAR” was designed and developed to scaffold the learning of the algebraic process, especially the formulation of equations. In this paper, we elaborate on the intervention pedagogy that is technology-enabled, as well as our research methodology.

In this paper, we discuss a visualization method of answers of a quiz. Though quizzes (especially descriptive answer style) are effective to identify the level of students' understanding, it is hard for lecturers to catch contents of all answers for effective and immediate feedback. We propose a visualization method based on self-organizing map and k-means method and develop a system that classifies answers and allows lecturers to adjust the results for preferable ones quickly.

This study proposes a constraint-based agent negotiation mechanism to enhance the learner-to-instructor interaction in order to promote learning effectiveness. Through the negotiation process, the instructor can reflect on the appropriateness of the learning sequences and adjust instructional goals, approaches and schemes by gradually perceiving the learners' feedback. The instructor can thus provide more adaptive teaching based on learners' specific needs. An illustrative example expresses that the proposed methodology can adjust the learning sequences according to learners' preferences and instructors' cognition. The experimental results indicated that the methodology could improve learning performance, enhance their learning motivation and increase the flexibility in learning.

In Japan, the “Period of Integrated Study” program for elementary and secondary education emphasizes cultivating students' abilities to cope with various problems in daily life. Most goals of this program involve meta-ability, which cannot be fully learned by traditional Japanese instructional methods. For this reason, it is necessary and important to provide teachers with a powerful help system that can support them in designing instruction for enhancing students' meta-ability. In this paper, we propose a FIMA (Flexible Instructional design support Multi-Agent System) and describe its architecture, which complies with the FIPA specifications.

This study examines the use of multimedia and their application to implement portfolio assessment in order to instruct students, assess their learning, and communicate the outcomes to parents. Interviews with all participants allowed the process to be described from multiple perspectives of this particular community. Overall, digital portfolios were found to be useful for instructing and assessing students and communicating with parents, and further for understanding how family culture influenced students learning in a technology-embedded environment. The goal of this paper is to reflect on the current development of portfolio assessment and verify the ways of ensuring its effectiveness in teaching and learning.

Many Interactive Learning Environments (ILE) produce assessment results. Norms exist to define how these results can be used, obtained and manipulated within ILE. AICC, certainly the most known, defines how to communicate assessment results and more widely, datas from a Learning Object (LO) to a Learning Management System (LMS). However, AICC and the other norms don't define what an assessment result has to look like. Moreover, assessment results are often semantically poor and expressed in a ILE-specific formalism. A common results model would improve the interoperability between ILE but also, if it is rich enough, clarify the meaning of assessment results. In this paper, such a common results model is introduced. At first its conceptual model is exposed, then its information model is described.

This paper is interested in both the sustainability and scalability of diffusion of pedagogical innovations in educational contexts. We argue that the diffusion of pedagogical innovations is a complex adaptive process. Current research methods, while informative, have limitations insofar as the non-linear, adaptive, and emergent properties of complex diffusion processes are concerned. To this end, this paper proposes the use of Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) as a complementary method. Following a review of existing methodologies, we set up an imperative for ABM, describe what ABM entails, and examine its affordances and limitations in emerging the diffusion patterns by simulating the decision making processes of boundedly-rational individuals in socio-organizational networks. We further argue that ABM is particularly helpful for exploring diffusion patterns in “what if” scenarios, and for making policies that foster sustainable and scalable innovation diffusion.

This paper describes the key role the design and employment of a suite of Technology Evaluation Tools (TET) played in the development of a whole of discipline approach to Information and Communication Technology Supported Teaching. In partnership with the university's Institute of Higher Education Research and Development, a set of Technology Evaluation Tools was developed that assisted in ensuring that any technology chosen for inclusion in our teaching programs would serve the program and the students well. This paper discusses the project and some of its outcomes.

The United Kingdom has tried and tested many different approaches to enhancing the science curriculum for 14–16 year olds utilising the advances of new technologies. However, there seems to be a chasm developing between knowing that ICT can be very beneficial to the teaching and actually training science teachers to use the technology effectively in their own practice. The author of this paper has had experience of both teaching science in the classroom and evaluating several UK initiatives in the area of ICT in science education. This paper shares some of the findings from two of the most recent projects related to this area and raises questions to the validity of the successes claimed by electronic based support networks.

The purpose of this paper is to stimulate interest and conversation in an area of significant potential for assessment systems in future education environments. This paper makes two arguments en route to the proposition that it may be possible, in a relatively short time frame, to effect a quantum jump in the utility of existing learner assessments via the use of integrative computer graphics.

Curriculum changes over time. In practice, it is not easy to keep a curricular system updated and to provide students with reliable course services that reflect and correspond to the evolutions of curriculum. This study is a step toward supporting a smooth curriculum evolution process with Ontology-aware Course Consulting (On2C) system through the use of Artificial Intelligent techniques to assist different stakeholders involved. Our approach contributes to a recently emerging trend for incorporating intelligent techniques in Intelligent Education System. In this paper a model of the evolutionary process has been proposed, which reflects the essential structure of curriculum for offering a better way to track the history of curriculum change. Curriculum ontology we developed serves as a fixed conceptual system to fully predict the generic components of curriculum, so this ontology can be reused in situation-dependent curriculum systems.

Course generation knowledge, i.e., how to assemble a sequence of learning objects which is adapted to a learner's goals, competencies and preferences, is hard to assess and expensive to formalize, at least if it is based on pedagogical principles. On the other hand, once a course generator has been developed, it allows generating personalized courses for individual users at a relatively low cost. Therefore, course generation lends itself of being available as a (Web) service such that other systems can access its functionality without having to implement the knowledge themselves. In this paper we investigate whether this reuse of course generation knowledge works in practice. We took a course generator that was developed in the European project LeActiveMath and made it available for use in a Chinese distant university. In the paper, we describe how we represent the generic course generation knowledge and the difficulties we faced and the results we achieved when we applied the course generator in the Chinese setting. We also report on using course generation in a bioinformatic workflow environment.

This paper describes the production of digital educational content which is reflected development stage of each autistic person. There are issues to model learner's developmental stage and to reflect it to the digital educational content. Therefore, we propose student model which consists of three acknowledgement skills (Language, Figure, and Matching) and correspondence rules which describes the relation between the student model and the digital educational content. Then, we developed the authoring system which consists of the student model and the correspondence rules. Instructors evaluated this system. Effectiveness of the system is turned out by the evaluation.

In this study, we systematize the vocabularies learned in Japanese history subject by using ontology and call it Japanese history ontology. By using ontology, the content and relation between vocabularies become clear, and it can be expected that efficient study is realizable. We build Japanese history ontology, and develop an experimental system which offers learning support. In this paper, we propose a system framework for learning support of Japanese history by using ontology.