INTEGRATING A COMIC MAKER SITE AS AN ALTERNATIVE EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN INDONESIAN EFL CLASSROOM

Abstracts Using latest technology as a teaching strategy, teacher could create a captivating classroom where students’ motivation can be grasped. As an attempt of fulfilling students’ needs of real-world education, MALL is explored. Pixton, the digital comic maker is the highlighted resource in this research. The purpose of this research is to investigate the advantages and challenges of changing the comic strips resources from conventional to digital for teaching writing comprehension in higher education. By applying (PjBL) as the framework of creating research cycles, content analysis and qualitative study are used to evaluate the use of Pixton. The advantage of using Pixton in higher education is to encourage students’ autonomous learning’s skills such as learning to learn, critical thinking, and collaboration. In other hands the challenges divided into technical and non technical area. This study definitely answers the questions regarding the advantages and challenges of applying Pixton in higher education. Keywords: Mobile Assisted Language Learning,  Project Based Learning, higher education, Pixton, Comic strips Abstraksi Menggunakan teknologi terkini sebagai strategi pembelajaran, guru dapat menciptakan kelas yang menarik dimana motivasi siswa dapat diraih. Sebagai upaya untuk memenuhi kebutuhan siswa akan pendidikan berbasis real-world, MALL digunakan. Pixton, sarana membuat komik digital sebagai sumber utama dalam penelitian ini. Tujuan penelitian ini adalah untuk menemukan manfaat dan tantangan dalam perubahan sumber komik strip konvensional menjadi digital untuk mengajar menulis di perguruan tinggi. PjBL digunakan sebagai landasan dalam pembuatan siklus penelitian, konten analisis dan kualitatif digunakan untuk mengevaluasi penggunaan Pixton. Manfaat menggunakan Pixton di perguruan tinggi adalah untuk mendorong siswa untuk memiliki kemampuan “autonomous learning”, antara lain kemampuan menentukan strategi belajar, berpikir kritis dan kolaboratif. Di sisi lain, ada tantangan yang terbagi menjadi tantangan bersifat teknis dan non teknis. Penelitian ini menjawab pertanyaan berkaitan dengan manfaat dan tantangan menggunakan Pixton di perguruan tinggi. Kata Kunci:  Mobile Assisted Language Learning,  Pembelajaran Berbasis Proyek, Pixton, komik stri

Comics Beyond the Page in Latin America

Comics Beyond the Page in Latin America is a cutting-edge study of the expanding worlds of Latin American comics. Despite lack of funding and institutional support, not since the mid-twentieth century have comics in the region been so dynamic, so diverse and so engaged with pressing social and cultural issues. Comics are being used as essential tools in debates about, for example, digital cultures, gender identities and political disenfranchisement. Rather than analysing the current boom in comics by focusing just on the printed text, however, this book looks at diverse manifestations of comics ‘beyond the page’. Contributors explore digital comics and social media networks; comics as graffiti and stencil art in public spaces; comics as a tool for teaching architecture or processing social trauma; and the consumption and publishing of comics as forms of shaping national, social and political identities. Bringing together authors from across Latin America and beyond, and covering examples from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay, the book sets out a panoramic vision of Latin American comics, whether in terms of scholarly contribution, geographical diversity or interdisciplinary methodologies. Comics Beyond the Page in Latin America demonstrates the importance of studying how comics circulate in all manner of ways beyond print media. It also reminds us of the need to think about the creative role of comics in societies with less established comics markets than in Europe, the US and Asia

Practical AI Value Alignment Using Stories

As more machine learning agents interact with humans, it is increasingly a prospect that an agent trained to perform a task optimally - using only a measure of task performance as feedback--can violate societal norms for acceptable behavior or cause harm. Consequently, it becomes necessary to prioritize task performance and ensure that AI actions do not have detrimental effects. Value alignment is a property of intelligent agents, wherein they solely pursue goals and activities that are non-harmful and beneficial to humans. Current approaches to value alignment largely depend on imitation learning or learning from demonstration methods. However, the dynamic nature of values makes it difficult to learn values through imitation learning-based approaches. To overcome the limitations of imitation learning-based approaches, in this work, we introduced a complementary technique in which a value-aligned prior is learned from naturally occurring stories that embody societal norms. This value-aligned prior can detect the normative and non-normative behavior of human society as well as describe the underlying social norms associated with these behaviors. To train our models, we sourced data from the children’s educational comic strip, Goofus \& Gallant. Additionally, we have built another dataset by utilizing a crowdsourcing platform. This dataset was created specifically to identify the norms or principles exhibited in the actions depicted within the comic strips. To build a normative prior model, we trained multiple machine learning models to classify natural language descriptions and visual demonstrations of situations found in the comic strip as either normative or non-normative and into different social norms. Finally, to train a value-aligned agent, we introduced a reinforcement learning-based method, in which we train an agent with two reward signals: a standard task performance reward plus a normative behavior reward. The test environment provides the standard task performance reward, while the normative behavior reward is derived from the value-aligned prior model. We show how variations on a policy shaping technique can balance these two sources of reward and produce policies that are both effective and perceived as being more normative. We test our value-alignment technique on different interactive text-based worlds; each world is designed specifically to challenge agents with a task as well as provide opportunities to deviate from the task to engage in normative and/or altruistic behavior

Narrative-driven immersion and students perceptions in an online software programming course

iLRN 2021. Online and in Virtual Reality (17 May - 10 June, 2021)Learning software programming is challenging for software engineering students. In this paper, students’ engagement in learning software engineering programming is considered under the SimProgramming approach using the OC2-RD2 narrative technique to create an immersive learning context. The objectives of this paper are twofold: presenting a narrative-driven immersive learning approach to introduce software engineering concepts and coding techniques to online undergraduate students; and analyzing the students’ feedback on this approach. Thematic analysis of the metacognitive tasks was performed on the students’ fortnightly reflections about their learning progress. Content analysis was based on interest categories, students’ perceptions, metacognitive challenges, narratives, examples and aspects to be kept or to be improved. Data from the content analysis were organized into categories, subcategories, indicators, and recording units and their categorization was peer-reviewed. The narratives were considered by the students as interesting, appealing, akin to professional reality and promoting interaction. Most students thought the approach was helpful for learning software programming.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Welcome to Computer Science: Designing a Comic Tour of Computers and Computing

While the number of high-quality educational comics is growing, there are no modern long-form comics discussing computer science at an undergraduate level. The computer science comics that do exist, along with being for a younger audience, are generally focused on teaching the reader programming concepts without exploring other aspects of computer science. For this thesis I scripted and drew the 56-page comic Welcome to Computer Science, which introduces the reader to computer science concepts including computer architecture, programming languages, and the internet. As a narrative comic written for an undergraduate audience, it can draw in readers who otherwise might not choose to engage with the material. As a breadth-first introduction, the comic provides the reader with a foundational understanding of computers and computer science; this work may provide even more experienced students with a better understanding of how their computer science classes relate to the rest of the field

2015 Undergraduate Research Symposium Abstract Book

Abstract book from the 2015 Fifteenth Annual UMM Undergraduate Research Symposium (URS) which celebrates student scholarly achievement and creative activities

The e-Volving Picturebook: Examining the Impact of New e-Media/Technologies On Its Form, Content and Function (And on the Child Reader)

The technology of the codex book and the habit of reading appear to be under attack currently for a variety of reasons explored in the Introduction of this Dissertation. One natural response to attack is a resulting effort to adapt in a bid to survive. Noël Carroll, leading American philosopher in the contemporary philosophy of art, touches on this concept in his discussion of the evolution of a new medium in his article, “Medium Specificity Arguments and Self-Consciously Invented Arts: Film, Video, and Photography,” from his Cambridge University Press 1996 text, Theorizing the Moving Image. Carroll proposes that any new medium undergoes phases of development (and I include new technology under that umbrella)). After examining Carroll’s theory this Dissertation attempts to apply it to the Children’s Picturebook Field, exploring the hypothesis that the published children’s narrative does evolve, has already evolved historically in response to other mediums/technologies, and is currently “e-volving” in response to emerging “e-media.” This discussion examines ways new media (particularly emerging e-media) affect the published children’s narrative form, content, and function (with primary focus on the picturebook form), and includes some examination of the response of the child reader to those changes. Chapter One explores the formation of the question, its value, and reviews available literature. Chapter Two compares the effects of an older sub-genre, the paper-engineered picturebook, with those of emerging e-picturebooks. Chapter Three compares the Twentieth Century Artist’s Book to picturebooks created by select past and current picturebook creators. Chapter Four first considers the shifting cultural mindset of Western Culture from a linear, word-based outlook to the non-linear, more visual approach fostered by the World Wide Web and supporting “screen” technologies; then identifies and examines current changes in form, content and function of the designed picturebooks that are developing “on the page” within the constraints of the codex book format. The Dissertation concludes with a review of Leonard Shlain’s 1998 text, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, using it as a departure point for final observations regarding unique strengths of the children’s picturebook as a learning tool for young children