Working out a common task: design and evaluation of user-intelligent system collaboration

This paper describes the design and user evaluation of an intelligent user interface intended to mediate between users and an Adaptive Information Extraction (AIE) system. The design goal was to support a synergistic and cooperative work. Laboratory tests showed the approach was efficient and effective; focus groups were run to assess its ease of use. Logs, user satisfaction questionnaires, and interviews were exploited to investigate the interaction experience. We found that user’ attitude is mainly hierarchical with the user wishing to control and check the system’s initiatives. However when confidence in the system capabilities rises, a more cooperative interaction is adopted

'mat': A new media annotation tool with an interactive learning cycle for application in tertiary education

This paper provides an overview of the design process of a new online media annotation tool. This work-in-progress report will step through some design decisions as aided by reviewing learning theory and related experiences outlined in the literature; design principles from a user interface perspective; and user testing of the first design iteration. The first of a three stage development of the media annotation tool, 'mat' (MAT), is designed for learning from video, with later stages enabling other media (audio, image, other) plus assignment building with media inserts. User testing reinforced several design decisions plus initiated some change

Collaboration in the Semantic Grid: a Basis for e-Learning

The CoAKTinG project aims to advance the state of the art in collaborative mediated spaces for the Semantic Grid. This paper presents an overview of the hypertext and knowledge based tools which have been deployed to augment existing collaborative environments, and the ontology which is used to exchange structure, promote enhanced process tracking, and aid navigation of resources before, after, and while a collaboration occurs. While the primary focus of the project has been supporting e-Science, this paper also explores the similarities and application of CoAKTinG technologies as part of a human-centred design approach to e-Learning

Toward a user-oriented analytical approach to learning design

The London Pedagogy Planner (LPP) is a prototype for a collaborative online planning and design tool that supports lecturers in developing, analysing and sharing learning designs. The tool is based on a developing model of the components involved in learning design, and the critical relationships between them. As a decision tool, it makes the pedagogical design explicit as an output from the process, capturing it for testing, redesign, reuse and adaptation by the originator, or by others. The aim is to test the extent to which we can engage lecturers in reflecting on learning design, and make them part of the educational community that discovers how best to use Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). This paper describes the development of LPP, presents pedagogical benefits of visual representations of learning designs, and proposes an analytical approach to learning design based on these visual representations. The analytical approach is illustrated based on an initial evaluation with the lecturers

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

Towards a user oriented analytical approach to learning design

The London Pedagogy Planner (LPP) is a prototype for a collaborative online planning and design tool that supports lecturers in developing, analysing and sharing learning designs. The tool is based on a developing model of the components involved in learning design and the critical relationships between them. As a decision tool it makes the pedagogical design explicit as an output from the process, capturing it for testing, redesign, reuse and adaptation by the originator, or by others. The aim is to test the extent to which we can engage lecturers in reflecting on learning design, and make them part of the educational community that discovers how best to use technology‐enhanced learning. This paper describes the development of LPP, presents pedagogical benefits of visual representations of learning designs and proposes an analytical approach to learning design based on these visual representations. The analytical approach is illustrated based on an initial evaluation with a small group of lecturers from two partner institutions

The impact of an iPad-supported annotation and sharing technology on university students' learning

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd iPads, or more generally tablet computers, have received rapid and widespread uptake across higher education. Despite this, there is limited evidence of how their use affects student learning within this context. This study focuses on the use of a tablet by the instructor to support the annotation and in-class sharing of students' work to create a collaborative learning environment within a first year undergraduate subject. This paper reports the results of an empirical study looking at the effect this tablet technology has on student performance using a sample of 741 first-year accounting students. The study uses data from enrolment and attendance records, end of semester examination results and student perceptions from a survey. Results indicate that class sharing of the instructor's and students' annotation of homework through the use of a tablet is associated with an improvement in student performance on procedural or equation-based questions as well as increased student engagement. However, contrary to expectations, the introduction of in class annotations was associated with a decline in student performance on theoretical, extended response questions. The authors argue that affordances of the tablet, when used in a student-centred way, can introduce a bias towards some kinds of interactions over others. This large-scale study of in-class tablet use suggests that though the tablets may be positively associated with student engagement and satisfaction, caution must be exercised in how the use by the instructor affects the classroom environment and what students learn. These findings have particular relevance to university learning contexts with equation-centric subjects such as those in Business and STEM

Case Study of Using a Social Annotation Tool to Support Collaboratively Learning

The purpose of the study was to understand student interaction and learning supported by a collaboratively social annotation tool — Diigo. The researcher examined through a case study how students participated and interacted when learning an online text with the social annotation tool — Diigo, and how they perceived their experience. The findings suggested that students participated actively in the collaborative learning activity and were engaged in a variety of behaviors including self-reflection, elaboration, internalization, and showing support. Although students generally had a moderately positive attitude toward using the social annotation tool for collaborative learning, a few problems were identified. In particular, students found it distracting to navigate through a large amount of annotation while reading the text. The study has implications for future research on using or developing social annotation tools for educational purposes

A learning design for student-generated digital storytelling

The literature on digital video in education emphasises the use of prefabricated, instructional-style video assets. Learning designs for supporting the use of these expert-generated video products have been developed. However, there has been a paucity of pedagogical frameworks for facilitating specific genres of learner-generated video projects. Informed by two studies, this article describes the development of a learning design for a popular genre: learner-generated digital storytelling. A particular learning design representation is used to present a structured description of an approach to digital storytelling, and issues are raised relating to future iterations of the design. © 2011 Taylor & Francis

Using Social Annotation Tools to Foster Collaborative Learning

Social annotation (SA) allows learners to highlight and comment on web pages and share annotations with each other online. Despite its potential in promoting collaborative learning, how to integrate it into educational settings has not been fully studied. This study aims at introducing and exploring three different ways of incorporating SA-based activities into an online course: (a) peer review; (b) annotated discussion; and (c) collaborative reading. Students participated all three SA- based activities and took a survey at the end reporting the effectiveness of these activities. In this proposal we reported the initial findings of student participation in the three collaborative learning activities