’Eyes free’ in-car assistance: parent and child passenger collaboration during phone calls

This paper examines routine family car journeys, looking specifically at how passengers assist during a mobile telephone call while the drivers address the competing demands of handling the vehicle, interacting with various artefacts and controls in the cabin, and engage in co-located and remote conversations while navigating through busy city roads. Based on an analysis of video fragments, we see how drivers and child passengers form their conversations and requests around the call so as to be meaningful and paced to the demands, knowledge and abilities of their cooccupants, and how the conditions of the road and emergent traffic are oriented to and negotiated in the context of the social interaction that they exist alongside. The study provides implications for the design of car-based collaborative media and considers how hands- and eyesfree natural interfaces could be tailored to the complexity of activities in the car and on the road

Using shared online blogs to structure and support informal coach learning. Part 2: The participants’ view and implications for coach education

In part one of this paper, Stoszkowski and Collins (2015) showed that shared online blogs were a useful tool to structure and support the informal learning of a cohort of final year undergraduate sports coaching students. The aim of the present study was to offer insight into student coaches’ perceptions of their use and experiences of structured group blogging for reflection and learning. Twenty-three student coaches (5 females, 18 males), purposely sampled from the original study, took part in four semi-structured focus group interviews. Interview data were inductively analysed. Student coaches were generally very positive about their learning experiences and the pedagogical approach employed. This was especially apparent in terms of perceived increases in levels of reflection, knowledge acquisition and improvements in coaching practice; changes corroborated by the data presented in part one. A range of reasons emerged for these outcomes, alongside several potential limiters of engagement in shared group blogging as a learning endeavour. Whilst these findings support recent, and growing proposals to systematically incorporate Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs into coach education pedagogy, several key considerations for the process of using such tools are outlined. Finally, the implications for coach educators are discussed

Learning mathematics through activities with robots

There are several countries that integrate programming into their mathematics curricula, thereby making robotics an interesting aspect of mathematics education. However, the benefits of using robotics for mathematics education are still unclear. This article addresses the use of mathematical tools with robot-based, problem-solving activities by discussing how mathematical tools are used in robot-based activities. This ethnographic intervention study took place in one secondary school in Norway as a part of an elective class in which videotaped data were gathered by observing the activity of groups of two or three students using Lego Mindstorm robots during an eight-week period. Through the use of activity system analysis in Cultural–Historical Activity Theory, we found that students used different kinds of mathematical tools. Furthermore, we found that mathematics can change its role from instrumental tool to object, that is, to an integrated aspect of the purpose of the activity.acceptedVersio

Competitive Legal Professionals’ use of Technology in Legal Practice and Legal Research

Advances in the information and communication technologies have led to the availability of a range of primary and secondary legal research publications online via the Internet, rather than on other storing devices such as compact discs or publications in the print media. Not only has information and communication technology (ICT) impacted on the availability of legal information resources, but its effects are also noticed in various law-related areas such as legal practice management, legal education, corporate governance and the law per se. The question addressed by this article is whether the application of ICTs has an effect on the practice of law, and specifically whether information and knowledge management affects the processes of legal research in modern legal practice. Various issues are considered in this regard, including what the concept of knowledge management (KM) entails in a law firm and what the current KM trends in South African law firms are. The article investigates global trends in the application of ICTs for legal research purposes, what the specific applications of KM in support of legal research may be, how information technology applications and KM systems and strategies can support the legal research process, and what the benefits of KM are to legal research. It finally discusses the impact technology has had on the skills required of competitive legal professionals

Proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET 2013)

"This book contains the proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET) 2013 which was held on 16.-17.September 2013 in Paphos (Cyprus) in conjunction with the EC-TEL conference. The workshop and hence the proceedings are divided in two parts: on Day 1 the EuroPLOT project and its results are introduced, with papers about the specific case studies and their evaluation. On Day 2, peer-reviewed papers are presented which address specific topics and issues going beyond the EuroPLOT scope. This workshop is one of the deliverables (D 2.6) of the EuroPLOT project, which has been funded from November 2010 – October 2013 by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) of the European Commission through the Lifelong Learning Programme (LLL) by grant #511633. The purpose of this project was to develop and evaluate Persuasive Learning Objects and Technologies (PLOTS), based on ideas of BJ Fogg. The purpose of this workshop is to summarize the findings obtained during this project and disseminate them to an interested audience. Furthermore, it shall foster discussions about the future of persuasive technology and design in the context of learning, education and teaching. The international community working in this area of research is relatively small. Nevertheless, we have received a number of high-quality submissions which went through a peer-review process before being selected for presentation and publication. We hope that the information found in this book is useful to the reader and that more interest in this novel approach of persuasive design for teaching/education/learning is stimulated. We are very grateful to the organisers of EC-TEL 2013 for allowing to host IWEPLET 2013 within their organisational facilities which helped us a lot in preparing this event. I am also very grateful to everyone in the EuroPLOT team for collaborating so effectively in these three years towards creating excellent outputs, and for being such a nice group with a very positive spirit also beyond work. And finally I would like to thank the EACEA for providing the financial resources for the EuroPLOT project and for being very helpful when needed. This funding made it possible to organise the IWEPLET workshop without charging a fee from the participants.

Metacognitive skills of second year extended and main stream University mathematics students: a case study

A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Wits School of Education, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Johannesburg, 2017Many universities have introduced so called extended degrees where students’ first year workload is spread over two years to prevent the decline of graduates in mathematics and science. It has been put forward that extended degree courses should include the explicit training of mathematics students in the use of metacognitive skills. This is based on research that shows that successful students in mathematics are able to apply such metacognitive skills and that these skills play an important role in mathematical problem solving. Such skills are concerned with the actual regulation, coordination and control of one’s own learning activities and cognitive processes. Given that extended degree students generally perform weakly in mathematics in comparison to main stream students (non-extended degree students) this research study sets out to consider the differences in the use of metacognitive skills of these two student groupings. A qualitative case study was used to investigate collaborative solving of mathematical problems of one student pair. Students were trained in the use of metacognitive skills by using the metacognitive intervention method called IMPROVE. The student pair was video-recorded during talk-aloud protocols twice before explicit training in the IMPROVE method, and after instruction in order to evaluate students’ development in the use of metacognitive skills. Video recordings were transcribed noting students’ verbal and non-verbal actions and the coding of transcriptions in conjunction with content analysis was used in determining differences in students’ metacognitive skills. Since students worked collaboratively, instances where students acted as so-called social triggers of each other’s metacognitive skills, were also investigated. With student-researcher interaction during observations, the researcher was also regarded as a social trigger of students’ metacognitive behaviour. Apart from these social triggers, environmental triggers of students’ metacognitive skills were also scrutinised. Environmental triggers included the effect of task difficulty and the intervention of the IMPROVE method on students’ metacognitive skills. This study on the social and environmental triggers of individual’s metacognitive skills contributes to the relatively young field in viewing metacognition as cognitive activity that operates on multiple levels during collaborative problem solving, and that metacognition cannot solely be explained in terms of individualistic conceptions but also by social and environmental triggers. Results from the study show that, in general, the main stream student exhibited a greater number of metacognitive skills compared to the extended degree student. Furthermore, it seems that the IMPROVE method as an environmental trigger, had an effect on the development of both students’ metacognitive behaviour. Research findings of the study also reveal that the researcher’s intervention mainly resulted in the students acting as social triggers for each other’s metacognitive behaviour. Furthermore, it was found that there were a greater number of occurrences in which the main stream student acted as social trigger for the extended degree student’ metacognitive behaviour. The level of task difficulty also seems to have acted as environmental trigger for students’ metacognitive behaviour. As an exploratory study, the findings of this study are not generalizable.MT 201

Energy awareness displays: motivating conservation at the workplace through feedback

Börner, D., Storm, J., Kalz, M., & Specht, M. (2012). Energy awareness displays: motivating conservation at the workplace through feedback. International Journal of Mobile Learning and Organisation, 6(3/4), 189–203.The paper presents a project that sets up to make energy consumption data visible and accessible to employees by providing dynamic situated consumption feedback at the workplace. Therefore a supporting infrastructure as well as two example applications have been implemented and evaluated. The resulting prototype fosters a ubiquitous learning process among the employees with the goal to change their consumption behaviour as well as the attitudes towards energy conservation. The paper presents the approach, the requirements, the infrastructure and applications, as well as the evaluation results of the conducted informative study, comparative study, user evaluation, and design study