Student Choice: Blends of Technology beyond the University to support social interaction and social participation in learning.

M. Doolan and Gilbert, T., 'Student Choice: Blends of Technology beyond the University to support social interaction and social participation in learning' , Chapter in E-Learning, E-Education, and Online Training, Third International Conference, eLEOT 2016, Dublin, Ireland, August 31 – September 2, 2016, Revised Selected Papers Publisher: Springer International Publishing, the final publication is available at Springer via doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49625-2_12 Print ISBN: 978-3-319-49624-5 Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-49625-2 © ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2017This paper presents an overview of a blended collaborative learning design driven by assessment and feedback. To extend class based activities students were provided with a private group space on the university managed learning environment. They chose to supplement this using technologies beyond those provided by the University to support their social interactions and participate in their learning. Qualitative data analysis of student’s reflections provides insights into the students own blends of technology including Skype, What’s App, Facebook amongst others and accessed via their hand held mobile devices such as Smartphones and laptops. These were used by the students to connect and collaborate with their peer group to complete the set tasks throughout the module and the final group based assessment.Final Accepted Versio

Toward a collective intelligence recommender system for education

The development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), have revolutionized the world and have moved us into the information age, however the access and handling of this large amount of information is causing valuable time losses. Teachers in Higher Education especially use the Internet as a tool to consult materials and content for the development of the subjects. The internet has very broad services, and sometimes it is difficult for users to find the contents in an easy and fast way. This problem is increasing at the time, causing that students spend a lot of time in search information rather than in synthesis, analysis and construction of new knowledge. In this context, several questions have emerged: Is it possible to design learning activities that allow us to value the information search and to encourage collective participation?. What are the conditions that an ICT tool that supports a process of information search has to have to optimize the student's time and learning? This article presents the use and application of a Recommender System (RS) designed on paradigms of Collective Intelligence (CI). The RS designed encourages the collective learning and the authentic participation of the students. The research combines the literature study with the analysis of the ICT tools that have emerged in the field of the CI and RS. Also, Design-Based Research (DBR) was used to compile and summarize collective intelligence approaches and filtering techniques reported in the literature in Higher Education as well as to incrementally improving the tool. Several are the benefits that have been evidenced as a result of the exploratory study carried out. Among them the following stand out: • It improves student motivation, as it helps you discover new content of interest in an easy way. • It saves time in the search and classification of teaching material of interest. • It fosters specialized reading, inspires competence as a means of learning. • It gives the teacher the ability to generate reports of trends and behaviors of their students, real-time assessment of the quality of learning material. The authors consider that the use of ICT tools that combine the paradigms of the CI and RS presented in this work, are a tool that improves the construction of student knowledge and motivates their collective development in cyberspace, in addition, the model of Filltering Contents used supports the design of models and strategies of collective intelligence in Higher Education.Postprint (author's final draft

A Metacognitive Instructional Approach and Self-Reflection: Reflective Practice From a Computer Science Perspective

Teaching is increasingly complex work which takes time to plan and continuous effort to ensure the highest standards of professional practice. There is a paradox in our rapidly changing society that educators are not very open to change in their practice (Hoban, 2002). The process for educators to learn and acquire effective teaching skills is a labour which has to be mastered over time. They would gain pedagogical knowledge and skills based on accumulation of new acquired knowledge and teaching methods and strategies to be added to their repertoire of existing knowledge and skills. In addition, it is vital for educators to utilize two aspects of reflective practice as suggested by Schon, which are ‘reflection in action’ and ‘reflection on action’ (Schon, 1983, 1987). Reflection in action refers to quick thinking action which takes places when one is teaching in the classroom. On the other hand, reflection on action usually takes place after the lesson out of the classroom when the educator reflects on his or her previous teaching and considers certain situations from the lesson again. Educational system in the 21st century encompasses reflection from both the teachers and students’ perspectives. In general, reflective practice in teaching and learning in undergraduate education focuses on the professional development of students and academics in an interdisciplinary education. Reflective practice has been in existence in most professional educational practices for several centuries. The use of reflective practice in computing education courses has significant benefits to enhance the knowledge of the students. However, there is some controversies on how this reflection was done and the manner in which this was done based on individual teaching practice. One of the main objectives of this study is to describe the various approaches used in teaching undergraduate students in a computing course. The study illustrates several modern approaches used during this classes. A qualitative research method was applied in gathering the feedback from the students using a general survey questions based on the course delivery. The study used statistical packages for the social sciences (SPSS) to analyze the data gathered. The results revealed the various level of acceptance of the teaching methods applied in the course. These results also demonstrate significant findings on the students' opinions and criticism which could help in future improvement of undergraduate computing curriculum. The study, firstly review literature on reflective practice. Secondly, discussed some of the good teaching practices and methods used in delivery the classes. Thirdly, the analysis and results obtained from the instrument questionnaires used for this study and finally, summary of the findings and further research directions

A metacognitive instructional approach and self-reflection : reflective practice from a computer science perspective

Teaching is increasingly complex work which takes time to plan and continuous effort to ensure the highest standards of professional practice. There is a paradox in our rapidly changing society that educators are not very open to change in their practice (Hoban, 2002). The process for educators to learn and acquire effective teaching skills is a labour which has to be mastered over time. They would gain pedagogical knowledge and skills based on accumulation of new acquired knowledge and teaching methods and strategies to be added to their repertoire of existing knowledge and skills. In addition, it is vital for educators to utilize two aspects of reflective practice as suggested by Schon, which are ‘reflection in action’ and ‘reflection on action’ (Schon, 1983, 1987). Reflection in action refers to quick thinking action which takes place when one is teaching in the classroom. On the other hand, reflection on action usually takes place after the lesson out of the classroom when the educator reflects on his or her previous teaching and considers certain situations from the lesson again. Educational system in the 21st century encompasses reflection from both the teachers and students’ perspectives. In general, reflective practice in teaching and learning in undergraduate education focuses on the professional development of students and academics in an interdisciplinary education. Reflective practice has been in existence in most professional educational practices for several centuries. The use of reflective practice in computing education courses has significant benefits to enhance the knowledge of the students. However, there is some controversies on how this reflection was done and the manner in which this was done based on individual teaching practice. One of the main objectives of this study is to describe the various approaches used in teaching undergraduate students in a computing course. The study illustrates several modern approaches used during this classes. A qualitative research method was applied in gathering the feedback from the students using a general survey questions based on the course delivery. The study used statistical packages for the social sciences (SPSS) to analyze the data gathered. The results revealed the various level of acceptance of the teaching methods applied in the course. These results also demonstrate significant findings on the students' opinions and criticism which could help in future improvement of undergraduate computing curriculum. The study, firstly review literature on reflective practice. Secondly, discussed some of the good teaching practices and methods used in delivery the classes. Thirdly, the analysis and results obtained from the instrument questionnaires used for this study and finally, summary of the findings and further research directions

The Impact of Dyslexia on the Effectiveness of Online Learning: A Systematic Literature Review

Dyslexia can have an impact on online learning outcomes. However, few studies have examined the association between dyslexia and online learning effectiveness. This systematic review focused on the effects of dyslexia on online learning effectiveness to conduct research in three major categories: analysis of impact, analysis of dyslexia on online learning, and analysis of interventions. A screening of two bibliographic databases identified 37 articles that met the inclusion criteria. The study determined that dyslexic learners are uncomforted with online learning and suffer from frustrated self-confidence and decreased academic performance in the learning process. It even affects the learners' evaluation of themselves and causes a decrease in self-efficacy. Among these, research on influencing factors can be divided into two dimensions: internal and external factors. Dyslexic learners are influenced by both the type of dyslexia and their psychological characteristics, as well as by teachers, teaching strategies, online educational environments, and educational media. These influences provide intervention strategies, such as developing customized online learning systems for dyslexic learners and exploring interventions in telerehabilitation medicine. However, no intervention strategies involve adjustments to the internal psychology of dyslexic learners and external support systems. Therefore, more research is needed to explore the differential impact of dyslexia on online learning and to understand the factors that produce this impact to provide a theoretical basis and direction for the generation of instructional strategies for dyslexics and the adaptation of online learning for dyslexics

Funds of knowledge 2.0: towards digital funds of identity

This article builds on the growing work on Funds of Identity by offering a conceptualisation of identity in relation to Vygotsky's concept of perezhivanie which is then situated within the discourse on digital identities. I also suggest how teachers and researchers could use avatars, digital representations of online users, as an identity text for drawing on and constructing students' Funds of Identity. In order to illustrate this approach, I briefly sketch an ongoing class-based research project called The Avatar Project. Overall, this article reaffirms and develops the argument that the Funds of Identity approach is an evolution of Funds of Knowledge. This thesis is encapsulated in the phrase, digital Funds of Identity: Funds of Knowledge 2.0

Edu-Cloud: On-the-fly Employability Skills as a Service

21st Century global job market competition requires Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) university curricula to support both state-of-the-art technical and soft skills learning to improve graduate employment. This necessitates the transformation of the current teaching and learning methodology powered by a social and col- laborative platform to provide a social co-learning environment. This social co-learning will provide students with opportunities for self-enrichment while supporting their technical skills and hands-on needs. The platform must also provide the required lab infrastructure for hands-on experimentation. This paper proposes the design and implementation of a cloud based platform called Edu-Cloud. The Edu-Cloud has been designed to provide automated resource provisioning and perform on-the-fly deployment of scalable virtual network functions to stream multimedia content closer to the global learners. This would help to meet the specific learning needs of a group of global interconnected students with similar learning skills and abilities. The benchmarking performance results show that the proposed framework works efficiently while reducing primary network traffic by deploying resources closer to the users and support scalability for a global deployment scenario

European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN). Conference Proceedings

Erasmus+ Programme of the European UnionThe powerful combination of the information age and the consequent disruption caused by these unstable environments provides the impetus to look afresh and identify new models and approaches for education (e.g. OERs, MOOCs, PLEs, Learning Analytics etc.). For learners this has taken a fantastic leap into aggregating, curating and co-curating and co-producing outside the boundaries of formal learning environments – the networked learner is sharing voluntarily and for free, spontaneously with billions of people.Supported by Erasmus+ Programme of the European Unioninfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

An ambient agent model for reading companion robot

Reading is essentially a problem-solving task. Based on what is read, like problem solving, it requires effort, planning, self-monitoring, strategy selection, and reflection. Also, as readers are trying to solve difficult problems, reading materials become more complex, thus demands more effort and challenges cognition. To address this issue, companion robots can be deployed to assist readers in solving difficult reading tasks by making reading process more enjoyable and meaningful. These robots require an ambient agent model, monitoring of a reader’s cognitive demand as it could consist of more complex tasks and dynamic interactions between human and environment. Current cognitive load models are not developed in a form to have reasoning qualities and not integrated into companion robots. Thus, this study has been conducted to develop an ambient agent model of cognitive load and reading performance to be integrated into a reading companion robot. The research activities were based on Design Science Research Process, Agent-Based Modelling, and Ambient Agent Framework. The proposed model was evaluated through a series of verification and validation approaches. The verification process includes equilibria evaluation and automated trace analysis approaches to ensure the model exhibits realistic behaviours and in accordance to related empirical data and literature. On the other hand, validation process that involved human experiment proved that a reading companion robot was able to reduce cognitive load during demanding reading tasks. Moreover, experiments results indicated that the integration of an ambient agent model into a reading companion robot enabled the robot to be perceived as a social, intelligent, useful, and motivational digital side-kick. The study contribution makes it feasible for new endeavours that aim at designing ambient applications based on human’s physical and cognitive process as an ambient agent model of cognitive load and reading performance was developed. Furthermore, it also helps in designing more realistic reading companion robots in the future

Technology Use By Teachers Of Deaf And Hard-Of-Hearing Students

This nationwide study explored the types and frequency of technology used by teachers of deaf and hard-of-hearing (d/hh) students to design and deliver instruction, as well as the types and frequency of technology being used by teachers of d/hh students to promote communication and collaboration. It also examined the extent of professional development in the area of technology use with d/hh students, and the related challenges experienced by these teachers. The following research questions guided this study. Research question 1. What kinds of technology do teachers of d/hh students use to design and deliver academic content-based learning activities? With what frequency are these technologies being used by teachers of d/hh students? Research question 1a. Is there a relationship between the self-reported amount and/or kinds of technology used by teachers of d/hh students to design and deliver academic content-based learning activities and their job position? Research question 1b. Is there a relationship between the self-reported amount and/or kinds of technology used by teachers of d/hh students to design and deliver academic content-based learning activities and their use of technology for obtaining additional training? Research question 2. What kinds of technology do teachers of d/hh students use to promote student communication and collaboration for learning? With what frequency are these technologies being used by teachers of d/hh students? Research question 2a. Is there a relationship between the self-reported amount and/or kinds of technology used by teachers of d/hh students to promote student communication and collaboration for learning and their job position? Research question 2b. Is there a relationship between the self-reported amount and/or kinds of technology used by teachers of d/hh students for student communication and collaboration and their use of technology for obtaining additional training? Research question 3. Is there a relationship between the self-reported use of technology by teachers of d/hh students for additional training and their job position? Research question 3a. Is there a relationship between the self-reported use of technology by teachers of d/hh students for additional training and how often their employer provides professional development in the use of instructional technology for use with deaf/hard-of-hearing students? Research question 4. Is there a relationship between the self-reported amount and/or kinds of challenges experienced by teachers of d/hh students and their job position