Facilitating constructivist e-learning by software agents

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Information Technology.E-learning is being taken as an important means to satisfy the increasing demands for learning in today’s information society. Although considerable research effort has been devoted to facilitating e-learning, very little has been done to support constructivist e-leaming. This research attempts to develop an online constructivist learning environment (CLE) and utilize software agents to provide supportive services for learners to facilitate and assist them to build knowledge by using constructivist ways. Constructivists assume knowledge is constructed by learners. Learners are knowledge-constructors whereas teachers are facilitators for the construction. Constructivist learning theory provides a framework to develop an online CLE. The important issues are concerned with what supportive services should be provided for learners and how to provide these services. The services identified in the work include: • providing access to appropriate learning resources and learning strategies; • fostering meaningful interactions with content, teachers, and fellow learners; • supporting personalized learning for individual learners; • facilitating collaborative learning among learners in groups; and • aiding to timely evaluate learning outcomes. An innovative strategy is adopted to organize these services. They are provided for learners in non-intrusive ways. Learners are not forced to accept any of the services. They can autonomously take control over their learning. Meanwhile, they are offered services through suggestion or advice. These spontaneous services help them solve various possible problems in learning and assist them to progress in the online learning process. All the supportive services are adapted to individual learners. Three key adaptations, service content, presentation manner, and intervention degree, are applied. Profiles are built to characterize individual learning characteristics, including knowledge constitution, cognition ability, and learning styles. All the services are dynamically generated based on actual learning scenes. A learning process specification language, built upon Koper’s EML, is developed to describe the learning activities and processes and the corresponding supportive services. A new type of agents, process agents, is developed to realize the services. Three classes of agents, personal assistant agent, planning agent, and managing agent, have been incorporated into the learning environment to provide support for learners. They work in the background, monitor and evaluate individual learner’s learning, and provide supportive services for learners whenever necessary. Together they play a role of ''constructivist teacher". To demonstrate the work, a system prototype has been developed and a number of services have been implemented. A preliminary evaluation has illustrated the agent-based approach can facilitate construction of knowledge by individual learners

The OCareCloudS project: toward organizing care through trusted cloud services

The increasing elderly population and the shift from acute to chronic illness makes it difficult to care for people in hospitals and rest homes. Moreover, elderly people, if given a choice, want to stay at home as long as possible. In this article, the methodologies to develop a cloud-based semantic system, offering valuable information and knowledge-based services, are presented. The information and services are related to the different personal living hemispheres of the patient, namely the daily care-related needs, the social needs and the daily life assistance. Ontologies are used to facilitate the integration, analysis, aggregation and efficient use of all the available data in the cloud. By using an interdisciplinary research approach, where user researchers, (ontology) engineers, researchers and domain stakeholders are at the forefront, a platform can be developed of great added value for the patients that want to grow old in their own home and for their caregivers

Doing research on the effectiveness of psychotherapy and psychotherapy training: a person-centered/experiential perspective

In this article, we present a framework for selecting instruments for evaluating psychotherapy and psychotherapy training from a person-centered and experiential psychotherapy (PCEP) perspective. The protocol is divided into eight therapy measurement domains, consisting of four research themes (therapy outcome, therapy process, client predictors, training outcome) and two levels (general/pan-theoretical concepts vs. treatment specific/PCEP-oriented concepts). This research protocol provides recommendations about what to measure, encouraging collaboration across different training sites, while still allowing flexibility for individual centers. Minimum and systematic case study data collection designs are described: Minimum designs are appropriate for use in private practice settings with one's own clients; systematic case-study designs can be used for student case-presentation requirements or for publication. The framework and research protocols described are part of an emerging international research project involving private and public training centers in several countries

How 5G wireless (and concomitant technologies) will revolutionize healthcare?

The need to have equitable access to quality healthcare is enshrined in the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which defines the developmental agenda of the UN for the next 15 years. In particular, the third SDG focuses on the need to “ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages”. In this paper, we build the case that 5G wireless technology, along with concomitant emerging technologies (such as IoT, big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning), will transform global healthcare systems in the near future. Our optimism around 5G-enabled healthcare stems from a confluence of significant technical pushes that are already at play: apart from the availability of high-throughput low-latency wireless connectivity, other significant factors include the democratization of computing through cloud computing; the democratization of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cognitive computing (e.g., IBM Watson); and the commoditization of data through crowdsourcing and digital exhaust. These technologies together can finally crack a dysfunctional healthcare system that has largely been impervious to technological innovations. We highlight the persistent deficiencies of the current healthcare system and then demonstrate how the 5G-enabled healthcare revolution can fix these deficiencies. We also highlight open technical research challenges, and potential pitfalls, that may hinder the development of such a 5G-enabled health revolution