nQuire: technological support for personal inquiry learning

This paper describes the development of nQuire, a software application to guide personal inquiry learning. nQuire provides teacher support for authoring, orchestrating and monitoring inquiries as well as student support for carrying out, configuring and reviewing inquiries. nQuire allows inquiries to be scripted and configured in various ways, so that personally relevant, rather than off-the-shelf inquiries, can be created and used by teachers and students. nQuire incorporates an approach to specifying learning flow that provides flexible access to current inquiry activities without precluding access to other activities for review and orientation. Dependencies between activities are automatically handled, ensuring decisions made by the student or teacher are propagated through the inquiry. nQuire can be used to support inquiry activities across individual, group and class levels at different parts of the inquiry and offers a flexible, web-based approach that can incorporate different devices (smart phone, netbook, PC) and does not rely on constant connectivity

A “laboratory of knowledge-making” for personal inquiry learning

We describe nQuire, a constraint-based learning toolkit to support a continuity of inquiry based learning between classroom and non-formal settings. The paper proposes design requirements for personal inquiry learning environments that support learning of personally meaningful science topics with development of metacognitive understanding and self-regulation of the scientific process through situated practice. It introduces a generic implementable model of the inquiry process, and describes an instantiation in the nQuire learning environment. An example of the use of the toolkit for a Healthy Eating inquiry with 28 Year 9 students concludes with results of the trial, design issues and recommendations

Una arquitectura flexible orientada hacia el agente para análisis de interacción y retroalimentaci ón

An architectural framework for the engineering of distributed learning environments is described, which allows for plugging in intelligent support agents programmed in multiple languages agent. The framework implements a blackboard architecture with a Java-based central Tuple Space server and clients that differ in hardware (PDAs, PCs with projection) and possibly in programming languages (C#, Prolog, Java). On this basis, it is possible toanalyze and flexibly support learning activities based on action logs as well as system state information. This framework has been used for supporting group discussions including design meetings with mobile input devices and a large public display. Analytic agents havebeen implemented in Prolog.Se describe un marco arquitectónico para la ingeniería de ambientes de aprendizaje distribuido, que permite acoplar agentes de soporte inteligente programados con un agente de lenguajes múltiples. El marco implementa una arquitectura de pizarrón con un servidor de Espacio Tuple central basado en Java y clientes que difieren en el hardware (PDAs, PCs con proyección) y posiblemente en los lenguajes de programación (C#, Prolog, Java). Basado en esto, es posible analizar y apoyar actividades de aprendizaje a partir de logaritmos de acción así como información del estado del sistema. Este marco fue utilizado para respaldar discusiones en grupo que incluyen reuniones de diseño con dispositivos móviles de entrada y un gran despliegue público. Se han implementado agentes analíticos en Prolog