Cognitive neurorobotics and self in the shared world, a focused review of ongoing research

Through brain-inspired modeling studies, cognitive neurorobotics aims to resolve dynamics essential to different emergent phenomena at the level of embodied agency in an object environment shared with human beings. This article is a review of ongoing research focusing on model dynamics associated with human self-consciousness. It introduces the free energy principle and active inference in terms of Bayesian theory and predictive coding, and then discusses how directed inquiry employing analogous models may bring us closer to representing the sense of self in cognitive neurorobots. The first section quickly locates cognitive neurorobotics in the broad field of computational cognitive modeling. The second section introduces principles according to which cognition may be formalized, and reviews cognitive neurorobotics experiments employing such formalizations. The third section interprets the results of these and other experiments in the context of different senses of self, both “minimal” and “narrative” self. The fourth section considers model validity and discusses what we may expect ongoing cognitive neurorobotics studies to contribute to scientific explanation of cognitive phenomena including the senses of minimal and narrative self

Influence and originality in the creative writing process

Using an approach that distinguishes between the epistemologies of critical theory and creative practice, this study investigates notions of originality and influence in literary theory and considers their applicability to the teaching of creative writing and creative writing practice. It argues that current paradigms offer limited and contradictory explanations of these phenomena and makes the case that, through the assimilation of recent philosophical and scientific perspectives into a framework of socially-situated theory, a fresh approach can be developed that acknowledges the embodied experience of the writing process. The study consists of two main research areas: qualitative and literary/theoretical. The literary/theoretical research falls into two strands of enquiry that are closely linked and run parallel to each other throughout the thesis. One strand is concerned with the need to find an ontological structure for creative writing that accommodates practical and theoretical approaches and provides a conceptual framework that allows issues of originality and influence to be seen from both inside the writing process and from an external theoretical perspective. The second strand, evolving within the former, analyses notions of originality and influence historically and more specifically within romanticism and the socially situated theory of Mikhail Bakhtin. The qualitative research was designed to offer a practical and experiential set of findings that could be used to guide the theoretical research. In this research project, using a phenomenological methodology, a group of part-time adult creative writing students (14 participants) were asked to reflect on their perception and experience of originality and influence in the writing process. Their responses were returned in the form of questionnaires and the findings were collated into fourteen key themes. The theoretical research contextualizes the study within debates with student writers in writing workshop sessions about issues of influence and originality in critical peer review. After a discussion of the pedagogic and theoretical issues that these debates generated, including an analysis of the impact of romanticism on contemporary notions of creativity and a survey of developments in pedagogic theory in creative writing, the literary/theoretical research goes on to explore notions of originality and influence in the work of Bakhtin and romanticism in greater detail. It develops a critique of Bakhtin’s socially-situated theory of creativity and argues that this is due to a weakness in the ontological premises of Bakhtin’s conceptual framework. Moving to a study of romanticism it proposes that Bakhtin’s socially-situated theory fails to fully understand or assimilate embodied emotionality into its ontology and that the embodied emotionality in romanticism, when seen through a more contemporary paradigm of embodied realism reveals the shortcomings in socially-situated theory. The final section on embodied realism and the impact of neuroscience on studies of the body and emotionality argues for a fresh ontological perspective, which would resolve the paradoxical nature of the relationship between an epistemic, socially constructed view of reality and a more biologically determined notion of human nature. In the discussion of key findings and in the conclusion to the research the thesis shows how, by adopting the ontological perspective of embodied realism and incorporating it into socially-situated theory, new perspectives on originality, influence and creativity can be developed that fully integrate epistemologies of theory and practice, and offer a grounded theoretical position from which to construct a viable pedagogy for creative writing. Finally, the thesis offers idea

Designing Embodied Interactive Software Agents for E-Learning: Principles, Components, and Roles

Embodied interactive software agents are complex autonomous, adaptive, and social software systems with a digital embodiment that enables them to act on and react to other entities (users, objects, and other agents) in their environment through bodily actions, which include the use of verbal and non-verbal communicative behaviors in face-to-face interactions with the user. These agents have been developed for various roles in different application domains, in which they perform tasks that have been assigned to them by their developers or delegated to them by their users or by other agents. In computer-assisted learning, embodied interactive pedagogical software agents have the general task to promote human learning by working with students (and other agents) in computer-based learning environments, among them e-learning platforms based on Internet technologies, such as the Virtual Linguistics Campus (www.linguistics-online.com). In these environments, pedagogical agents provide contextualized, qualified, personalized, and timely assistance, cooperation, instruction, motivation, and services for both individual learners and groups of learners. This thesis develops a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and user-oriented view of the design of embodied interactive pedagogical software agents, which integrates theoretical and practical insights from various academic and other fields. The research intends to contribute to the scientific understanding of issues, methods, theories, and technologies that are involved in the design, implementation, and evaluation of embodied interactive software agents for different roles in e-learning and other areas. For developers, the thesis provides sixteen basic principles (Added Value, Perceptible Qualities, Balanced Design, Coherence, Consistency, Completeness, Comprehensibility, Individuality, Variability, Communicative Ability, Modularity, Teamwork, Participatory Design, Role Awareness, Cultural Awareness, and Relationship Building) plus a large number of specific guidelines for the design of embodied interactive software agents and their components. Furthermore, it offers critical reviews of theories, concepts, approaches, and technologies from different areas and disciplines that are relevant to agent design. Finally, it discusses three pedagogical agent roles (virtual native speaker, coach, and peer) in the scenario of the linguistic fieldwork classes on the Virtual Linguistics Campus and presents detailed considerations for the design of an agent for one of these roles (the virtual native speaker)

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.

Embodied Literate Practices of Freshman Women Students: A Phenomenology of Students in First-Year Composition

This project examines the experiences of freshman women students as they compose their first papers for first-year college composition. This study uses an interpretative phenomenological method to explore the lived experiences freshmen women undergo before they arrive at college and how those experiences inform these women’s practices in first-year composition. This dissertation has three main goals: to recover and clarify Heidegger’s interpretative phenomenology, to use that clarified method to explore freshman women’s experiences in first-year composition, and to suggest ways in which phenomenology might be used in the daily practices of writing instructors and administrators in higher education. To address each of these three goals, I first differentiate Heidegger’s interpretative phenomenology from Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology as well as from other phenomenologies. I also put interpretative phenomenology in conversation with both feminist and composition scholars to address some of the criticisms of interpretative phenomenology. The study itself consists of the interactions with seven volunteer participants in first-year composition, as well as my classroom observations and reflection journals. Keeping in line with phenomenological practice during the interviews, I outline a set of questions for the participants, but I allow the participants to lead the conversation, sometimes to places outside of my prepared outline; my classroom observations and reflection journals coincide chronologically with the interviews though they are performed at different times and locations. Then, using five broad research questions as a loose structure, I highlight conversations from the three data sources (interviews, reflection journals, classroom observations) to demonstrate what interpretative phenomenology confirms or reveals about our assumptions of freshmen in first-year composition. Finally, I use both the method as well as the data to describe “phenomenological thinking” and how that practice might be used to teach and assess student writing in higher education

L2 Learning-To-Write Through Writing Conferences: A Mixed Methods Research Study

Ph.D

Students´ language in computer-assisted tutoring of mathematical proofs

Truth and proof are central to mathematics. Proving (or disproving) seemingly simple statements often turns out to be one of the hardest mathematical tasks. Yet, doing proofs is rarely taught in the classroom. Studies on cognitive difficulties in learning to do proofs have shown that pupils and students not only often do not understand or cannot apply basic formal reasoning techniques and do not know how to use formal mathematical language, but, at a far more fundamental level, they also do not understand what it means to prove a statement or even do not see the purpose of proof at all. Since insight into the importance of proof and doing proofs as such cannot be learnt other than by practice, learning support through individualised tutoring is in demand. This volume presents a part of an interdisciplinary project, set at the intersection of pedagogical science, artificial intelligence, and (computational) linguistics, which investigated issues involved in provisioning computer-based tutoring of mathematical proofs through dialogue in natural language. The ultimate goal in this context, addressing the above-mentioned need for learning support, is to build intelligent automated tutoring systems for mathematical proofs. The research presented here has been focused on the language that students use while interacting with such a system: its linguistic propeties and computational modelling. Contribution is made at three levels: first, an analysis of language phenomena found in students´ input to a (simulated) proof tutoring system is conducted and the variety of students´ verbalisations is quantitatively assessed, second, a general computational processing strategy for informal mathematical language and methods of modelling prominent language phenomena are proposed, and third, the prospects for natural language as an input modality for proof tutoring systems is evaluated based on collected corpora

The Development of a Semantic Model for the Interpretation of Mathematics including the use of Technology

The semantic model developed in this research was in response to the difficulty a group of mathematics learners had with conventional mathematical language and their interpretation of mathematical constructs. In order to develop the model ideas from linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, formal languages and natural language processing were investigated. This investigation led to the identification of four main processes: the parsing process, syntactic processing, semantic processing and conceptual processing. The model showed the complex interdependency between these four processes and provided a theoretical framework in which the behaviour of the mathematics learner could be analysed. The model was then extended to include the use of technological artefacts into the learning process. To facilitate this aspect of the research, the theory of instrumentation was incorporated into the semantic model. The conclusion of this research was that although the cognitive processes were interdependent, they could develop at different rates until mastery of a topic was achieved. It also found that the introduction of a technological artefact into the learning environment introduced another layer of complexity, both in terms of the learning process and the underlying relationship between the four cognitive processes

Pressure, Threat, and Fear in the Classroom: Pupils' and Teachers' Perceptions of Soft Failure in an 11+ Context

This thesis concerns both pupils’ and teachers’ perceptions and reactions to soft failure. Whilst there is widespread agreement that errors and impasses in the classroom can be pedagogically useful, pupils do not always respond positively to soft failure, potentially limiting their learning. Teachers, whilst keen to support pupils experiencing temporary academic setbacks, can unintentionally cement perceptions that errors should be avoided, leading to a co-construction between teacher and pupil of a classroom climate that is unfriendly to error making. In taking a bio ecological and interdisciplinary approach, this thesis addresses a gap in error climate studies through examining the intersection of sociocultural and psychological factors that impact perceptions of, and reactions to, soft failure. This thesis argues that pupils’ reactions to soft failure are imprinted, not only with immediate classroom proximal processes, but also from processes within the home, wider values, and ideologies. Drawing upon the case study genre and bound by the entry and exit points of a selective education system, findings from observations and interviews with Y7 and Y5 pupils suggest the facilitation of classroom peer ecologies orientated towards performance and demonstrating success. Through conceptualising gender as heteroglossic, Y7 grammar school girls were seen to enact masculine, highly competitive performances which reinforced a pressured climate where negative evaluation and soft failure was feared. However, these findings are complicated by pupils’ divergent and fluctuating responses and reactions to soft failure, situated and contextualised by teachers’ error handling, classroom organisation and school processes. Therefore, to establish when soft failure matters for pupils, this thesis explores the interplay of competing values, goals, and interactions. In doing so, the antecedents of soft failure adaptivity are identified, with the perceived threat to pupils’ dignity – which I reason must be understood in an adolescent context — argued as the fulcrum on which soft failure appraisals are made