From VLEs to Learning Webs: The Implications of Web 2.0 for Learning and Teaching

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Brown, S. (2010) From VLEs to learning webs: The implications of web 2.0 for learning and teaching. Interactive Learning Environments, 18 (1), pp. 1-10 in the Interactive Learning Environments 2010 [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10494820802158983

Assessing the efficacy of online teaching with the Constructivist online learning environment survey

Teachers of science, mathematics and technology Australia wide are being required to transform their established epistemologies of practice in order to engage learners as active conceptualisers within socially interactive learning environments. Many teachers are enrolling in postgraduate distance education programs to assist them with this challenging task. Curtin University is responding by using computer mediated communication to speed up the exchange of distance study materials and to provide online interactive learning environments (via chat groups, bulletin boards and email). For the past three years, the authors have been using the Internet to teach online Masters degree students studying at a distance from Curtin. The major pedagogical goal is to engage students (professional teachers) in reflective and collaborative learning. The web sites provide Activity Rooms in which the teachers engage students in frequent and focused discourse with each other and with their online tutors. As reflective teachers, the authors are keen to evaluate their own innovative practices and constantly improve them. To this end, they have designed the Constructivist On-Line Learning Environment Survey (COLLES), an electronic questionnaire that enables them to readily monitor each student's preferred online learning environment and compare it with her/his actual experiences. In this presentation, they outline the rationale of the questionnaire and present some preliminary analyses that illustrate its usefulness. [Author abstract, ed] Teachers of science, mathematics and technology Australia wide are being required to transform their established epistemologies of practice in order to engage learners as active conceptualisers within socially interactive learning environments. Many teachers are enrolling in postgraduate distance education programs to assist them with this challenging task. Curtin University is responding by using computer mediated communication to speed up the exchange of distance study materials and to provide online interactive learning environments (via chat groups, bulletin boards and email). For the past three years, the Internet has been used to teach online Masters degree students studying at a distance from Curtin. The major pedagogical goal is to engage the students (professional teachers) in reflective and collaborative learning. Curtin's web sites provide Activity Rooms in which students are engaged in frequent and focused discourse with each other and with their online tutors. To evaluate and improve on their teaching practice, the academic staff designed the Constructivist On-Line Learning Environment Survey (COLLES), an electronic questionnaire that enables them to readily monitor each student's preferred online learning environment and compare it with her/his actual experiences. This paper outlines the rationale of the questionnaire and presents some preliminary analyses that illustrate its usefulness

The ecology of interactive learning environments: Situating traditional theory

In educational discourse on human learning (i.e. the result of experience) and development (i.e. the result of maturation), there are three fundamental theoretical frameworks, – behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism, each of which have been applied, with varying degrees of success, in online environments. An ecological framework of human learning and development in interactive learning environments is proposed. Such an inclusive paradigm organizes the fundamental theoretical assumptions of behaviourism (i.e. automated learning), cognitivism (i.e. recall, understanding, analysis, synthesis, evaluation, creativity, problem solving) and constructivism (i.e. private and shared meaning). Based on review of the literature, behaviourism is best conceptualized as a learning theory; constructivist theoretical assumptions are best applied to cognitive development including private online experience (cognitive constructivism) and shared online experience (social constructivism). Cognitivism is a particularly relevant theoretical orientation in understanding both human learning and development in interactive learning environments

SMILE: the creation of space for interaction through blended digital technology

Interactive Learning Environments at Sussex University is a course in which students are given mobile devices (XDAs) with PDA functionality and full Internet access for the duration of the term. They are challenged to design and evaluate learning experiences, both running and evaluating learning sessions that involve a blend of technologies. Data on technology usage was collected via backups, email and web-site logging as well as video and still photography of student-led sessions. Initial analysis indicates that large amounts of technical support, solid pedagogical underpinning and a flexible approach to both delivery context and medium are essential. The project operated under the acronym SMILE – Sussex Mobile Interactive Learning Environment

Editorial for Vol.29, No.1

This March 2021 issue (Vol. 29, No. 1) of CIT. Journal of Computing and Information Technology brings four papers from the areas of security and privacy, interactive learning environments, modeling and simulation, and natural language processing

Exploring the visualization of student behavior in interactive learning environments

My research combines Interactive Learning Environments (ILE), Educational Data Mining (EDM) and Information Visualization (Info-Vis) to inform analysts, educators and researchers about user behavior in software, specifically in CBEs, which include intelligent tutoring systems, computer aided instruction tools, and educational games. InVis is a novel visualization technique and tool I created for exploring, navigating, and understanding user interaction data. InVis reads in user-interaction data logged from students using educational systems and constructs an Interaction Network from those logs. Using this data InVis provides an interactive environment to allow instructors and education researchers to navigate and explore to build new insights and discoveries about student learning. I conducted a three-point user study, which included a quantitative task analysis, qualitative feedback, and a validated usability survey. Through this study, I show that creating an Interaction Network and visualizing it with InVis is an effective means of providing information to users about student behavior. In addition to this, I also provide four use-cases describing how InVis has been used to confirm hypotheses and debug software tutors. A major challenge in visualizing and exploring the Interaction Network is network's complexity, there are too many nodes and edges presented to understand the data efficiently. In a typical Interaction Network for twenty students, it is common to have hundreds of nodes, which to make sense of, has proven to be too many. I present a network reduction method, based on edge frequencies, which lowers the number of edges and nodes by roughly 90\\% while maintaining the most important elements of the Interaction Network. Next, I compare the results of this method with three alternative approaches and show our reduction method produces the preferred results. I also present an ordering detection method for identifying solution path redundancy because of student action orders. This method reduces the number of nodes and edges further and advances the resulting network towards the structure of a simple graph. Understanding the successful student solutions is only a portion of the behaviors we are interested in as researchers and educators using computer based educational systems, student difficulties are also important. To address areas of student difficulty, I present three different methods and two visual representations to draw the attention of the user to nodes where students had difficulty. Those methods include presenting the nodes with the highest number of successful students, the nodes with the highest number of failing students, and the expected difficulty of each state. Combined with a visual representation, these methods can draw the focus of users to potentially important nodes, which contain areas of difficulty for students. Lastly, I present the latest version of the InVis tool, which is a platform for investigating student behavior in computer based educational systems. Through the continued use of this tool, new researchers can investigate many new hypotheses, research questions and student behaviors, with the potential to facilitate a wide range of new discoveries