Harmony and Technology Enhanced Learning

New technologies offer rich opportunities to support education in harmony. In this chapter we consider theoretical perspectives and underlying principles behind technologies for learning and teaching harmony. Such perspectives help in matching existing and future technologies to educational purposes, and to inspire the creative re-appropriation of technologies

Designing a training tool for imaging mental models

The training process can be conceptualized as the student acquiring an evolutionary sequence of classification-problem solving mental models. For example a physician learns (1) classification systems for patient symptoms, diagnostic procedures, diseases, and therapeutic interventions and (2) interrelationships among these classifications (e.g., how to use diagnostic procedures to collect data about a patient's symptoms in order to identify the disease so that therapeutic measures can be taken. This project developed functional specifications for a computer-based tool, Mental Link, that allows the evaluative imaging of such mental models. The fundamental design approach underlying this representational medium is traversal of virtual cognition space. Typically intangible cognitive entities and links among them are visible as a three-dimensional web that represents a knowledge structure. The tool has a high degree of flexibility and customizability to allow extension to other types of uses, such a front-end to an intelligent tutoring system, knowledge base, hypermedia system, or semantic network

Knowledge Construction of 3D Geometry Concepts and Processes Within a Virtual Reality Learning Environment

A consensus has emerged within the mathematics education community about the limitations of traditional approaches for teaching and learning 3D geometry. Therefore, it has been suggested that new approaches based on the use of computers need to be adopted. One such new approach that has been proposed utilises Virtual Reality Learning Environment (VRLE). This paper reports on the initial phases of a research study whose major aim is to design and evaluate a VRLE to facilitate the construction of knowledge about 3D geometry concepts and processes. This research study investigates two primary school students’ construction of 3D geometry knowledge whilst engaged within a VRLE developed by the researcher. A design experiments research methodology was employed in this study. This is research that iterates through cycles of design and research with the objective of arriving at theoretical and design principles that will have application both within and beyond the immediate research study. Therefore, the results being reported in this paper will be used to inform the modification not only of the VRLE but also of theoretical frameworks underlying the design and implementation of VRLEs

Hypercard: A promising tool for constructivist methodolody

Multimedia learning -- Collaborative authoring of Hypercard stacks -- Student construction of meaning

Architecture and hypertext: networks of proliferation, accretion and mutation

This thesis originated with the East River Project, a national collection of collaborative studios orchestrated by the Van Alen Institute in New York City. The project addresses the question of how best to energize and rehabilitate the decaying urban fabric on the banks of the East River in Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. The site which the Iowa State Laboratory for Experimental Design worked on compromises the East River Park (extending over a mile between 14th and Jackson Streets) and the structure that intersects it, the Williamsburg Bridge (spanning the river between Brooklyn and Manhattan at Delancey Street). The L.E.D. overlaid onto the project of proposing rehabilitation of the East River Park and its predominant structure (the bridge) its mission of exploring the interface of digital and physical tools in the design process.;As an integrated media studio, it addressed the problem from the standpoint that integrated media can best serve: design as an accretion of multiple small elements on a conceptual framing apparatus, small elements on a conceptual framing apparatus, small elements that can be constructed piecemeal and over a long period of time (as opposed to design as a process of master planning at the grand scale, which then proceeds to the small elements). Furthermore, this research was situated specifically within an epistemological milieu that is characterized by various possibilities of accretion and proliferation, the way in which these processes are conducted, and what they represent. This milieu compromises the 1851 Crystal Palace in London,;Hieronymous Bosch\u27s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, the model of the garden itself as the ongoing product of such processes (as well as the linear processes of conventional design), Material World (a collection of photographs of average families from many countries, each posed in front of its abode with all of its domestic possessions), James Joyce\u27s Finnegans Wake, and Owen Jones\u27s The Grammar of Ornament, among other nodes that describe this territory of proliferation of the everyday. The first \u27ordering\u27 of this research resulted in four drawings of the design of a Rapid Transit Station on the Williamsburg Bridge, connecting the bridge to the park. This thesis is the second ordering, a written work assisted by the drawings. Katleen Wouters, Six Nodes, Four Baskets

Designers and Stakeholders Defining Design Opportunities "In-Situ" through Co-reflection

this article proposes co-reflection as a workshop to situate design practice in its context of application and presents a case study done at the eLearn Center of the Open University of Catalonia. Co-reflection is a re!ective practice. In the half-aday workshop developed, co-reflection was specifically tailored for group dynamics in situ. The workshop was the kick-off meeting of a design research project and involved both designers and stakeholders. The project focused on how to communicate and disseminate relevant information between members of the eLearn Center. the aim of the kick-off meeting was to define design opportunities by framing both collaboration and a design space. this double aim has been achieved by: a) exploring and framing a design space by re!ecting on short design activities in situ, and b) motivating stakeholders to collaborate in the design research project by making them re!ect on the expertise and interests they can share and gain. Participants’ evaluations have been used as feedback and treated as insightful considerations for further action research

Semantics of time travel in a generative information space

This thesis focuses on interactive and computational semantics for manipulating the time-based medium of an evolving information space. The interactive semantics enable the user to engage in linear timeline traversal and non-linear history manipulation. Extended tape recorder metaphor controls, including jog-shuttle based navigation, provide the user with flexible means for operating the software's generative functionalities, and linearly traversing session history. The user can see previews of information space states while traversing the history using the jog-shuttle. We also introduce a door-latch metaphor that enables one of several considered forms of nonlinear history manipulation. Users can change history by retroactively latching an information sample in its position across time. For representing the information space history, we have developed MPEG-like computational keyframe semantics. This representation is in the form of XML, which is generated automatically and converted back to Java by a framework named ecologylab.xml, which was developed as a part of this thesis. These computational keyframe semantics serve as the basis for interaction semantics. A user study was conducted in the form of a design competition, to evaluate these new features. The results indicated that the users do find the time travel features useful and they feel more in-control of the information space with access to time travel features compared to the case when time travel features are not present