WEB 2.0 MEDIATED COLLABORATIVE WRITING IN EFL CONTEXT: SURVEY OF EMPIRICAL RESEARCH

The existence of Web 2.0 technology which allows all users to meet, read, and write online provides room for innovations in teaching and learning method. Online collaborative writing tools, a type of the social networking web 2.0, has been increasingly integrated into English language teaching and learning. A number of researches have been conducted to examine the use of this online collaborative writing

Exploring Improvisational Approaches to Social Knowledge Acquisition

To build agents that can engage user in more open-ended social contexts, more and more attention has been focused on data-driven approaches to reduce the requirement of extensive, hand-authored behavioral content creation. However, one fundamental challenge of data-driven approaches, is acquiring human social interaction data with sufficient variety to capture more open-ended social interactions, as well as their coherency. Previous work has attempted to extract such social knowledge using crowdsourced narratives. This paper proposes an approach to acquire the knowledge of social interaction by integrating an improvisational theatre training technique into a crowdsourcing task aimed at collecting social narratives. The approach emphasizes theory of mind concepts, through an iterative prompting process about the mental states of characters in the narrative and paired writing, in order to encourage the authoring of diverse social interactions. To assess the effectiveness of integrating prompting and two-worker improvisation to the knowledge acquisition process, we systematically compare alternative ways to design the crowdsourcing task, including a) single worker vs. two workers authoring interaction between different characters in a given social context, and b) with or without prompts. Findings from 175 participants across two different social contexts show that the prompts and two-workers collaboration could significantly improve the diversity and the objective coherency of the narratives. The results presented in this paper can provide a rich set of diverse and coherent action sequences to inform the design of socially intelligent agents

Exploring Improvisational Approaches to Social Knowledge Acquisition

To build agents that can engage user in more open-ended social contexts, more and more attention has been focused on data-driven approaches to reduce the requirement of extensive, hand-authored behavioral content creation. However, one fundamental challenge of data-driven approaches, is acquiring human social interaction data with sufficient variety to capture more open-ended social interactions, as well as their coherency. Previous work has attempted to extract such social knowledge using crowdsourced narratives. This paper proposes an approach to acquire the knowledge of social interaction by integrating an improvisational theatre training technique into a crowdsourcing task aimed at collecting social narratives. The approach emphasizes theory of mind concepts, through an iterative prompting process about the mental states of characters in the narrative and paired writing, in order to encourage the authoring of diverse social interactions. To assess the effectiveness of integrating prompting and two-worker improvisation to the knowledge acquisition process, we systematically compare alternative ways to design the crowdsourcing task, including a) single worker vs. two workers authoring interaction between different characters in a given social context, and b) with or without prompts. Findings from 175 participants across two different social contexts show that the prompts and two-workers collaboration could significantly improve the diversity and the objective coherency of the narratives. The results presented in this paper can provide a rich set of diverse and coherent action sequences to inform the design of socially intelligent agents

Exploring Writing Circles as Innovative, Collaborative Writing Structures with Teacher Candidates

Writing circles are “small groups . . . meeting regularly to share drafts, choose common writing topics, practice positive response, and in general, help each other become better writers” (Vopat, 2009, p. 6). In this exploratory study, writing circles were employed with elementary teacher candidates in hopes of enhancing their perceptions about writing and authorship. This mixed methods pilot used a convenience sample of 28 teacher candidates in a language arts methods course. Based on interest and using writing workshop elements, weekly writing circles were formed and generated one collaborative manuscript. Afterward, 68% of candidates reported improvement in writing skills. Retrospective responses were analyzed and coded to reveal the following themes: ideas, relationships, choice, improvement, and feedback. Furthermore, 96% of candidates reported enthusiasm for using writing circles in their future classrooms

Principles in Patterns (PiP) : Piloting of C-CAP - Evaluation of Impact and Implications for System and Process Development

The Principles in Patterns (PiP) project is leading a programme of innovation and development work intended to explore and develop new technology-supported approaches to curriculum design, approval and review. It is anticipated that such technology-supported approaches can improve the efficacy of curriculum approval processes at higher education (HE) institutions, thereby improving curriculum responsiveness and enabling improved and rapid review mechanisms which may produce enhancements to pedagogy. Curriculum design in HE is a key "teachable moment" and often remains one of the few occasions when academics will plan and structure their intended teaching. Technology-supported curriculum design therefore presents an opportunity for improving academic quality, pedagogy and learning impact. Approaches that are innovative in their use of technology offer the promise of an interactive curriculum design process within which the designer is offered system assistance to better adhere to pedagogical best practice, is exposed to novel and high impact learning designs from which to draw inspiration, and benefits from system support to detect common design issues, many of which can delay curriculum approval and distract academic quality teams from monitoring substantive academic issues. This strand of the PiP evaluation (WP7:38) attempts to understand the impact of the PiP Class and Course Approval Pilot (C-CAP) system within specific stakeholder groups and seeks to understand the extent to which C-CAP is considered to support process improvements. As process improvements and changes were studied in a largely quantitative capacity during a previous but related evaluative strand, this strand includes the gathering of additional qualitative data to better understand and verify the business process improvements and change effected by C-CAP. This report therefore summarises the outcome of C-CAP piloting within a University faculty, presents the methodology used for evaluation, and the associated analysis and discussion. More generally this report constitutes an additional evaluative contribution towards a wider understanding of technology-supported approaches to curriculum design and approval in HE institutions and their potential in improving process transparency, efficiency and effectiveness

Principles in Patterns (PiP) : Project Evaluation Synthesis

Evaluation activity found the technology-supported approach to curriculum design and approval developed by PiP to demonstrate high levels of user acceptance, promote improvements to the quality of curriculum designs, render more transparent and efficient aspects of the curriculum approval and quality monitoring process, demonstrate process efficacy and resolve a number of chronic information management difficulties which pervaded the previous state. The creation of a central repository of curriculum designs as the basis for their management as "knowledge assets", thus facilitating re-use and sharing of designs and exposure of tacit curriculum design practice, was also found to be highly advantageous. However, further process improvements remain possible and evidence of system resistance was found in some stakeholder groups. Recommendations arising from the findings and conclusions include the need to improve data collection surrounding the curriculum approval process so that the process and human impact of C-CAP can be monitored and observed. Strategies for improving C-CAP acceptance among the "late majority", the need for C-CAP best practice guidance, and suggested protocols on the knowledge management of curriculum designs are proposed. Opportunities for further process improvements in institutional curriculum approval, including a re-engineering of post-faculty approval processes, are also recommended

MobiGroup: Enabling Lifecycle Support to Social Activity Organization and Suggestion with Mobile Crowd Sensing

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This paper presents a group-aware mobile crowd sensing system called MobiGroup, which supports group activity organization in real-world settings. Acknowledging the complexity and diversity of group activities, this paper introduces a formal concept model to characterize group activities and classifies them into four organizational stages. We then present an intelligent approach to support group activity preparation, including a heuristic rule-based mechanism for advertising public activity and a context-based method for private group formation. In addition, we leverage features extracted from both online and offline communities to recommend ongoing events to attendees with different needs. Compared with the baseline method, people preferred public activities suggested by our heuristic rule-based method. Using a dataset collected from 45 participants, we found that the context-based approach for private group formation can attain a precision and recall of over 80%, and the usage of spatial-temporal contexts and group computing can have more than a 30% performance improvement over considering the interaction frequency between a user and related groups. A case study revealed that, by extracting the features such as dynamic intimacy and static intimacy, our cross-community approach for ongoing event recommendation can meet different user needs

A High Fidelity Interface for Documents Merging Tool Using a Language Analysis Oracle

Revision is an important step in the writing process in order to obtain a good written work. It is mostly needed in academia, industry, and government. Usually, it is done by one reviser or more who is not the author of the written piece. The role of revisers is not limited to correcting any spelling or grammar mistakes, but also ensuring the coherence of the writing as well as the words used by the author to express his/her idea correctly to the readers. In addition, revisers help the author to put his/her writing in the appropriate format. One approach to do the revision is individually in a parallel way where each reviser modifies the original document. As a result, the author ends up with multiple versions of his/her work. For this situation, many merging control systems have been developed to enable the user to merge the revised versions with the original document in order to represent the changes that were made in the revised versions in an easily understandable way. Although these merging tools provide the users with much of the relevant information about the changes and who made them, the interfaces of these tools do not allow users to filter the corrections so that the users’ attention can be focused on the most important changes. For example, if there are format changes and grammar corrections, in addition to editing changes that could change the meaning of the author’s original writing, we believe that users would prefer to pay attention to the changes that could change the meaning and then check the format changes, after taking a look at grammar corrections. In this thesis we developed a new merging interface that enables the user to filter the changes, based on their level of importance, to give them special attention. In addition, the interface provides the users with a user-friendly control panel that allows the user to choose among conflicting changes. This will help users produce a correct merged document. A usability study was conducted with ten graduate students from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee to test whether a high fidelity prototype of this interface would help users to better understand the changes that were made in the two revisions as well as choose the best revisions. While the study found both positive and negative qualities in the prototype, most participants valued the change classification feature, suggesting that it is worthy of further research

FRAMEWORK FOR COLLABORATIVELY WRITING TEACHING AIDS BY EXAMPLE OF RAJU KESKUS MATERIALS

Koolitused ülikoolis ja mujal on täna muutumas. Oleme liikumas traditsioonilistelt õppematerjalidelt uude ajastusse. Õpikud ei pea enam olema staatilised, kus need kirjutatakse kord valmis ja kunagi ehk tehakse parandatud kordustrükk. Aina enam on levimas ning populaarsust kogumas e-õpe, paljud kursused on kättesaadavad veebis konspektidena või spetsaalselt selleks loodud keskkondades nagu Blackboard [1] ja Moodle [1]. Samas ei pea ükski õppematerjal piirduma vaid veebi või pabervormiga – lisaks on õpiplatvormidena kasutusel ka nutitelefonid, e-lugerid, pihuarvutid jms. Need uued tehnoloogilised lahendused teevad võimalikuks lisada õppematerjalidesse lisaks tekstile ka interaktiivseid elemente - animatsioone, videosid, audiot, eneseteste ja palju muud. Nii nagu tehnoloogiasajand annab uued võimalused toob see ka uusi eelduseid ja ootusi. Wikipedia inglisekeelses versioonis tehakse iga päev ligikaudu 150 000 muudatust [2], iga maailma suursündmuse kohta tekib operatiivselt ka vastav Wikipedia artikkel. Kõik artiklid on pidevas arengus, nende sisu muutub aina paremaks ja täpsemaks. Lennuliikluse häirete korral ei saada ettevõtted enam viimse peensuseni viimistletud pressiteateid vaid jagavad kiiret, operatiivset informatsiooni sotsiaalvõrgustikes nagu Facebook [3] või Twitter [4]. Ühiskond on jõudnud punkti, kus eelkõige on oluline informatsiooni värskus. Samad eeldused ja ootused kehtivad ka õppematerjalidele. Eeldame, et õppematerjalid on pidevas muutumises ning vastavad igal ajahetkel reaalsusele ja sisaldavad kõige värskemat informatsiooni. Digitaalseid materjale on küll oluliselt lihtsam uuendada kui anda aina välja uusi kordustrükke paberraamatutest, kuid vaatamata vormile on see väga vaevarikas töö. Ilmselt seetõttu on Wikipediast ja avatud lähtekoodiga (ing.k. Open Source) projektidest populaarseks saanud koostöö formaat jõudnud ka koolitusmaterjalide loomise maailma. Kooskirjutamist (ingl.k. collaborative writing) on põhjalikult uuritud juba aastakümneid [5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. Selle toetamiseks on püütud disainida ning ka loodud [11] mitmeid erinevaid tarkvaralahendusi. Uurimata ning väljapakkumata on aga terviklahendus, kuidas väiksemates projektides võiks hakkama saada igapäevaste, peamiselt tasuta kättesaadavate töövahenditega. Autori motivatsioon kooskirjutamise projekte lahata tuleneb isiklikust kogemusest ühe õppematerjali loomise projektiga. 2009. aasta märtsist augustini osales autor projekti Veebistuudium [12] Veebidisaini [13] õppesuuna õppematerjalide väljatöötamise meeskonnas. Meeskond koosnes kuuest spetsialistist, kes nende kuude vältel töötasid välja enam kui 200-leheküljelise materjali veebidisaini õpetamiseks kasutades tehnoloogiat Silverlight [14]. Seda materjali kasutas autor hiljem kahel nädalasel üldhariduskoolide õpetajatele suunatud koolitusel. Hiljem on koolituse läbinud õpetajad sama materjali kasutanud oma koolitundides. Tänaseks, kui materjal pole veel aastanegi, on Veebidisaini meeskond teinud mitmeid järeldusi, mida oleks võinud ning tulevikus peaks tegema teisiti. See on kogemus, mida autor soovib antud töös rakendada. Antud magistritöö esimeseks eesmärgiks on luua raamistik selliste koostöös valmivate ning pidevalt täienevate tänapäevaste õppematerjalide loomiseks. Töös uuritakse milliseid tehnilisi vahendeid tuleks kasutada ning kuidas tööd organiseerida ja planeerida. Lisaks vaadeldakse, millised probleemid võivad seejuures tekkida ning kuidas neid lahendada. Töö toetub suures osas RAJU keskuse (LEGO Mindstorms Robotite arendamise ja uurimise keskus) [15] näite najale, kus püütakse koos kirjutada õppematerjale LEGO Mindstorms [16] robotite kasutamise kohta õppetöös. Magistritöö üheks eesmärgiks ongi vastavalt valminud raamistikule panna kokku terviklik õpperaamat, mida saaksid praegused LEGO robotite huvilised juba sel sügisel kasutama hakata. Käesolev lõputöö koosneb neljast osast - esimene osas kirjutab täpselt lahti lahendatava probleemi, teises osas kirjeldatakse kooskirjutamist kui protsessi ja selle haldamist. Kolmandas osas analüüsitakse tehnilisi vahendeid, mis seda protsessi toetada võiksid. Neljandas osas analüüsitakse probleeme RAJU keskuse materjalides ning püütakse luua selged reeglid, mis neid edaspidi vältida aitavad.Courses in schools and universities are changing. We are drifting away from traditional static teaching aids towards a new era of interactive content. Some time ago one might have published a book on paper and after sufficient time had past (and hopefuly most of the books had been sold) there would have been another relase of the book. With e-learning technologies like BlackBoard [1] and Moodle [2] getting more and more popular we are able to constantly update and improve our teaching aids. But we are not limited only to web, today almost anything might be seen as an e-learning platform – e-readers, smartphones, PDAs, web-browsers or eaven gameconsoles. All of these also make it possible to include interactivity like multimedia, polls and animations in our lectures. As technology has brought new possibilities it has also built new expectations. We have reached the day where the thing that matters the most is the freshness of information. In the English version of Wikipedia there are about 150000 edits made each day [3]. For every major event, there is a Wikipedia article created for it almos instantly. Companies no longer worry about polishing their newsletters to very last detail. Instead they use 140 characters in a socialnetwork like Twitter [5] or Facebook [4] to provide accurate and operative information to their clients. The same expectations for information accuracy and freshnes has moved to training materials. Users expect that, the lectures they are attending and books they are reading, always contain the most up to date information. Constant updating and improving of training-materials is an owerwhelming task for only one person to maintain. That is why many are starting to use collaborative methods known from Wikipedia and open-source software projects to tackle those tasks. Collaborative writing is a well reasearched topic [5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. However there has not been much reasearch done about using everyday software and services for getting through such projects. RAJU keskus [16] is a group of LEGO Mindstorm NXT robots [17] enthusiast in Institute of Computer Science in University of Tartu. They are responsible of training teachers for using LEGO robots in education. Today they have a lot of tutorials, slides and videos for that purpose. For the first time last year, about 10 bachelour theseses were written that were later meant to be adapted to this big LEGO Mindstorms teaching aid. Today this one big book does not exist, because the process of collaboration and the materials both have some problems. This paper researches the different problems in collaboration and its management, looks at software and services to support collaboration and anayzes the specific case of RAJU keskuse teaching aids and proposes how to improve the materials and the process of creating them. This paper consists of four parts: the first part describes the exact collaborative writing problem to be solved, the second part gives an extensive overview of collaborative writing area, the third chapter concentrates on choosing software and services to support the collaboration. The fourth part gives exact guidelines to RAJU keskus for improving their process of collaboratively writing their book. One of the results of this thesis is a combined teaching material about LEGO Mindstorms NXT robots (Appendix 1). The book was put together according to the framework prooposed in this thesis