Intelligent support for inquiry learning from images: a learning scenario and tool

Inquiry learning involves the learner acquiring new concepts and skills by means of carrying out an investigation. Some previous studies have looked into how these learning activities can be carried out on source materials, such as web documents, and the provision of appropriate scaffolding to guide the learning process. Here we consider how intelligent support can be provided to guide the learner in analysing source materials and building knowledge from their interpretation. An important feature of our case study is that the source materials are images, potentially having greater variation in how they are interpreted and therefore increasing the need for intelligent support. Intelligent support provided by our system can identify patterns and inconsistencies in the learner’s interpretation and knowledge building, and offer recommendations based on comparison with a reference model. The recommendations derived from a reference model aim to guide the learner in reviewing and revising their interpretation of the images and the implications of these for their inferences, rather than directly providing a “right” or “wrong” evaluation of their answer

Teaching in the Collaborative Virtual Learning Environment of Second Life: Design Considerations For Virtual World Developers

Educators are seeking ways to better engage their students including the use of collaborative virtual learning environments (CVLEs). Some virtual worlds can serve as CVLEs as the advent of Second Life has created particular interest within the education community. Second Life, however, was not initially designed to facilitate education alone. I propose that as a CVLE, Second Life may be failing educators' expectations of its initial, ongoing, and future use as a system for supporting education. In order to determine how Second Life may be failing educators, I conducted a case study with a group of university-level educators that examined their reasons for and against adopting Second Life as a CVLE, the affordances they explored, the barriers they encountered, and how these affordances and barriers affected student learning and the participant's future use of Second Life and future virtual worlds in education. I then compare their use of Second Life to that of traditional groupware systems. As a result, I propose and detail the development of a rich integrated development environment, application programming interface, more flexible privacy policy, and more robust community tools for educators based on these comparisons