A tutorial task and tertiary courseware model for collaborative learning communities

RAED provides a computerised infrastructure to support the development and administration of Vicarious Learning in collaborative learning communities spread across multiple universities and workplaces. The system is based on the OASIS middleware for Role-based Access Control. This paper describes the origins of the model and the approach to implementation and outlines some of its benefits to collaborative teachers and learners

Towards automated generation of scripted dialogue: some time-honoured strategies

The main aim of this paper is to introduce automated generation of scripted dialogue as a worthwhile topic of investigation. In particular the fact that scripted dialogue involves two layers of communication, i.e., uni-directional communication between the author and the audience of a scripted dialogue and bi-directional pretended communication between the characters featuring in the dialogue, is argued to raise some interesting issues. Our hope is that the combined study of the two layers will forge links between research in text generation and dialogue processing. The paper presents a first attempt at creating such links by studying three types of strategies for the automated generation of scripted dialogue. The strategies are derived from examples of human-authored and naturally occurring dialogue

Simulating emotional reactions in medical dramas

Presenting information on emotionally charged topics is a delicate task: if bare facts alone are conveyed, there is a risk of boring the audience, or coming across as cold and unfeeling; on the other hand, emotional presentation can be appropriate when carefully handled, but when overdone or mishandled risks being perceived as patronising or in poor taste. When Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems present emotionally charged information linguistically, by generating scripts for embodied agents, emotional/affective aspects cannot be ignored. It is important to ensure that viewers consider the presentation appropriate and sympathetic. We are investigating the role of affect in communicating medical information in the context of an NLG system that generates short medical dramas enacted by embodied agents. The dramas have both an informational and an educational purpose in that they help patients review their medical histories whilst receiving explanations of less familiar medical terms and demonstrations of their usage. The dramas are also personalised since they are generated from the patients' own medical records. We view generation of natural/appropriate emotional language as a way to engage and maintain the viewers' attention. For our medical setting, we hypothesize that viewers will consider dialogues more natural when they have an enthusiastic and sympathetic emotional tone. Our second hypothesis proposes that such dialogues are also better for engaging the viewers' attention. As well as describing our NLG system for generating natural emotional language in medical dialogue, we present a pilot study with which we investigate our two hypotheses. Our results were not quite as unequivocal as we had hoped. Firstly, our participants did notice whether a character sympathised with the patient and was enthusiastic. This did not, however, lead them to judge such a character as behaving more naturally or the dialogue as being more engaging. However, when pooling data from our two conditions, dialogues with versus dialogues without emotionally appropriate language use, we discovered, somewhat surprisingly, that participants did consider a dialogue more engaging if they believed that the characters showed sympathy towards the patient, were not cold and unfeeling, and were natural (true for the female agent only)

Argument Strength is in the Eye of the Beholder: Audience Effects in Persuasion

Americans spend about a third of their time online, with many participating in online conversations on social and political issues. We hypothesize that social media arguments on such issues may be more engaging and persuasive than traditional media summaries, and that particular types of people may be more or less convinced by particular styles of argument, e.g. emotional arguments may resonate with some personalities while factual arguments resonate with others. We report a set of experiments testing at large scale how audience variables interact with argument style to affect the persuasiveness of an argument, an under-researched topic within natural language processing. We show that belief change is affected by personality factors, with conscientious, open and agreeable people being more convinced by emotional arguments.Comment: European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2017

Managing affect in learners' questions in undergraduate science

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2012 Society for Research into Higher Education.This article aims to position students' classroom questioning within the literature surrounding affect and its impact on learning. The article consists of two main sections. First, the act of questioning is discussed in order to highlight how affect shapes the process of questioning, and a four-part genesis to question-asking that we call CARE is described: the construction, asking, reception and evaluation of a learner's question. This work is contextualised through studies in science education and through our work with university students in undergraduate chemistry, although conducted in the firm belief that it has more general application. The second section focuses on teaching strategies to encourage and manage learners' questions, based here upon the conviction that university students in this case learn through questioning, and that an inquiry-based environment promotes better learning than a simple ‘transmission’ setting. Seven teaching strategies developed from the authors' work are described, where university teachers ‘scaffold’ learning through supporting learners' questions, and working with these to structure and organise the content and the shape of their teaching. The article concludes with a summary of the main issues, highlighting the impact of the affective dimension of learning through questioning, and a discussion of the implications for future research

Learning by watching others learn: the use of videoed tutorials in undergraduate business education

The Fourth Industrial Age (4IA) is likely to be accompanied simultaneously by an increase in technology-mediated learning and an urgent need for people to learn rapidly, effectively and collaboratively. This study investigates the potential of vicarious learning from videoed tutorials as a pedagogical tool suitable for the challenges of 4IA. Undergraduate Business students observed videos of student tutees responding to tutor prompts as they tackled open-ended and conceptually challenging problems. The results revealed that student observers self-reported: gains in their conceptual understanding from watching videoed tutorials; preferences for watching tutorial dialogues over alternative learning methods; and that watching videoed tutorials had positive impacts on their affect and access to additional learning-related information. The study concludes that vicarious learning from videoed tutorials is an accessible technology-mediated pedagogy that is achievable by mainstream educators and is effective in developing conceptual understanding, engaging students and providing access to additional learning-related information.Peer Reviewe

The Art of Science of Teaching Utilizing Discussion and Other Group Participation Methods in Class Room Teaching

The literature concerning teaching is replete with information and research on how to teach and how people learn. There is also a considerable body of knowledge indicating that adult students have learning preferences somewhat different from adolescent and child students. Yet we often find that we are not as well versed in the art and science of teaching as we would like to be, and unless we attend classes in a college of education, little in our formal education teaches us to teach, except our learning from the observational experience of going to class and watching others teach. This lack of emphasis on teaching by college teachers has been exacerbated by structures which reward publication, grantsmanship, and consultation more than effective teaching. Exposure to the literature on teaching allows one to categorize the many methods and techniques for teaching into five broad sets of methods: telling methods, discussion methods, showing methods, performance methods, and supervised study methods. In this paper the author addresses one of these sets, discussion methods. Discussion methods of teaching are often divided into two sets, closed group methods and open group methods. The distinction in the two being the extent of participation of all members. In closed group methods, all learners are active discussion participants. In open group methods one person or a small group take the most active part and the others are essentially an audience. Nine closed group methods and four open group methods are described and cautions and suggestions concerning their use are given

Investigating the learning process of students using dialogic instructional videos

The need for high-quality remote learning experiences has been illustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, there is a need to explore instructional videos that go beyond expert exposition as the main pedagogical approach. An emerging body of research has begun to investigate instructional videos that feature dialogue. However, this body of research has focused primarily on whether such videos are effective. In contrast, the purpose of our study is to investigate the dialogic learning processes involved as students viewing dialogic videos develop mathematical meaning. We employed a Bakhtinian perspective to analyse the learning of a pair of Grade 9 students who engaged with dialogic instructional videos. The results focus on ventriloquation as a learning process

Learning and Games

Part of the Volume on the Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning In this chapter, I argue that good video games recruit good learning and that a game's design is inherently connected to designing good learning for players. I start with a perspective on learning now common in the Learning Sciences that argues that people primarily think and learn through experiences they have had, not through abstract calculations and generalizations. People store these experiences in memory -- and human long-term memory is now viewed as nearly limitless -- and use them to run simulations in their minds to prepare for problem solving in new situations. These simulations help them to form hypotheses about how to proceed in the new situation based on past experiences. The chapter also discusses the conditions experience must meet if it is to be optimal for learning and shows how good video games can deliver such optimal learning experiences. Some of the issues covered include: identity and learning; models and model-based thinking; the control of avatars and "empathy for a complex system"; distributed intelligence and cross-functional teams for learning; motivation, and ownership; emotion in learning; and situated meaning, that is, the ways in which games represent verbal meaning through images, actions, and dialogue, not just other words and definitions