Visual modelling and designing for cooperative learning and development of team competences

This paper proposes a holistic approach to designing for the promotion of team and social competences in blended learning courses. Planning and modelling cooperative learning scenarios based on a domain specific modelling notation in the style of UML activity diagrams, and comparing evaluation results with planned outcomes allows for iterative optimization of a course's design. In a case study - a course on project management for computer science students - the instructional design including individual and cooperative learning situations was modelled. Specific emphasis was put on visualising the hypothesised development of team competences in the course design models. These models were subsequently compared to evaluation results obtained during the course. The results show that visual modelling of planned competence promotion enables more focused design, implementation and evaluation of collaborative learning scenarios

Interactive Teaching Across Culture and Technology

Remember the time when you had a teacher in front of a blackboard endlessly talking, sometimes in a rambling way to students? Those days are gone. This project is a proof of that and aims at palliating students’ boredom. Interactive Teaching Materials across Culture and Technology (INTACT) intends to present an alternative way in the teaching paradigm as it intends to be a resourceful tool in the teaching/learning process. Both teachers and students can work together cooperatively and collaboratively, two different ways well explained by Mary Glynn and Ildikó Szabó further ahead. Teachers will no longer become the centre of learning but they will become guides and facilitators throughout all the learning process. Students can learn from their teachers but the latter can also learn from the former. The novelty here is that learners are engaged online in a different set of activities and among students. Therefore, the INTACT platform caters for an online collaborative learning community comprised of both students and teachers. As Sarolta Lipóczi so well puts it, the crux of the matter is ‘learning to learn too’. The teaching paradigm is changing and we are witnessing different approaches and techniques in pedagogical matters. In this context, at the basis of the INTACT project is a display of a wide array of new techniques and methodologies that account for active learning based on multimodal teaching and learning resources. Students will thus interact cognitively and in a constructivist way with different materials, such as visuals, texts, audio, to name a few. INTACT offers students and teachers options so that they can choose several actions in the course of the learning unit, for instance watch, browse, select, compare and manipulate all the resources available. Bearing in mind this short introduction to the project, in Part 2 Mary Glynn and Ildikó Szabó give us a better definition of INTACT and the educational arguments underlying its foundation. They also focus on the difference between collaborative and cooperative learning and on the importance of bilingualism and the advantages of CLIL, now one of the trendiest bilingual teaching methods, In part 2, we find a sample of resources ranging from Biology to second language learning. In the first learning unit, Toni Cramer and Steffen Schaal from the University of Education-Ludwigsburg, Germany, conceived an 8-lesson unit plan on the Human Immune System. Through these 8 lessons, students will learn how to explain blood types, to describe the parts of the human immune system model and collect data and interpret the spreading of diseases using adequate simulations, among other useful knowledge. The second and the third learning units are targeted at primary school students. The authors’ main purpose, Mary Glynn, from St. Patrick’s College in Dublin and Mariangeles Caballero from Universidad Complutense – Faculty of Education in Madrid, respectively, is to enhance students’ knowledge on science and technology by exploring and applying scientific ideas and concepts. Magnetism and the Human Circulatory system are therefore the proposals presented by the authors. Framed in the Geography programme of the 7th grade of the 3rd cycle of the basic education, for a target audience aged 12-13 years old, Maria Antónia Martins, from Emídio Garcia Secondary School in Bragança-Portugal, conceived the fourth learning unit on Elements and Climate factors regarding the Translational Motion and the Seasons of the Year. The temperature element was chosen to be studied throughout 3 lessons. In the course of these, students should not only be capable of relating the diurnal and annual variation of the temperature according to the movements of the earth but also to understand the relation between the annual variation of the temperature and the latitude of the place. The fifth and the sixth learning units aim at improving foreign language and social skills while at the same time students are taken back in time, thus broadening their knowledge on culture and history. Through the most suggestive title: ‘Legends and heroes – To be a Knight in King Arthur’s court’, Ildikó Szabó, from the Kecskemét College, Teacher Training Faculty in Hungary, takes us on a tour through medieval times meeting the needs of several learning styles, such as acoustic, kinaesthetic and visual. Sarolta Lipóczi, also from the Kecskemét College, Teacher Training Faculty, conceived the sixth learning unit titled ‘Mozart as a child and his travels’ a way to learn German as a foreign language. In this unit, primary school students are given the story of a famous musician born in Austria. Students thus develop cultural knowledge and language competences through exciting learning objects and activities. In part 3, Birgit May, Annika Jokiaho and Vítor Gonçalves, with the collaboration of José Exposto make a brief overview of the INTACT platform, explaining the methods adopted and highlighting more technical issues related to results achieved during the the project. Subchapter 3.2. reflects on good practices resulting from the whole project. It also records the national teams’ experience in working with the others for accomplishing the various tasks as well as the numerous unexpected and unavoidable problems that came up in the three years during which the project was completed. Being all said, we truly hope that this ebook can become an appetiser to the project, largely to make both students and teachers frequent users of the interactive platform

A survey of agent-oriented methodologies

This article introduces the current agent-oriented methodologies. It discusses what approaches have been followed (mainly extending existing object oriented and knowledge engineering methodologies), the suitability of these approaches for agent modelling, and some conclusions drawn from the survey

A cross-case analysis of ICT courses in teacher training programmes for special needs: technology affordances and Universal Design for Learning

The special needs teacher is a highly qualified professional whose role is to work in collaboration with all class teachers to activate an inclusive approach for the benefit of all students and to enable individual potentialities. Technology can be of paramount importance in designing learning activities according to the principles of Universal Design for Learning in an interdisciplinary approach and with a holistic perspective of all involved actors in the teaching/learning process. In Italy, the prospective special needs teacher has the opportunity to be fully trained thanks to a comprehensive specialization course where the areas of competence of digital literacy are addressed in a specific course. The study reports a cross analysis of three editions of an Information and Communication Technology course, with a focus on the results of the last edition, whose online format was discussed starting from strengths identified in the first two face-to-face editions of the same course

Enhancing competence development for social inclusion Using the TENCompetence Web tools

Louys, A., Hernández-Leo, D., Sligte, H., Pérez-Sanagustín, M., & Schoonenboom, J. (2010). Enhancing competence development for social inclusion Using the TENCompetence Web tools. In D. Griffiths, & R. Koper (Eds.), Rethinking Learning and Employment at a Time of Economic Uncertainty. Proceedings of the 6th TENCompetence Open workshop (pp. 60-72). November, 19-20, 2009, Manchester, UK. Bolton, UK: Institute for Educational Cybernetics, The University of Bolton. For the complete book please see http://hdl.handle.net/1820/3191This paper describes the study of two pilot studies centred on technology-enhanced competence development in lifelong education carried out in the challenging context of the Association of Participants Àgora. The comparison between both pilot studies reinforces the first conclusion drawn from the 1st pilot experience, which puts in evidence that the use of the TENCompetence infrastructure provides significant learning benefits for adult participants with low educational profiles and who are traditionally excluded from the use of innovative learning technologies and the knowledge society. The participants had the opportunity to develop and improve competences related to English language, ICT and Basic Spanish (only 2nd pilot). The tools employed switched from being a Rich client to a Web client also integrating new functionality related to self-assessment, activities organization and resources sharing. The paper introduces the context and the pilot scenario, indicates the evaluation methodology applied and discusses the most significant findings and the comparison of the two pilot studies. The results of the second pilot reinforce the conclusion that TENCompetence provides a relevant solution for competence development in support of social inclusion.The work on this publication has been sponsored by the TENCompetence Integrated Project that is funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme, priority IST/Technology Enhanced Learning. Contract 027087 [http://www.tencompetence.org

Rethinking learning and employment at a time of economic uncertainty:Proceedings of the 6th TENCompetence Open Workshop, Manchester, UK, 19th and 20th November 2009

These proceedings consist of the peer reviewed papers presented at the Sixth TENCompetence Open Workshop. This was the final event of TENCompetence, which was an Integrated Project funded by the EU 6th Framework Programme with the goal of developing a European, open-source infrastructure to support the lifelong development of competences. The workshop took place at the Edwardian Hotel, Manchester, UK, on the 19th and 20th November 2009. The theme chosen was “Rethinking Learning and Employment at a Time of Economic Uncertainty”, reflecting the environment in which results of the project were to be deployed. The eight papers are grouped into three thematic sections: (1) strategic issues related to the provision competence development activities; (2) aspects of the technical infrastructure required to provide flexible support for competence development; (3) the results of pilots which make use of TENCompetence tools to provide competence development opportunities in four contrasting contexts of lifelong learning, outside the traditional context of formal education