Exploring hashtags collaboratively to facilitate learning and knowledge construction

In the era of mobile learning and digital native students, concepts like seamless learning, situated learning and rhizomatic learning gain importance as the current technology is able to support them by developing new kinds of applications for mobile devices. At the same time, social network platforms like Twitter are also being studied as a way to boost communication supporting collaborative knowledge construction since they are available everywhere and students are familiar with their use. This paper highlights an experience in which a mobile application called FeedbackApp was developed and used for these purposes. The main characteristic of this application is that it uses various ways to explore the information generated while searching and sharing information and discussing the learning topics, using concept maps, geographical maps and text lists. A preliminary experience shows that this application might encourage students to be more participative in discussions and exchange of ideas

Applying Dempster–Shafer theory for developing a flexible, accurate and interpretable classifier

Two approaches have traditionally been identified for developing artificial intelligence systems supporting decision-making: Machine Learning, which applies general techniques based on statistical analysis and optimization methods to extract information from a large amount of data looking for possible relations among them, and Expert Systems, which codify experts knowledge in rules, which are then applied to a specific situation. One of the main advantages of the first approach is its greater accuracy and wider generality for the application of the methods developed which can be used in various scenarios. By contrast, expert systems are usually more restricted and often applicable only to the domain for which they were originally developed. However, the machine learning approach requires the availability of large chunks of data, and it is much more complicated to interpret the results of the statistical methods to obtain some explanation of why the system decides, classifies, or evaluates a situation in a certain way. This issue may become very important in areas such as medicine, where it is relevant to know why the system recommends a certain treatment or diagnoses a certain illness. Likewise, in the financial sector, it might be legally required to explain that a decision to reject the granting of a mortgage loan to a person is not due to discriminatory causes such as gender or race. In order to be able to have interpretability and extract knowledge of available data we developed a classification method based on Dempster-Shafer's Plausibility Theory. Mass assignment functions (MAF) must be established to apply this theory and they assign a weight or probability to all subsets of the possible outcomes, given the presence of a certain fact on a decision scenario. Thus MAF assignments encode expert knowledge. The method learns optimal values for the weights of each MAF using the Gradient Descent method. The presented method allows combination of MAF which have been generated by the method itself or defined by an expert with those that are derived from a set of available data. The developed method was first applied to controlled scenarios and traditional data sets to ensure that classifications and explanations are correct. Results show that the model can classify with an accuracy which is comparable to other statistical classification methods, being also able to extract the most important decision rules from the data.Conicyt (Chile) scholarship 2218050

Using Mobile Devices to Foster Social Interactions in the Classroom

This paper reports about the development of a system supporting problem-based learning in the classroom. Its principal design principles are the combination of computer mediated and face-to-face interaction and mobility to ensure a high level of motivation. The main contributions of this solution are: a) being a full peer-to-peer application it can be used in any situation, inside the classroom, in labs, museum or even in the open air; b) the teacher can create new problems "on the fly" and send them to the students anytime; and c) provides the teacher with powerful assessment and feedback possibilities. The paper also reports about a first evaluation of the system called MCI-Supporter.This paper was funded by Fondecyt 1050601

Understanding student participation in undergraduate course communities: A case study

Artículo de publicación ISIParticipation is the cornerstone of any community. Promoting, understanding and properly managing it allows not only keeping the community sustainable, but also providing personalized services to its members and managers. This article presents a case study in which student participation in a course community was motivated using two different extrinsic mechanisms, and mediated by a software platform. The results were compared with a baseline community of the same course, in which participation was not motivated by external means. The analysis of these results indicates that managing a partially virtual course community requires the introduction of monitoring services, community managers and extrinsic mechanisms to motivate participation. These findings allow community managers to improve their capability for promoting participation and keeping the community sustainable. The findings also raise several implications that should be considered in the design of software supporting this kind of community, when managing the participation of its members.Fondecyt Project (Chile) 1150252; Ph.D. Scholarship Program of Conicyt Chile CONICYT-PCHA/Doctorado Nacional/2013-2113007

Findings when converting a summative evaluation instrument to a formative one through collaborative learning activities

Although illiteracy has been in constant decline over the last decades,there are too many reports about people having problems to identify the mainideas contained in texts they read. Reading comprehension is essential for stu-dents, because it is a predictor of their academic or professional success.Researchers have developed computer supported learning activities for sup-porting students develop their reading comprehension skills with varying degreesof success. One of the various advantages of having students work on electronicdocuments is that computers can help teachers monitor students’work. One ofthe problems of these systems is poor usability due to sophisticated human-computer interaction paradigms emulating activities students perform in tradi-tional learning activities for improving reading comprehension with pen andpaper. In this paper we report on a research which implements a learning activitybased on answers with multiple choice similar to a questionnaire, which is easy toimplement in computers and easy to interact with. Although multiple choicequestionnaires are associated to summative evaluations, the implementedlearning activity uses them within a collaborative learning activity in whichstudents have to justify,first individually then collaboratively, their choice with ashort text. The developed system was used and evaluated in a real learningsituation; one of the most interestingfindings is not only that students who haveto justify their option with a text perform better than those who have not, but thatthe pertinence of the text to the question does not play a major role. This suggeststhat just asking the students to justify their answers requires them to do a thinkingprocess which otherwise they would not do

A Platform for Motivating Collaborative Learning Using Participatory Simulation Applications

Several research efforts suggest that collaborative participatory simulations improve teaching and learning, increasing motivation inside the classroom. Currently, it has been mainly applied with students of primary and secondary educational levels, leaving higher level students aside. This paper presents a platform for implementing participatory simulations, where social interactions and motivational effects are the main facilitators. An instance of this platform was implemented for medicine school undergraduate students. Its implementation is simple, lightweight, fully based on pen-based interaction, and designed to work with handhelds and tablet-PC over an ad-hoc wireless network. The platform is able to support any kind of application implementing participatory simulation based on the exchange of artifacts among the learners.This paper was funded by Fondecyt 1050601

Exploring collaboration in the realm of virtual museums

Virtual museums have been very popular since the early days of the World Wide Web and many scientific works have been published on this topic. Although the rich variety of possibilities for supporting collaboration among the users of virtual museums, today very few implementations offer support for such kind of activities. This paper aims at settling the value of collaboration in virtual museums by means of depicting and classifying collaborative organization and co-curation activities in establishing, designing, planning, realizing, operating, deploying and visiting a virtual exhibition applying action research. As a use case, we present ongoing work to realize a virtual museum devoted to Armenian cross stones (Khachkars)

Basis for a Methodology to Define, Validate and Apply Best Practices in a Computer-integrated Classroom

A todos los que me acompañaron en esta aventura. Especialmente a Carolina, quien estuvo junto a mi en cada paso. i Agradecimientos Este es un proyecto que no es posible emprender solo. Durante el desarrollo de mi tesis recibí ayuda de más fuentes de las que podía imaginar. No me es posible agradecer en estas líneas a todos, así que pido disculpas a quienes involuntariamente he dejado fuera. Agradezco a mis profesores guía, Nelson Baloian, Ulrich Hoppe y José Pino, con quienes pude contar no sólo en lo profesional sino también en lo personal. Al Servicio Alemán de Intercambio Académico (DAAD) que permitió dedicación exclusiva a mi trabajo durante un período importante, a través de Maria Hartmann que siempre estuvo dispuesta a ayudar. Al grupo Collide de la Universität Duisburg-Essen que me acogió en un ambiente muy propicio, especialmente a Ulrich Hoppe