Personalised trails and learner profiling in an e-learning environment

This deliverable focuses on personalisation and personalised trails. We begin by introducing and defining the concepts of personalisation and personalised trails. Personalisation requires that a user profile be stored, and so we assess currently available standard profile schemas and discuss the requirements for a profile to support personalised learning. We then review techniques for providing personalisation and some systems that implement these techniques, and discuss some of the issues around evaluating personalisation systems. We look especially at the use of learning and cognitive styles to support personalised learning, and also consider personalisation in the field of mobile learning, which has a slightly different take on the subject, and in commercially available systems, where personalisation support is found to currently be only at quite a low level. We conclude with a summary of the lessons to be learned from our review of personalisation and personalised trails

The effects of dissection-room experiences and related coping strategies among Hungarian medical students

Background: Students get their first experiences of dissecting human cadavers in the practical classes of anatomy and pathology courses, core components of medical education. These experiences form an important part of the process of becoming a doctor, but bring with them a special set of problems. Methods: Quantitative, national survey (n = 733) among medical students, measured reactions to dissection experiences and used a new measuring instrument to determine the possible factors of coping. Results: Fifty per cent of students stated that the dissection experience does not affect them . Negative effects were significantly more frequently reported by women and students in clinical training (years 3,4,5,6). The predominant factor in the various coping strategies for dissection practicals is cognitive coping (rationalisation, intellectualisation). Physical and emotional coping strategies followed, with similar mean scores. Marked gender differences also showed up in the application of coping strategies: there was a clear dominance of emotional-based coping among women. Among female students, there was a characteristic decrease in the physical repulsion factor in reactions to dissection in the later stages of study. Conclusions: The experience of dissection had an emotional impact on about half of the students. In general, students considered these experiences to be an important part of becoming a doctor. Our study found that students chiefly employed cognitive coping strategies to deal with their experiences. Dissection-room sessions are important for learning emotional as well as technical skills. Successful coping is achieved not by repressing emotions but by accepting and understanding the negative emotions caused by the experience and developing effective strategies to deal with them. Medical training could make better use of the learning potential of these experiences

Particulate Fillers in Thermoplastics

The characteristics of particulate filled thermoplastics are determined by four factors: component properties, composition, structure and interfacial interactions. The most important filler characteristics are particle size, size distribution, specific surface area and particle shape, while the main matrix property is stiffness. Segregation, aggregation and the orientation of anisotropic particles determine structure. Interfacial interactions lead to the formation of a stiff interphase considerably influencing properties. Interactions are changed by surface modification, which must be always system specific and selected according to its goal. Under the effect of external load inhomogeneous stress distribution develops around heterogeneities, which initiate local micromechanical deformation processes determining the macroscopic properties of the composites

Collaborative trails and group profiling within an e-Learning environment

In recent years in the field of education there has been much attention given to work around Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). The basic idea is that learners profit from working together and learning together, as this invokes a deeper learning, and computers and the Internet provide just the tools needed for communication and collaboration to enable this kind of learning. The idea of collaborative trails was introduced in Kaleidoscope deliverable D22.2.1 (Schoonenboom et al., 2004), an earlier deliverable from the TRAILS project. This deliverable seeks to explore further the different forms that collaborative trails can take, how such trails can be usefully analysed, and how systems can support learners in creating and reflecting on the trails they take. It should be noted that not all collaborative trails come from collaborative learning – collaborative trails can emerge from a collection of individual paths through learning materials of learners who never meet or communicate with one another at all. The focus in this deliverable, however, is mainly on the trails created by learners when they work together on some common learning goal, in a CSCL context. The document is structured as follows: Section 2 gives a brief overview of the theoretical background to the development of CSCL, looking at constructivism, cooperation and collaboration. Section 3 looks at ways in which these theories can be put into practice in a computer supported environment. Three pedagogical models for achieving this are considered, and the section concludes with an assessment of how trails can be supported in such scenarios. Section 4 then moves on to look in more detail at the design of environments to support CSCL and at the techniques of collaborative filtering and conversational analysis that can be used to recommend items to learners and to help reflection on collaborative activity respectively. Section 5 reports on some of the existing research systems and state-of-the-art collaborative learning systems currently available, and categorises them into a taxonomy proposed by Jermann et al. (Jermann, Soller and Muehlenbrock, 2001), and concludes with a look at some of the main ongoing research issues in collaborative learning. Section 6 considers the new dimension added to collaboration via technology when the technology is mobile, and considers the occurrence of collaborative trails in mobile learning. Section 7 takes a look at how much support for collaboration is provided by current commercial e-learning systems, and we conclude in Section 8 by describing some learning scenarios that show where we think support for collaborative trails may be going in the next few years – they are futuristic, but quite possible with the technologies being currently developed