Motivational Social Visualizations for Personalized E-Learning

A large number of educational resources is now available on the Web to support both regular classroom learning and online learning. However, the abundance of available content produces at least two problems: how to help students find the most appropriate resources, and how to engage them into using these resources and benefiting from them. Personalized and social learning have been suggested as potential methods for addressing these problems. Our work presented in this paper attempts to combine the ideas of personalized and social learning. We introduce Progressor + , an innovative Web-based interface that helps students find the most relevant resources in a large collection of self-assessment questions and programming examples. We also present the results of a classroom study of the Progressor +  in an undergraduate class. The data revealed the motivational impact of the personalized social guidance provided by the system in the target context. The interface encouraged students to explore more educational resources and motivated them to do some work ahead of the course schedule. The increase in diversity of explored content resulted in improving students’ problem solving success. A deeper analysis of the social guidance mechanism revealed that it is based on the leading behavior of the strong students, who discovered the most relevant resources and created trails for weaker students to follow. The study results also demonstrate that students were more engaged with the system: they spent more time in working with self-assessment questions and annotated examples, attempted more questions, and achieved higher success rates in answering them

Designing electronic collaborative learning environments

Electronic collaborative learning environments for learning and working are in vogue. Designers design them according to their own constructivist interpretations of what collaborative learning is and what it should achieve. Educators employ them with different educational approaches and in diverse situations to achieve different ends. Students use them, sometimes very enthusiastically, but often in a perfunctory way. Finally, researchers study them and—as is usually the case when apples and oranges are compared—find no conclusive evidence as to whether or not they work, where they do or do not work, when they do or do not work and, most importantly, why, they do or do not work. This contribution presents an affordance framework for such collaborative learning environments; an interaction design procedure for designing, developing, and implementing them; and an educational affordance approach to the use of tasks in those environments. It also presents the results of three projects dealing with these three issues

Virtual Reality - Applications and Explorations

Virtual and Artificial Reality have become in the last few years one of the major new hype words. Subsequently there has been a plethora of glossy books and droll conference proceedings describing various systems and hardware implementation problems. As has always been discovered in computer science the major effort is in designing and building the software applications. Alan's aim has been to ignore the hardware side and concentrate on the far larger and almost impossible problem of what to do with it. This book is a collection of ten essays trying to look slightly into the future and define actual uses for Virtual Reality kits rather than showing off expensive hardware. This has resulted in a series of topics, each defines a different interface problem between the user and machine which may have some solution by using Virtual Reality. Even though the topics vary, at times drastically, Alan has managed to use editorial selection very well intertwining them into a reasonably coherent whole. The scope is too large for any single book to cover in any detail and as is inevitable important topics for example military and medicine have been excluded. Topics chosen range from traditional computer information database visualisation to planetary exploration to the Virtual Reality version of the music video and literacy in cyberspace