AN ENACTIVE APPROACH TO TECHNOLOGICALLY MEDIATED LEARNING THROUGH PLAY

This thesis investigated the application of enactive principles to the design of classroom technolo- gies for young children’s learning through play. This study identified the attributes of an enactive pedagogy, in order to develop a design framework to accommodate enactive learning processes. From an enactive perspective, the learner is defined as an autonomous agent, capable of adapta- tion via the recursive consumption of self generated meaning within the constraints of a social and material world. Adaptation is the parallel development of mind and body that occurs through inter- action, which renders knowledge contingent on the environment from which it emerged. Parallel development means that action and perception in learning are as critical as thinking. An enactive approach to design therefore aspires to make the physical and social interaction with technology meaningful to the learning objective, rather than an aside to cognitive tasks. The design framework considered in detail the necessary affordances in terms of interaction, activity and context. In a further interpretation of enactive principles, this thesis recognised play and pretence as vehicles for designing and evaluating enactive learning and the embodied use of technology. In answering the research question, the interpreted framework was applied as a novel approach to designing and analysing children’s engagement with technology for learning, and worked towards a paradigm where interaction is part of the learning experience. The aspiration for the framework was to inform the design of interaction modalities to allow users’ to exercise the inherent mechanisms they have for making sense of the world. However, before making the claim to support enactive learning processes, there was a question as to whether technologically mediated realities were suitable environments to apply this framework. Given the emphasis on the physical world and action, it was the intention of the research and design activities to explore whether digital artefacts and spaces were an impoverished reality for enactive learning; or if digital objects and spaces could afford sufficient ’reality’ to be referents in social play behaviours. The project embedded in this research was tasked with creating deployable technologies that could be used in the classroom. Consequently, this framework was applied in practice, whereby the design practice and deployed technologies served as pragmatic tools to investigate the potential for interactive technologies in children’s physical, social and cognitive learning. To understand the context, underpin the design framework, and evaluate the impact of any techno- logical interventions in school life, the design practice was informed by ethnographic methodologies. The design process responded to cascading findings from phased research activities. The initial fieldwork located meaning making activities within the classroom, with a view to to re-appropriating situated and familiar practices. In the next stage of the design practice, this formative analysis determined the objectives of the participatory sessions, which in turn contributed to the creation of technologies suitable for an inquiry of enactive learning. The final technologies used standard school equipment with bespoke software, enabling children to engage with real time compositing and tracking applications installed in the classrooms’ role play spaces. The evaluation of the play space technologies in the wild revealed under certain conditions, there was evidence of embodied presence in the children’s social, physical and affective behaviour - illustrating how mediated realities can extend physical spaces. These findings suggest that the attention to meaningful interaction, a presence in the environment as a result of an active role, and a social presence - as outlined in the design framework - can lead to the emergence of observable enactive learning processes. As the design framework was applied, these principles could be examined and revised. Two notable examples of revisions to the design framework, in light of the applied practice, related to: (1) a key affordance for meaningful action to emerge required opportunities for direct and immediate engagement; and (2) a situated awareness of the self and other inhabitants in the mediated space required support across the spectrum of social interaction. The application of the design framework enabled this investigation to move beyond a theoretical discourse

Multiuser Museum Interactives for Shared Cultural Experiences: an Agent Based Approach

Multiuser museum interactives are computer systems installed in museums or galleries which allow several visitors to interact together with digital representations of artefacts and information from the museum's collection. WeCurate is such a system, providing a multiuser curation work ow where the aim is for the users to synchronously view and discuss a selection of images, #12;nally choosing a subset of these images that the group would like to add to their group collection. The system presents two main problems: work control and group decision making. An Electronic Institution (EI) is used to model the work into scenes, where users engage in speci#12;c activities in speci#12;c scenes. A multiagent system is used to support group decision making, representing the actions of the users within the EI, where the agents advocate and support the desires of their users e.g. aggregating opinions, proposing interactions and resolutions between disagreeing group members and choosing images for discussion. Copyright © 2013, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (www.ifaamas.org). All rights reserved.Peer Reviewe

WeCurate: Enriching the Sociocultural Practices of the Museum Experience

This paper reports on the evaluation of WeCurate, a synchronised image viewer that supports discussions of digital images of cultural artefacts. The evaluation was conducted at a London museum while it was installed as a multiuser interactive. The results from the trial reflected the dynamics and practices of social groups visiting museums, and revealed aspects of social interaction which should be considered when developing interactives intended to support collaboration

An Experience-Based BDI Logic: Motivating Shared Experiences and Intentionality

This paper proposes the notion of experience to help situate agents in their environment, providing a link on how the continually evolving environment impacts the evolution of an agent's BDI model and vice versa. Then, using the notion of shared experience as a primitive construct, we develop a novel formal model of shared intention which we believe more adequately describes social behaviour than traditional BDI logics that focus on individual agents. Whilst many philosophers have argued that collective intentionality cannot always be equated to the collection of the individual agents' intentions, there has been no AI model that addresses this issue. We believe this is the first attempt to develop an explicit notion of shared experience from an AI perspective. © 2013 IEEE.This work is supported by: the ACE ERA-Net project; the CBIT project (funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science & Innovation TIN2010-16306); and the Agreement Technologies project (CONSOLIDER CSD 2007-0022, INGENIO 2010)Peer Reviewe

Collaborative Peer Assessment using PeerLearn

In this chapter we introduce the PeerLearn methodology and its associated tools. We base the design of pedagogical workflows for students on the definition of rubrics (using PeerAssess) as the starting element that drives the creation of lesson plans (using LessonEditor). These plans run over our web platform (Peer-Flow). Students can evaluate one another following given rubrics and teachers can accept (or not) marks produced by a collaborative assessment tool (COMAS). Experimental results show that PeerLearn provide students with a highly satisfying new pedagogical experience and increased learning outcomes. © 2015 The authors and IOS Press.Peer reviewe

Music Learning with Massive Open Online Courses

Steels, Luc et al.-- Editors: Luc SteelsMassive Open Online Courses, known as MOOCs, have arisen as the logical consequence of marrying long-distance education with the web and social media. MOOCs were confidently predicted by advanced thinkers decades ago. They are undoubtedly here to stay, and provide a valuable resource for learners and teachers alike. This book focuses on music as a domain of knowledge, and has three objectives: to introduce the phenomenon of MOOCs; to present ongoing research into making MOOCs more effective and better adapted to the needs of teachers and learners; and finally to present the first steps towards 'social MOOCs’, which support the creation of learning communities in which interactions between learners go beyond correcting each other's assignments. Social MOOCs try to mimic settings for humanistic learning, such as workshops, small choirs, or groups participating in a Hackathon, in which students aided by somebody acting as a tutor learn by solving problems and helping each other. The papers in this book all discuss steps towards social MOOCs; their foundational pedagogy, platforms to create learning communities, methods for assessment and social feedback and concrete experiments. These papers are organized into five sections: background; the role of feedback; platforms for learning communities; experiences with social MOOCs; and looking backwards and looking forward. Technology is not a panacea for the enormous challenges facing today's educators and learners, but this book will be of interest to all those striving to find more effective and humane learning opportunities for a larger group of students.Funded by the European Commission's OpenAIRE2020 project.Peer reviewe

An Experience-Based BDI Logic: Motivating Shared Experiences and Intentionality

International audienceThis paper proposes the notion of experience to help situate agents in their environment, providing a link on how the continually evolving environment impacts the evolution of an agent's BDI model and vice versa. Then, using the notion of shared experience as a primitive construct, we develop a novel formal model of shared intention which we believe more adequately describes social behaviour than traditional BDI logics that focus on individual agents. Whilst many philosophers have argued that collective intentionality cannot always be equated to the collection of the individual agents' intentions, there has been no AI model that addresses this issue. We believe this is the first attempt to develop an explicit notion of shared experience from an AI perspective

Multiuser Museum Interactives for Shared Cultural Experiences: an Agent-based Approach

Multiuser museum interactives are computer systems installed in museums or galleries which allow several visitors to interact together with digital representations of artefacts and information from the museum's collection. WeCurate is such a system, providing a multiuser curation workflow where the aim is for the users to synchronously view and discuss a selection of images, finally choosing a subset of these images that the group would like to add to their group collection. The system presents two main problems: workflow control and group decision making. An Electronic Institution (EI) is used to model the workflow into scenes, where users engage in specific activities in specific scenes. A multiagent system is used to support group decision making, representing the actions of the users within the EI, where the agents advocate and support the desires of their users e.g. aggregating opinions, proposing interactions and resolutions between disagreeing group members and choosing images for discussion

WeCurate: Designing for synchronised browsing and social negotiation

WeCurate is a shared image browser for collaboratively curating a virtual exhibition from a cultural image archive. This paper is concerned with the evaluation and iteration of a prototype UI (User Interface) design to enable this community image browsing. In WeCurate, several remote users work together with autonomic agents to browse the archive and to select, through negotiation and voting, a set of images which are of the greatest interest to the group. The UI allows users to synchronize viewing media, assists navigating the cultural institutions extensive database and users negotiations about which images should be added to the gro

Engineering multiuser museum interactives for shared cultural experiences

Multiuser museum interactives are computer systems installed in museums or galleries which allow several visitors to interact together with digital representations of artefacts and information from the museum׳s collection. In this paper, we describe WeCurate, a socio-technical system that supports co-browsing across multiple devices and enables groups of users to collaboratively curate a collection of images, through negotiation, collective decision making and voting. The engineering of such a system is challenging since it requires to address several problems such as: distributed workflow control, collective decision making and multiuser synchronous interactions. The system uses a peer-to-peer Electronic Institution (EI) to manage and execute a distributed curation workflow and models community interactions into scenes, where users engage in different social activities. Social interactions are enacted by intelligent agents that interface the users participating in the curation workflow with the EI infrastructure. The multiagent system supports collective decision making, representing the actions of the users within the EI, where the agents advocate and support the desires of their users e.g. aggregating opinions for deciding which images are interesting enough to be discussed, and proposing interactions and resolutions between disagreeing group members. Throughout the paper, we describe the enabling technologies of WeCurate, the peer-to-peer EI infrastructure, the agent collective decision making capabilities and the multi-modal interface. We present a system evaluation based on data collected from cultural exhibitions in which WeCurate was used as supporting multiuser interactive