Up and down the number line: modelling collaboration in contrasting school and home environments

This paper is concerned with user modelling issues such as adaptive educational environments, adaptive information retrieval, and support for collaboration. The HomeWork project is examining the use of learner modelling strategies within both school and home environments for young children aged 5 – 7 years. The learning experience within the home context can vary considerably from school especially for very young learners, and this project focuses on the use of modelling which can take into account the informality and potentially contrasting learning styles experienced within the home and school

Generating socially appropriate tutorial dialog

Analysis of student-tutor coaching dialogs suggest that good human tutors attend to and attempt to influence the motivational state of learners. Moreover, they are sensitive to the social face of the learner, and seek to mitigate the potential face threat of their comments. This paper describes a dialog generator for pedagogical agents that takes motivation and face threat factors into account. This enables the agent to interact with learners in a socially appropriate fashion, and foster intrinsic motivation on the part of the learner, which in turn may lead to more positive learner affective states

Supporting Behavior Change in Cooperative Driving

Cooperation among vehicles is aimed to create a smooth traffic flow and minimize shockwaves and traffic jams. Before the technology gets mature, cooperative driving may already be made possible by involving the drivers. This paper reports a literature survey on two issues: 1) cooperation in traffic and motivations in driving; 2) persuasive technology and applications of extrinsic feedback. Informed by the literature survey, we propose concepts for supporting driver’s behavior change for the purpose of cooperative driving