A design-based study of Citizen Inquiry for geology

Citizen Inquiry forms a new method of informal science learning and aims to enable the engagement of citizens in online scientific investigations. Citizen Inquiry combines aspects from Citizen Science and Inquiry-based learning and is implemented through a community of practice where people having a shared interest interact and exchange knowledge and methods supported and guided by online systems and tools within a web-based inquiry environment. To explore the potential of Citizen Inquiry, a series of design-based studies will be developed to help in understanding and improving the engagement of citizens in online scientific investigation. “Inquiring Rock Hunters” is the first design-study of Citizen Inquiry, applied to Geology, and it explores the experience of participants with inquiries, other participants and tools

Training novel phonemic contrasts: a comparison of identification and oddity discrimination training

High Variability Pronunciation Training (HVPT) is a highly successful alternative to ASR-based pronunciation training. It has been demonstrated that HVPT is effective in teaching the perception of non-native phonemic contrasts, and that this skill generalizes to the perception of unfamiliar words and talkers, transfers to pronunciation, and is retained long-term. HVPT is, however, not efficient and hence not motivating for the learner. In this study, we therefore compare HVPT with an alternative, namely oddity discrimination training. This comparison, in which Mandarin-Chinese speakers were trained to pronounce the English /r/-/l/ phonemic contrast, provides preliminary evidence to support the use of discrimination tasks in addition to identification tasks to add variety to HVPT

Introducing citizen inquiry

The term ‘citizen inquiry’ was coined to describe ways that members of the public can learn by initiating or joining shared inquiry-led scientific investigations (Sharples et al., 2013). It merges learning through scientific investigation with mass collaborative participation exemplified in citizen science activities, altering the relationship most people have with research from being passive recipients to becoming actively engaged, and the relationship between scholarship and public understanding from dissemination towards cooperation. Through the presentation of empirical studies, this edited volume introduces concepts and practices of citizen inquiry

Design Guidelines for Sensor-based Mobile Learning Applications

We present five design guidelines that we have developed from issues identified during our usability evaluations in a sensor-based citizen inquiry project. These have been compiled from existing literature, and after receiving feedback on use of the mobile application from participants through forum comments and survey responses, statistical analysis of the sensor measurements, and the researchers' observation and reflection. These guidelines aim to assist Technology-enhanced Learning (TEL) researchers and teachers who develop, modify or use mobile apps for their projects and lessons

E-Pedagogy of Handheld Devices 2013 Survey: Patterns of student use for learning

The Pedagogy of Ebooks (E-Ped) project began in 2012 and seeks to document, analyse and explain the changing study practices of UK distance learning students as they employ, adapt and integrate the use of new portable digital devices such as e-book readers and tablets into their learning. This report describes the results of an undergraduate survey undertaken in 2013 at the Open University (UK) which asked students how they used e-readers, tablets and smartphones for study. This research represents a snapshot of the rapidly changing interaction between technology and education, and highlights issues and opportunities for Higher Education in supporting student adoption of appropriate technologies and development of effective new methods of study

Towards social generative AI for education: theory, practices and ethics

This paper explores educational interactions involving humans and artificial intelligences not as sequences of prompts and responses, but as a social process of conversation and exploration. In this conception, learners continually converse with AI language models within a dynamic computational medium of internet tools and resources. Learning happens when this distributed system sets goals, builds meaning from data, consolidates understanding, reconciles differences, and transfers knowledge to new domains. Building social generative AI for education will require development of powerful AI systems that can converse with each other as well as humans, construct external representations such as knowledge maps, access and contribute to internet resources, and act as teachers, learners, guides and mentors. This raises fundamental problems of ethics. Such systems should be aware of their limitations, their responsibility to learners and the integrity of the internet, and their respect for human teachers and experts. We need to consider how to design and constrain social generative AI for education.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl

New AI tools that can write student essays require educators to rethink teaching and assessment

AI tools are available today that can write compelling university level essays. Taking an example of sample essay produced by the GPT-3 transformer, Mike Sharples discusses the implications of this technology for higher education and argues that they should be used to enhance pedagogy, rather than accelerating an ongoing arms race between increasingly sophisticated fraudsters and fraud detectors

Cognition, computers and creative writing

This thesis describes a teaching scheme for creative writing that takes account of a child's developing cognitive abilities. It first provides the means for a child to explore language and gain sufficient understanding of linguistic concepts and processes to be able to control the acquisition of new writing skills. This is a preparation for the second part of the scheme, in which a child applies this understanding to her own creative writing. The child is given practice in generating and transforming text at different structural levels, and in selecting text forms that are appropriate to the audience and function of the writing. Computer programs form an integral part of the scheme. They provide representations of two abstract systems - a generative grammar and an associative network - which the child manipulates to investigate language structure and plans. The programs also offer a dynamic medium for text creation and revision. The teaching scheme was tested with six eleven year old children who visited the University for 29 sessions of 60-70 minutes duration, over three school terms. It was presented to the children through written worksheets, containing language exercises, writing activities, and instructions for the use of the computer. The children were set pre and post descriptive and narrative essays. The same essays were also set for a control group of children who followed normal classroom teaching for the period of the project. The main method of assessment was a feature analysis of the essays. They were examined for the occurrence of 'mature' and 'immature' linguistic features, at the word/phrase, sentence, and section level of text. The presence of mature features indicates that the writer is able to reflect on the form of language and can create text to a well-structured and coherent plan. During the first part of the scheme, the children formed into two distinct groups. Two children performed poorly in all activities that involved the understanding and manipulation of language. The four remaining children performed well in these activities and enjoyed the experience of exploring language with the aid of a computer. These four children w^ere taken on to the second stage of the scheme. An analysis of the pre and post essays showed developments in the writing ability of all four children. Each child, however, gained a different set of skills, and appeared to be using the writing projects to explore a particular aspect of style. We suggest that such explorations are valuable, enabling a child to discover the constraints and possibilities of creative writing

John Clark's Latin Verse Machine: 19th Century Computational Creativity

John Clark was inventor of the Eureka machine to generate hexameter Latin verse. He labored for 13 years from 1832 to implement the device that could compose at random over 26 million different lines of well-formed verse. This paper proposes that Clark should be regarded as an early cognitive scientist. Clark described his machine as an illustration of a theory of "kaleidoscopic evolution" whereby the Latin verse is "conceived in the mind of the machine" then mechanically produced and displayed. We describe the background to automated generation of verse, the design and mechanics of Eureka, its reception in London in 1845 and its place in the history of language generation by machine. The article interprets Clark's theory of kaleidoscopic evolution in terms of modern cognitive science. It suggests that Clark has not been given the recognition he deserves as a pioneer of computational creativity.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. Submitted to IEEE Annals of the History of Computin

Seeding, wonder rooms and curatorial inquiry: New forms of museum communication and learning

This paper addresses how to enable innovative forms of learning with museums. Research into the learning sciences has identified attributes of successful learning, including learning through conversation and collaboration, embodied cognition, and metacognitive awareness (Sawyer, 2014). Parallel work has identified new methods of learning in an age of digital and mobile technologies, such as seamless learning, rhizomatic learning and personal inquiry learning (Sharples et al., 2014). These are underpinned by a social constructivist theory of learning whereby people construct shared understanding of the world through active exploration and dialogue, mediated by cognitive tools and supported by expert teachers. How can this new science of learning be aligned with the role and fabric of museums as places to exhibit and interpret collections for public education and entertainment