Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning

This study explores the role of academic blogs in supporting a group of preservice teachers while they became physically separated during the teaching practice. Underlying our study is an integrative approach that puts academic blogs alongside with other media in an attempt to discern their comparative strengths and limitations. In particular, academic blogs are compared with personal blogs in terms of individual expressions and reflection; and with discussion forums in terms of social interaction and reflective dialogue. The study took a qualitative case study approach and focused on a group of preservice teachers during their teaching practice. Academic blogging has been found to foster individual expressions, reflection, social networking, and peer support. It affords a more flexible and expressive way of individual-centered expressions. However, it is not very good at supporting dynamic and interactive online discussions. Our study helps deepen the insights into the educational affordances of blogs and marks an initial step towards discerning the niche of blogs as an educational media.

The investigation examined how to simulate practices of distributed, partially virtual teamwork in higher education. A course was designed to engage ten teams in producing solutions to complex problems, similar to that in knowledge work. The teams researched and prepared final reports and project presentations (shared objects) based on assignments from two customers. The course design provided templates and communication structures, but the teams needed to self-organize in order to carry out their own goals. Two analyses examined how the arranged project promoted practices of distributed, hybrid knowledge work and how the students coped with the knowledge creation challenge. Based on the team interviews half-way through the course, the students were confused and even distressed with the open-ended assignment. At the end of the course, their self-reflections revealed a change to more positive appraisals of the assignment. It was concluded that there were two types of practices involved, project work and inquiry, which might be best supported with different types of scaffolding, the first pragmatic or structural and the latter epistemic. This course presents an example of how workplace practices can be modeled for education, but also points to needs for scaffolding challenging team processes.

This paper reports on the Furniture Design Critic. We propose a computational model of design critiquing using the program, which as a research tool helps us explain how to select critiquing methods in the consideration of critiquing conditions. Surveying the literature of architectural education, we have identified two dimensions from critiquing comments: (1) delivery types (interpretation, introduction/reminder, example, demonstration, and evaluation) and (2) communication modalities (written comments, graphical annotations, and images). This paper also presents how the Furniture Design Critic system selects particular methods by considering specific conditions such as the user's knowledge level and the interaction history between the user and the system.

We have developed a learning environment where students teach a computer agent using visual representations, and can monitor the agent's learning progress by asking her questions and having her take quizzes. The system provides self-regulated learning and metacognitive support via dialog-embedded prompts from Betty, the teachable agent, and Mr. Davis, the mentor agent. Our primary goals have been to support learning of complex science topics in middle school classrooms and facilitate development of metacognitive skills to support future learning. In this paper, we discuss methods that we have employed for detecting and characterizing students' behavior patterns from their activity sequences on the system. In particular, we discuss a method for learning hidden Markov models (HMM) from the activity logs. We demonstrate that the HMM structure corresponds to students' aggregated behavior patterns in the learning environment. Overall, the HMM technique allows us to go beyond simple frequency and sequence analyses, such as individual activity and pre-defined pattern counts, instead using exploratory methods to examine how these activities cohere in larger patterns over time. The paper outlines a study conducted in a 5th grade science classroom, presents the models derived from the students' activity sequences, interprets the model structure as aggregate patterns of their learning behaviors, and links these patterns to students' use of self-regulated learning strategies. The results illustrate that those who teach an agent demonstrate better learning performance and better use of metacognitive monitoring behaviors than students who only learn for themselves. We also observed more advanced and focused monitoring behaviors in the students who received metacognitive strategy feedback from the mentor agent while they taught the teachable agent.