Owing to the lack of face-to-face interactions, students using a web-based learning system are li... more Owing to the lack of face-to-face interactions, students using a web-based learning system are likely to study alone and with relatively little classmate support and pressure. Teachers in a web-based learning system may apply the group-learning model to overcome this problem. Therefore, teachers first need to organize, manage, and monitor the group learning. Additionally, they must take appropriate actions based on teaching strategies to improve the learning achievements of the students. To perform these tasks effectively, the teachers must obtain relevant information by searching and analyzing the huge amount of web-access logs or by monitoring web interactions. This will be burdensome and difficult to do well for the teachers. This work presents novel methodologies for developing instruments to assist teachers in performing grouping, intervention and strategy analysis. The proposed methodologies apply data mining tools provided by existing database management systems. A tool is in...
In conventional classrooms, teachers attempt to enhance instruction by monitoring students' l... more In conventional classrooms, teachers attempt to enhance instruction by monitoring students' learning processes and analyzing their performances by paper records and observation. Similarly, distance learning systems on the Web should be designed to record students' behaviors to assist teachers in assessing performance and making decisions related to curriculum. Recent developments in Web server systems can record the students' access to the learning systems in Web logs. Information processing analysis on the historical classroom processes can help teachers to develop knowledge for applying proper teaching strategies according to available information in Web logs. However, teachers cannot easily infer the pedagogical meaning of Web logs and discover the pedagogical rules of students' behavior patterns in the Web logs to refine teaching strategies. Therefore, to use Web logs for pedagogical purposes, this article adopts decision tree and data cube information processing...
The article aims to compare international conferences, The International Educational Technology C... more The article aims to compare international conferences, The International Educational Technology Conference (IETC, 2011) and The International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE, 2010), from various dimensions. The comparison is expected to conclude a better approach for every IETC and ICCE to be held. Keywords: The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology (TOJET), The Asia-Pacific Society of Computers in Education (APSCE), Comparative Study
In order to encourage students to participate in online learning forums, prompt responses to thei... more In order to encourage students to participate in online learning forums, prompt responses to their questions are essential. To answer students' online questions, teaching assistants are assigned to manage discussions and answer questions in online learning forums. To minimize the response time, many teaching assistants may be needed to interact with learners. We investigated the trade-off between the request-response time and the cost of labor for handling the requests since this has become a challenging and important ...
Paper and traditional books have been serving as useful tools in supporting knowledge-intensive t... more Paper and traditional books have been serving as useful tools in supporting knowledge-intensive tasks and school learning. Although learning strategies such as selective verbatim note-taking or question-asking may foster intentional recall or resolve comprehension difficulties in paper-based learning practice, improvement in learning may depend on the opportunity and quality of which students apply note-taking, review notes, or enhance comprehension through questioning. This study aims to complement a paper textbook ...
Information on the Web like HTML documents with images, video, and sound is a collection of heter... more Information on the Web like HTML documents with images, video, and sound is a collection of heterogeneous data. HTML documents are semistructured in nature. Semistructured data are used to describe those structures which are less rigid or regular than those data found in standard database systems. This study presents a novel means of using Patricia Tree [14] to index semistructured data. This index is used by transferring the query into a regular expression and querying the regular expression over the Patricia Tree. The highlight of ...
Functional roles may explain the learning performance of groups. Detecting a functional role is c... more Functional roles may explain the learning performance of groups. Detecting a functional role is critical for promoting group learning performance in computer-supported collaborative learning environments. However, it is not easy for teachers to identify the functional roles played by students in a web-based learning group, or the relationship between roles and group performance. In a web learning system, interactions among group members can be recorded as a large corpus for further analysis. Tools can then be developed to assist teachers to recognise the roles played by group members and determine the best intervention strategy to support group learning. This study designed a method to identify automatically the role played by students, through an analysis of their online collaborative learning interactions. A regression prediction strategy was proposed to predict group performance according to identified functional roles. Experimental results from a study of 82 students showed that the accuracy of detecting functional roles was acceptable, and the prediction of learning performance is useful for most functional roles except opinion-giver and harmoniser. Finally, three grouping strategies for collaborative learning are proposed from the perspective of functional role-distribution. Teachers can, therefore, recognise the status of group members’ participation by identifying roles and reorganising the group to increase learning performance.
Dictionary use can improve reading comprehension and incidental vocabulary learning. Nevertheless... more Dictionary use can improve reading comprehension and incidental vocabulary learning. Nevertheless, great extraneous cognitive load imposed by the search process may reduce or even prevent the improvement. With the help of technology, dictionary users can now instantly access the meaning list of a searched word using a mouse click. However, they must spend great cognitive effort identifying the most appropriate meaning for a given context, contributing to the disruption of the flow of reading and decreasing the positive effect of dictionary use. Furthermore, dictionary users face difficulty in exploiting accumulative illustrations from multiple contexts to understand obscure words whose appropriate meanings are not in the dictionary or are difficult to identify. To address these issues and to offer language learners, especially lifelong learners, effective support for incremental and incidental learning of vocabulary through reading, this research proposes a dictionary interface named RoLo (Remind on Lookup). Each time an unfamiliar word is re-looked up, RoLo reminds users about contextual information and word knowledge learned in previous encounters of the word in an appropriate manner. Two studies were conducted to evaluate RoLo. The first study, with 34 participants, examined the effect of RoLo use on incidental vocabulary learning. The second examination, involving 43 participants who used the prototype of RoLo for one month, investigated dictionary users’ evaluation of RoLo. The results show that RoLo helps dictionary users enhance vocabulary learning and text comprehension and search for unfamiliar words more easily and faster.
In order to encourage students to participate in online learning forums, prompt responses to thei... more In order to encourage students to participate in online learning forums, prompt responses to their questions are essential. To answer students’ online questions, teaching assistants are assigned to manage discussions and answer questions in online learning forums. To minimize the response time, many teaching assistants may be needed to interact with learners. We investigated the trade-off between the request-response time and the cost of labor for handling the requests since this has become a challenging and important issue for education managers. In this study, a queuing-based model is proposed to construct the relationship between response time and the human resource requirement in a learning forum. In addition, an experiment using students in a Computer Science Introduction course at a vocational high school was conducted to verify the model and determine the average number of assistants required so that the students’ questions can be answered within an acceptable time interval, providing valuable information for managing online discussion forums for educational purposes. Finally, the participants’ perceptions were investigated using a questionnaire revised from the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) in order to identify whether feelings of the perception-of-usefulness and the perception-of-satisfaction during the response wait time showed significant differences when the number of teaching assistants was reduced. The results revealed no significant difference in learners’ perceptions after reducing the number of teaching assistants. It confirms that using the model to predict the number of required teaching assistants is highly reliable, and effective in reducing labor costs without jeopardizing student satisfaction.
This study proposes a platform to provide a near-authentic environment, context,
and situation fo... more This study proposes a platform to provide a near-authentic environment, context, and situation for task-based learning. The platform includes two projection screens (a vertical and a horizontal screen) combined for situated or authentic learning. The horizontal screen extends the vertical screen scene to form a space for learning activities and performance. The platform creates learning situations using robots as surrogates of students to accomplish real-life tasks. Kolb’s fourstage experiential learning cyclical model was adopted in the learning design. A simple practice was developed to examine the effect on teaching children English as a foreign language. The results reveal that children could engage deeply and feel more enjoyment using the system. Moreover, as surrogates for students to imagine that they are accomplishing real-life missions, robots could be a vital element of authentic learning in future classrooms.
People have greater difficulty reading academic textbooks on screen than on paper.
One notable pr... more People have greater difficulty reading academic textbooks on screen than on paper. One notable problem is that they cannot construct an effective cognitive map because of the lack of contextual information cues and ineffective navigational mechanisms in e-books. To support the construction of cognitive maps, this paper proposes the visual cue map, which presents pages and within-page spatial cues in an interactive toolbar, and reflects the physical structure of the book and the relative relationship between cues and pages. An e-book reading system integrated with the visual cue map and 2 reading strategies—surveying and questioning—was developed, and an experiment was conducted to examine the effect of the visual cue map on the reading, reviewing, and navigational performance of readers. The results showed that participants who used the system with the visual cue map spent significantly less time to complete 10 navigational tasks and gained a higher reviewing score. Based on the results, we conclude that the visual cue map can improve navigational performance, which also improves reviewing performance. The improvements may be due to the visual cue map helping the construction of cognitive maps.
Collaborative storytelling activities in social media environments are generally developed in a l... more Collaborative storytelling activities in social media environments are generally developed in a linear way in which all participants collaborate on a shared story as it is passed from one to another in a relay form. Difficulties with this linear approach arise when collecting the contributions of participants in to a coherent story. This study proposes a hypermedia approach to enable students to integrate the episodes of others to develop different branches of stories. Since these linear and nonlinear approaches facilitate students in developing stories in quite a different manner, students’ perceptions of linear and hypermedia approaches differ in their collaboration mechanisms, which may in turn affect positive interdependence and ultimate success in the collaborative storytelling. The results of an empirical study show that the performance of students in the hypermedia group was superior to that of members the linear group insofar as perception of collaborative process, peer support, authorship, and collaborative result where concerned.
Software avatars are increasingly applied to support children’s collaborative storytelling
becaus... more Software avatars are increasingly applied to support children’s collaborative storytelling because avatars may serve as a transparent shield or as embodied agents to facilitate creativity in children. However, when using avatars, it is not easy for children to practise and refine their speaking skills by narrating their stories to an audience. The programming difficulties involved in that process tend to distract attention away from the collaborative storytelling activity itself. This study therefore proposes an interaction model featuring tangible story avatars (TSAs) that can serve as a platform to scaffold collaborative story creation, revision and narrative. A 9-week study with 16 children aged 8 years was conducted to evaluate the interaction model with the TSAs. The results suggest that the TSAs may play three primary roles in facilitating collaborative storytelling: as a tool for developing confidence, as a tool for reflective story development and as a group artefact. Researchers and educators may find it valuable to consider these three roles in designing the TSAs in support of collaborative storytelling in similar contexts.
Animated pedagogical agents with characteristics such as facial expressions, gestures, and human ... more Animated pedagogical agents with characteristics such as facial expressions, gestures, and human emotions, under an interactive user interface are attractive to students and have high potential to promote students’ learning. This study proposes a convenient method to add an embodied empathic avatar into a computer-aided learning program; learners express their emotions by mouse-clicking while reading, and the avatar motivates them accordingly. This study designs empathic responses for avatars to encourage and persuade learners to make greater reading effort. This experiment examines emotional recognition, empathy transformation, and the effect of virtual human encouragement and persuasion. Subjects identify facial expressions of the avatar, especially those expressing positive facial emotions. Compared to the contrast group, the empathic avatar increases learners’ willingness to continue reading and complete exercises.
The article aims to compare international conferences, The International Educational Technology C... more The article aims to compare international conferences, The International Educational Technology Conference (IETC, 2011) and The International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE, 2010), from various dimensions. The comparison is expected to conclude a better approach for every IETC and ICCE to be held. Keywords: The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology(TOJET), The Asia-Pacific Society of Computers in Education(APSCE), Comparative Study
In programming courses, teaching students who have varied levels of knowledge and skills the requ... more In programming courses, teaching students who have varied levels of knowledge and skills the requisite competencies to perform in real-world software development teams is indeed difficult. To address this problem, this paper proposes a community of practice (CoP) approach and provides some guidelines to simulate a real-world CoP in a blended learning environment. It simulates not only the role structure and tasks but also the participation process. The design of this approach is based on the situated learning perspective that considers learning to be a trajectory in which learners move from legitimate peripheral participation to full participation in CoPs. The results from the data analysis and questionnaires indicated that the students were very engaged in this activity and believed that this approach helped them to develop necessary programming knowledge and skills. This study also reports certain constraints and suggestions for teachers who want to adapt this approach for their courses.
Dictionary use can improve reading comprehension and incidental vocabulary learning. Nevertheless... more Dictionary use can improve reading comprehension and incidental vocabulary learning. Nevertheless, great extraneous cognitive load imposed by the search process may reduce or even prevent the improvement. With the help of technology, dictionary users can now instantly access the meaning list of a searched word using a mouse click. However, they must spend great cognitive effort identifying the most appropriate meaning for a given context, contributing to the disruption of the flow of reading and decreasing the positive effect of dictionary use. Furthermore, dictionary users face difficulty in exploiting accumulative illustrations from multiple contexts to understand obscure words whose appropriate meanings are not in the dictionary or are difficult to identify. To address these issues and to offer language learners, especially lifelong learners, effective support for incremental and incidental learning of vocabulary through reading, this research proposes a dictionary interface named RoLo (RemindonLookup). Each time an unfamiliar word is re-looked up, RoLo reminds users about contextual information and word knowledge learned in previous encounters of the word in an appropriate manner. Two studies were conducted to evaluate RoLo. The first study, with 34 participants, examined the effect of RoLo use on incidental vocabulary learning. The second examination, involving 43 participants who used the prototype of RoLo for one month, investigated dictionary users' evaluation of RoLo. The results show that RoLo helps dictionary users enhance vocabulary learning and text comprehension and search for unfamiliar words more easily and faster.
EFL learners in Taiwan have a low-level communication ability because many learners are still not... more EFL learners in Taiwan have a low-level communication ability because many learners are still not provided opportunities to use language for genuine communication in classrooms and receive insufficient language input due to the environment. This study examines the use of digital board game language learning set in a task-collaborative platform, digital learning playground, designed for classroom learning. This study investigates whether communicative skills and intrinsic motivation could be improved by seeing relevant context and receiving adequate practice through gaming. Ninety-six high school Taiwanese students (n = 96), who were randomly assigned to an ordinary instruction group, a board game language-learning group, or a digital board game language-learning group, engaged in a 50-min English class. Analysis of covariance was used for comparing learning performance through a speaking test between the three groups. A modified intrinsic motivation inventory was conducted to assess learners’ perceptions of learning experience and an interview was held for details. The quantitative data presents a higher learning performance for the instruction set at digital learning playground. The qualitative data confirms computerized simulation adapted from board game entails context-relevant immersion, encouraging communication and efficient game instruction management for EFL language learning.
Owing to the lack of face-to-face interactions, students using a web-based learning system are li... more Owing to the lack of face-to-face interactions, students using a web-based learning system are likely to study alone and with relatively little classmate support and pressure. Teachers in a web-based learning system may apply the group-learning model to overcome this problem. Therefore, teachers first need to organize, manage, and monitor the group learning. Additionally, they must take appropriate actions based on teaching strategies to improve the learning achievements of the students. To perform these tasks effectively, the teachers must obtain relevant information by searching and analyzing the huge amount of web-access logs or by monitoring web interactions. This will be burdensome and difficult to do well for the teachers. This work presents novel methodologies for developing instruments to assist teachers in performing grouping, intervention and strategy analysis. The proposed methodologies apply data mining tools provided by existing database management systems. A tool is in...
In conventional classrooms, teachers attempt to enhance instruction by monitoring students' l... more In conventional classrooms, teachers attempt to enhance instruction by monitoring students' learning processes and analyzing their performances by paper records and observation. Similarly, distance learning systems on the Web should be designed to record students' behaviors to assist teachers in assessing performance and making decisions related to curriculum. Recent developments in Web server systems can record the students' access to the learning systems in Web logs. Information processing analysis on the historical classroom processes can help teachers to develop knowledge for applying proper teaching strategies according to available information in Web logs. However, teachers cannot easily infer the pedagogical meaning of Web logs and discover the pedagogical rules of students' behavior patterns in the Web logs to refine teaching strategies. Therefore, to use Web logs for pedagogical purposes, this article adopts decision tree and data cube information processing...
The article aims to compare international conferences, The International Educational Technology C... more The article aims to compare international conferences, The International Educational Technology Conference (IETC, 2011) and The International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE, 2010), from various dimensions. The comparison is expected to conclude a better approach for every IETC and ICCE to be held. Keywords: The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology (TOJET), The Asia-Pacific Society of Computers in Education (APSCE), Comparative Study
In order to encourage students to participate in online learning forums, prompt responses to thei... more In order to encourage students to participate in online learning forums, prompt responses to their questions are essential. To answer students' online questions, teaching assistants are assigned to manage discussions and answer questions in online learning forums. To minimize the response time, many teaching assistants may be needed to interact with learners. We investigated the trade-off between the request-response time and the cost of labor for handling the requests since this has become a challenging and important ...
Paper and traditional books have been serving as useful tools in supporting knowledge-intensive t... more Paper and traditional books have been serving as useful tools in supporting knowledge-intensive tasks and school learning. Although learning strategies such as selective verbatim note-taking or question-asking may foster intentional recall or resolve comprehension difficulties in paper-based learning practice, improvement in learning may depend on the opportunity and quality of which students apply note-taking, review notes, or enhance comprehension through questioning. This study aims to complement a paper textbook ...
Information on the Web like HTML documents with images, video, and sound is a collection of heter... more Information on the Web like HTML documents with images, video, and sound is a collection of heterogeneous data. HTML documents are semistructured in nature. Semistructured data are used to describe those structures which are less rigid or regular than those data found in standard database systems. This study presents a novel means of using Patricia Tree [14] to index semistructured data. This index is used by transferring the query into a regular expression and querying the regular expression over the Patricia Tree. The highlight of ...
Functional roles may explain the learning performance of groups. Detecting a functional role is c... more Functional roles may explain the learning performance of groups. Detecting a functional role is critical for promoting group learning performance in computer-supported collaborative learning environments. However, it is not easy for teachers to identify the functional roles played by students in a web-based learning group, or the relationship between roles and group performance. In a web learning system, interactions among group members can be recorded as a large corpus for further analysis. Tools can then be developed to assist teachers to recognise the roles played by group members and determine the best intervention strategy to support group learning. This study designed a method to identify automatically the role played by students, through an analysis of their online collaborative learning interactions. A regression prediction strategy was proposed to predict group performance according to identified functional roles. Experimental results from a study of 82 students showed that the accuracy of detecting functional roles was acceptable, and the prediction of learning performance is useful for most functional roles except opinion-giver and harmoniser. Finally, three grouping strategies for collaborative learning are proposed from the perspective of functional role-distribution. Teachers can, therefore, recognise the status of group members’ participation by identifying roles and reorganising the group to increase learning performance.
Dictionary use can improve reading comprehension and incidental vocabulary learning. Nevertheless... more Dictionary use can improve reading comprehension and incidental vocabulary learning. Nevertheless, great extraneous cognitive load imposed by the search process may reduce or even prevent the improvement. With the help of technology, dictionary users can now instantly access the meaning list of a searched word using a mouse click. However, they must spend great cognitive effort identifying the most appropriate meaning for a given context, contributing to the disruption of the flow of reading and decreasing the positive effect of dictionary use. Furthermore, dictionary users face difficulty in exploiting accumulative illustrations from multiple contexts to understand obscure words whose appropriate meanings are not in the dictionary or are difficult to identify. To address these issues and to offer language learners, especially lifelong learners, effective support for incremental and incidental learning of vocabulary through reading, this research proposes a dictionary interface named RoLo (Remind on Lookup). Each time an unfamiliar word is re-looked up, RoLo reminds users about contextual information and word knowledge learned in previous encounters of the word in an appropriate manner. Two studies were conducted to evaluate RoLo. The first study, with 34 participants, examined the effect of RoLo use on incidental vocabulary learning. The second examination, involving 43 participants who used the prototype of RoLo for one month, investigated dictionary users’ evaluation of RoLo. The results show that RoLo helps dictionary users enhance vocabulary learning and text comprehension and search for unfamiliar words more easily and faster.
In order to encourage students to participate in online learning forums, prompt responses to thei... more In order to encourage students to participate in online learning forums, prompt responses to their questions are essential. To answer students’ online questions, teaching assistants are assigned to manage discussions and answer questions in online learning forums. To minimize the response time, many teaching assistants may be needed to interact with learners. We investigated the trade-off between the request-response time and the cost of labor for handling the requests since this has become a challenging and important issue for education managers. In this study, a queuing-based model is proposed to construct the relationship between response time and the human resource requirement in a learning forum. In addition, an experiment using students in a Computer Science Introduction course at a vocational high school was conducted to verify the model and determine the average number of assistants required so that the students’ questions can be answered within an acceptable time interval, providing valuable information for managing online discussion forums for educational purposes. Finally, the participants’ perceptions were investigated using a questionnaire revised from the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) in order to identify whether feelings of the perception-of-usefulness and the perception-of-satisfaction during the response wait time showed significant differences when the number of teaching assistants was reduced. The results revealed no significant difference in learners’ perceptions after reducing the number of teaching assistants. It confirms that using the model to predict the number of required teaching assistants is highly reliable, and effective in reducing labor costs without jeopardizing student satisfaction.
This study proposes a platform to provide a near-authentic environment, context,
and situation fo... more This study proposes a platform to provide a near-authentic environment, context, and situation for task-based learning. The platform includes two projection screens (a vertical and a horizontal screen) combined for situated or authentic learning. The horizontal screen extends the vertical screen scene to form a space for learning activities and performance. The platform creates learning situations using robots as surrogates of students to accomplish real-life tasks. Kolb’s fourstage experiential learning cyclical model was adopted in the learning design. A simple practice was developed to examine the effect on teaching children English as a foreign language. The results reveal that children could engage deeply and feel more enjoyment using the system. Moreover, as surrogates for students to imagine that they are accomplishing real-life missions, robots could be a vital element of authentic learning in future classrooms.
People have greater difficulty reading academic textbooks on screen than on paper.
One notable pr... more People have greater difficulty reading academic textbooks on screen than on paper. One notable problem is that they cannot construct an effective cognitive map because of the lack of contextual information cues and ineffective navigational mechanisms in e-books. To support the construction of cognitive maps, this paper proposes the visual cue map, which presents pages and within-page spatial cues in an interactive toolbar, and reflects the physical structure of the book and the relative relationship between cues and pages. An e-book reading system integrated with the visual cue map and 2 reading strategies—surveying and questioning—was developed, and an experiment was conducted to examine the effect of the visual cue map on the reading, reviewing, and navigational performance of readers. The results showed that participants who used the system with the visual cue map spent significantly less time to complete 10 navigational tasks and gained a higher reviewing score. Based on the results, we conclude that the visual cue map can improve navigational performance, which also improves reviewing performance. The improvements may be due to the visual cue map helping the construction of cognitive maps.
Collaborative storytelling activities in social media environments are generally developed in a l... more Collaborative storytelling activities in social media environments are generally developed in a linear way in which all participants collaborate on a shared story as it is passed from one to another in a relay form. Difficulties with this linear approach arise when collecting the contributions of participants in to a coherent story. This study proposes a hypermedia approach to enable students to integrate the episodes of others to develop different branches of stories. Since these linear and nonlinear approaches facilitate students in developing stories in quite a different manner, students’ perceptions of linear and hypermedia approaches differ in their collaboration mechanisms, which may in turn affect positive interdependence and ultimate success in the collaborative storytelling. The results of an empirical study show that the performance of students in the hypermedia group was superior to that of members the linear group insofar as perception of collaborative process, peer support, authorship, and collaborative result where concerned.
Software avatars are increasingly applied to support children’s collaborative storytelling
becaus... more Software avatars are increasingly applied to support children’s collaborative storytelling because avatars may serve as a transparent shield or as embodied agents to facilitate creativity in children. However, when using avatars, it is not easy for children to practise and refine their speaking skills by narrating their stories to an audience. The programming difficulties involved in that process tend to distract attention away from the collaborative storytelling activity itself. This study therefore proposes an interaction model featuring tangible story avatars (TSAs) that can serve as a platform to scaffold collaborative story creation, revision and narrative. A 9-week study with 16 children aged 8 years was conducted to evaluate the interaction model with the TSAs. The results suggest that the TSAs may play three primary roles in facilitating collaborative storytelling: as a tool for developing confidence, as a tool for reflective story development and as a group artefact. Researchers and educators may find it valuable to consider these three roles in designing the TSAs in support of collaborative storytelling in similar contexts.
Animated pedagogical agents with characteristics such as facial expressions, gestures, and human ... more Animated pedagogical agents with characteristics such as facial expressions, gestures, and human emotions, under an interactive user interface are attractive to students and have high potential to promote students’ learning. This study proposes a convenient method to add an embodied empathic avatar into a computer-aided learning program; learners express their emotions by mouse-clicking while reading, and the avatar motivates them accordingly. This study designs empathic responses for avatars to encourage and persuade learners to make greater reading effort. This experiment examines emotional recognition, empathy transformation, and the effect of virtual human encouragement and persuasion. Subjects identify facial expressions of the avatar, especially those expressing positive facial emotions. Compared to the contrast group, the empathic avatar increases learners’ willingness to continue reading and complete exercises.
The article aims to compare international conferences, The International Educational Technology C... more The article aims to compare international conferences, The International Educational Technology Conference (IETC, 2011) and The International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE, 2010), from various dimensions. The comparison is expected to conclude a better approach for every IETC and ICCE to be held. Keywords: The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology(TOJET), The Asia-Pacific Society of Computers in Education(APSCE), Comparative Study
In programming courses, teaching students who have varied levels of knowledge and skills the requ... more In programming courses, teaching students who have varied levels of knowledge and skills the requisite competencies to perform in real-world software development teams is indeed difficult. To address this problem, this paper proposes a community of practice (CoP) approach and provides some guidelines to simulate a real-world CoP in a blended learning environment. It simulates not only the role structure and tasks but also the participation process. The design of this approach is based on the situated learning perspective that considers learning to be a trajectory in which learners move from legitimate peripheral participation to full participation in CoPs. The results from the data analysis and questionnaires indicated that the students were very engaged in this activity and believed that this approach helped them to develop necessary programming knowledge and skills. This study also reports certain constraints and suggestions for teachers who want to adapt this approach for their courses.
Dictionary use can improve reading comprehension and incidental vocabulary learning. Nevertheless... more Dictionary use can improve reading comprehension and incidental vocabulary learning. Nevertheless, great extraneous cognitive load imposed by the search process may reduce or even prevent the improvement. With the help of technology, dictionary users can now instantly access the meaning list of a searched word using a mouse click. However, they must spend great cognitive effort identifying the most appropriate meaning for a given context, contributing to the disruption of the flow of reading and decreasing the positive effect of dictionary use. Furthermore, dictionary users face difficulty in exploiting accumulative illustrations from multiple contexts to understand obscure words whose appropriate meanings are not in the dictionary or are difficult to identify. To address these issues and to offer language learners, especially lifelong learners, effective support for incremental and incidental learning of vocabulary through reading, this research proposes a dictionary interface named RoLo (RemindonLookup). Each time an unfamiliar word is re-looked up, RoLo reminds users about contextual information and word knowledge learned in previous encounters of the word in an appropriate manner. Two studies were conducted to evaluate RoLo. The first study, with 34 participants, examined the effect of RoLo use on incidental vocabulary learning. The second examination, involving 43 participants who used the prototype of RoLo for one month, investigated dictionary users' evaluation of RoLo. The results show that RoLo helps dictionary users enhance vocabulary learning and text comprehension and search for unfamiliar words more easily and faster.
EFL learners in Taiwan have a low-level communication ability because many learners are still not... more EFL learners in Taiwan have a low-level communication ability because many learners are still not provided opportunities to use language for genuine communication in classrooms and receive insufficient language input due to the environment. This study examines the use of digital board game language learning set in a task-collaborative platform, digital learning playground, designed for classroom learning. This study investigates whether communicative skills and intrinsic motivation could be improved by seeing relevant context and receiving adequate practice through gaming. Ninety-six high school Taiwanese students (n = 96), who were randomly assigned to an ordinary instruction group, a board game language-learning group, or a digital board game language-learning group, engaged in a 50-min English class. Analysis of covariance was used for comparing learning performance through a speaking test between the three groups. A modified intrinsic motivation inventory was conducted to assess learners’ perceptions of learning experience and an interview was held for details. The quantitative data presents a higher learning performance for the instruction set at digital learning playground. The qualitative data confirms computerized simulation adapted from board game entails context-relevant immersion, encouraging communication and efficient game instruction management for EFL language learning.
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Papers by Gwo-dong Chen
promoting group learning performance in computer-supported collaborative learning environments. However, it is
not easy for teachers to identify the functional roles played by students in a web-based learning group, or the
relationship between roles and group performance. In a web learning system, interactions among group members
can be recorded as a large corpus for further analysis. Tools can then be developed to assist teachers to recognise the
roles played by group members and determine the best intervention strategy to support group learning. This study
designed a method to identify automatically the role played by students, through an analysis of their online
collaborative learning interactions. A regression prediction strategy was proposed to predict group performance
according to identified functional roles. Experimental results from a study of 82 students showed that the accuracy of
detecting functional roles was acceptable, and the prediction of learning performance is useful for most functional
roles except opinion-giver and harmoniser. Finally, three grouping strategies for collaborative learning are proposed
from the perspective of functional role-distribution. Teachers can, therefore, recognise the status of group members’
participation by identifying roles and reorganising the group to increase learning performance.
great extraneous cognitive load imposed by the search process may reduce or even prevent the
improvement. With the help of technology, dictionary users can now instantly access the meaning list of
a searched word using a mouse click. However, they must spend great cognitive effort identifying the
most appropriate meaning for a given context, contributing to the disruption of the flow of reading and
decreasing the positive effect of dictionary use. Furthermore, dictionary users face difficulty in exploiting
accumulative illustrations from multiple contexts to understand obscure words whose appropriate
meanings are not in the dictionary or are difficult to identify. To address these issues and to offer
language learners, especially lifelong learners, effective support for incremental and incidental learning
of vocabulary through reading, this research proposes a dictionary interface named RoLo (Remind on
Lookup). Each time an unfamiliar word is re-looked up, RoLo reminds users about contextual information
and word knowledge learned in previous encounters of the word in an appropriate manner. Two studies
were conducted to evaluate RoLo. The first study, with 34 participants, examined the effect of RoLo use
on incidental vocabulary learning. The second examination, involving 43 participants who used the
prototype of RoLo for one month, investigated dictionary users’ evaluation of RoLo. The results show that
RoLo helps dictionary users enhance vocabulary learning and text comprehension and search for unfamiliar
words more easily and faster.
essential. To answer students’ online questions, teaching assistants are assigned to manage discussions and
answer questions in online learning forums. To minimize the response time, many teaching assistants may be
needed to interact with learners. We investigated the trade-off between the request-response time and the cost of
labor for handling the requests since this has become a challenging and important issue for education managers. In
this study, a queuing-based model is proposed to construct the relationship between response time and the human
resource requirement in a learning forum. In addition, an experiment using students in a Computer Science
Introduction course at a vocational high school was conducted to verify the model and determine the average
number of assistants required so that the students’ questions can be answered within an acceptable time interval,
providing valuable information for managing online discussion forums for educational purposes. Finally, the
participants’ perceptions were investigated using a questionnaire revised from the Technology Acceptance Model
(TAM) in order to identify whether feelings of the perception-of-usefulness and the perception-of-satisfaction
during the response wait time showed significant differences when the number of teaching assistants was reduced.
The results revealed no significant difference in learners’ perceptions after reducing the number of teaching
assistants. It confirms that using the model to predict the number of required teaching assistants is highly reliable,
and effective in reducing labor costs without jeopardizing student satisfaction.
and situation for task-based learning. The platform includes two projection
screens (a vertical and a horizontal screen) combined for situated or authentic
learning. The horizontal screen extends the vertical screen scene to form a space
for learning activities and performance. The platform creates learning situations
using robots as surrogates of students to accomplish real-life tasks. Kolb’s fourstage
experiential learning cyclical model was adopted in the learning design. A
simple practice was developed to examine the effect on teaching children English
as a foreign language. The results reveal that children could engage deeply and
feel more enjoyment using the system. Moreover, as surrogates for students to
imagine that they are accomplishing real-life missions, robots could be a vital
element of authentic learning in future classrooms.
One notable problem is that they cannot construct an effective cognitive map because
of the lack of contextual information cues and ineffective navigational mechanisms in
e-books. To support the construction of cognitive maps, this paper proposes the visual
cue map, which presents pages and within-page spatial cues in an interactive toolbar,
and reflects the physical structure of the book and the relative relationship between
cues and pages. An e-book reading system integrated with the visual cue map and 2
reading strategies—surveying and questioning—was developed, and an experiment
was conducted to examine the effect of the visual cue map on the reading, reviewing,
and navigational performance of readers. The results showed that participants who
used the system with the visual cue map spent significantly less time to complete 10
navigational tasks and gained a higher reviewing score. Based on the results, we
conclude that the visual cue map can improve navigational performance, which also
improves reviewing performance. The improvements may be due to the visual cue
map helping the construction of cognitive maps.
in which all participants collaborate on a shared story as it is passed from one to another in a relay form.
Difficulties with this linear approach arise when collecting the contributions of participants in to
a coherent story. This study proposes a hypermedia approach to enable students to integrate the
episodes of others to develop different branches of stories. Since these linear and nonlinear approaches
facilitate students in developing stories in quite a different manner, students’ perceptions of linear and
hypermedia approaches differ in their collaboration mechanisms, which may in turn affect positive interdependence
and ultimate success in the collaborative storytelling. The results of an empirical study show
that the performance of students in the hypermedia group was superior to that of members the linear
group insofar as perception of collaborative process, peer support, authorship, and collaborative result
where concerned.
because avatars may serve as a transparent shield or as embodied agents to facilitate
creativity in children. However, when using avatars, it is not easy for children to practise
and refine their speaking skills by narrating their stories to an audience. The programming
difficulties involved in that process tend to distract attention away from the collaborative
storytelling activity itself. This study therefore proposes an interaction model
featuring tangible story avatars (TSAs) that can serve as a platform to scaffold collaborative
story creation, revision and narrative. A 9-week study with 16 children aged
8 years was conducted to evaluate the interaction model with the TSAs. The results
suggest that the TSAs may play three primary roles in facilitating collaborative storytelling:
as a tool for developing confidence, as a tool for reflective story development and as
a group artefact. Researchers and educators may find it valuable to consider these three
roles in designing the TSAs in support of collaborative storytelling in similar contexts.
under an interactive user interface are attractive to students and have high potential to promote students’
learning. This study proposes a convenient method to add an embodied empathic avatar into a computer-aided
learning program; learners express their emotions by mouse-clicking while reading, and the avatar motivates
them accordingly. This study designs empathic responses for avatars to encourage and persuade learners to
make greater reading effort. This experiment examines emotional recognition, empathy transformation, and the
effect of virtual human encouragement and persuasion. Subjects identify facial expressions of the avatar,
especially those expressing positive facial emotions. Compared to the contrast group, the empathic avatar
increases learners’ willingness to continue reading and complete exercises.
(IETC, 2011) and The International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE, 2010), from various
dimensions. The comparison is expected to conclude a better approach for every IETC and ICCE to be held.
Keywords: The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology(TOJET), The Asia-Pacific Society of
Computers in Education(APSCE), Comparative Study
examines the use of digital board game language learning set in a task-collaborative platform, digital learning playground, designed for classroom learning. This study investigates
whether communicative skills and intrinsic motivation could be improved by seeing
relevant context and receiving adequate practice through gaming. Ninety-six high school Taiwanese students (n = 96), who were randomly assigned to an ordinary instruction
group, a board game language-learning group, or a digital board game language-learning
group, engaged in a 50-min English class. Analysis of covariance was used for comparing learning performance through a speaking test between the three groups. A modified intrinsic motivation inventory was conducted to assess learners’ perceptions of learning
experience and an interview was held for details. The quantitative data presents a higher learning performance for the instruction set at digital learning playground. The qualitative data confirms computerized simulation adapted from board game entails context-relevant immersion, encouraging communication and efficient game instruction management for EFL language learning.
promoting group learning performance in computer-supported collaborative learning environments. However, it is
not easy for teachers to identify the functional roles played by students in a web-based learning group, or the
relationship between roles and group performance. In a web learning system, interactions among group members
can be recorded as a large corpus for further analysis. Tools can then be developed to assist teachers to recognise the
roles played by group members and determine the best intervention strategy to support group learning. This study
designed a method to identify automatically the role played by students, through an analysis of their online
collaborative learning interactions. A regression prediction strategy was proposed to predict group performance
according to identified functional roles. Experimental results from a study of 82 students showed that the accuracy of
detecting functional roles was acceptable, and the prediction of learning performance is useful for most functional
roles except opinion-giver and harmoniser. Finally, three grouping strategies for collaborative learning are proposed
from the perspective of functional role-distribution. Teachers can, therefore, recognise the status of group members’
participation by identifying roles and reorganising the group to increase learning performance.
great extraneous cognitive load imposed by the search process may reduce or even prevent the
improvement. With the help of technology, dictionary users can now instantly access the meaning list of
a searched word using a mouse click. However, they must spend great cognitive effort identifying the
most appropriate meaning for a given context, contributing to the disruption of the flow of reading and
decreasing the positive effect of dictionary use. Furthermore, dictionary users face difficulty in exploiting
accumulative illustrations from multiple contexts to understand obscure words whose appropriate
meanings are not in the dictionary or are difficult to identify. To address these issues and to offer
language learners, especially lifelong learners, effective support for incremental and incidental learning
of vocabulary through reading, this research proposes a dictionary interface named RoLo (Remind on
Lookup). Each time an unfamiliar word is re-looked up, RoLo reminds users about contextual information
and word knowledge learned in previous encounters of the word in an appropriate manner. Two studies
were conducted to evaluate RoLo. The first study, with 34 participants, examined the effect of RoLo use
on incidental vocabulary learning. The second examination, involving 43 participants who used the
prototype of RoLo for one month, investigated dictionary users’ evaluation of RoLo. The results show that
RoLo helps dictionary users enhance vocabulary learning and text comprehension and search for unfamiliar
words more easily and faster.
essential. To answer students’ online questions, teaching assistants are assigned to manage discussions and
answer questions in online learning forums. To minimize the response time, many teaching assistants may be
needed to interact with learners. We investigated the trade-off between the request-response time and the cost of
labor for handling the requests since this has become a challenging and important issue for education managers. In
this study, a queuing-based model is proposed to construct the relationship between response time and the human
resource requirement in a learning forum. In addition, an experiment using students in a Computer Science
Introduction course at a vocational high school was conducted to verify the model and determine the average
number of assistants required so that the students’ questions can be answered within an acceptable time interval,
providing valuable information for managing online discussion forums for educational purposes. Finally, the
participants’ perceptions were investigated using a questionnaire revised from the Technology Acceptance Model
(TAM) in order to identify whether feelings of the perception-of-usefulness and the perception-of-satisfaction
during the response wait time showed significant differences when the number of teaching assistants was reduced.
The results revealed no significant difference in learners’ perceptions after reducing the number of teaching
assistants. It confirms that using the model to predict the number of required teaching assistants is highly reliable,
and effective in reducing labor costs without jeopardizing student satisfaction.
and situation for task-based learning. The platform includes two projection
screens (a vertical and a horizontal screen) combined for situated or authentic
learning. The horizontal screen extends the vertical screen scene to form a space
for learning activities and performance. The platform creates learning situations
using robots as surrogates of students to accomplish real-life tasks. Kolb’s fourstage
experiential learning cyclical model was adopted in the learning design. A
simple practice was developed to examine the effect on teaching children English
as a foreign language. The results reveal that children could engage deeply and
feel more enjoyment using the system. Moreover, as surrogates for students to
imagine that they are accomplishing real-life missions, robots could be a vital
element of authentic learning in future classrooms.
One notable problem is that they cannot construct an effective cognitive map because
of the lack of contextual information cues and ineffective navigational mechanisms in
e-books. To support the construction of cognitive maps, this paper proposes the visual
cue map, which presents pages and within-page spatial cues in an interactive toolbar,
and reflects the physical structure of the book and the relative relationship between
cues and pages. An e-book reading system integrated with the visual cue map and 2
reading strategies—surveying and questioning—was developed, and an experiment
was conducted to examine the effect of the visual cue map on the reading, reviewing,
and navigational performance of readers. The results showed that participants who
used the system with the visual cue map spent significantly less time to complete 10
navigational tasks and gained a higher reviewing score. Based on the results, we
conclude that the visual cue map can improve navigational performance, which also
improves reviewing performance. The improvements may be due to the visual cue
map helping the construction of cognitive maps.
in which all participants collaborate on a shared story as it is passed from one to another in a relay form.
Difficulties with this linear approach arise when collecting the contributions of participants in to
a coherent story. This study proposes a hypermedia approach to enable students to integrate the
episodes of others to develop different branches of stories. Since these linear and nonlinear approaches
facilitate students in developing stories in quite a different manner, students’ perceptions of linear and
hypermedia approaches differ in their collaboration mechanisms, which may in turn affect positive interdependence
and ultimate success in the collaborative storytelling. The results of an empirical study show
that the performance of students in the hypermedia group was superior to that of members the linear
group insofar as perception of collaborative process, peer support, authorship, and collaborative result
where concerned.
because avatars may serve as a transparent shield or as embodied agents to facilitate
creativity in children. However, when using avatars, it is not easy for children to practise
and refine their speaking skills by narrating their stories to an audience. The programming
difficulties involved in that process tend to distract attention away from the collaborative
storytelling activity itself. This study therefore proposes an interaction model
featuring tangible story avatars (TSAs) that can serve as a platform to scaffold collaborative
story creation, revision and narrative. A 9-week study with 16 children aged
8 years was conducted to evaluate the interaction model with the TSAs. The results
suggest that the TSAs may play three primary roles in facilitating collaborative storytelling:
as a tool for developing confidence, as a tool for reflective story development and as
a group artefact. Researchers and educators may find it valuable to consider these three
roles in designing the TSAs in support of collaborative storytelling in similar contexts.
under an interactive user interface are attractive to students and have high potential to promote students’
learning. This study proposes a convenient method to add an embodied empathic avatar into a computer-aided
learning program; learners express their emotions by mouse-clicking while reading, and the avatar motivates
them accordingly. This study designs empathic responses for avatars to encourage and persuade learners to
make greater reading effort. This experiment examines emotional recognition, empathy transformation, and the
effect of virtual human encouragement and persuasion. Subjects identify facial expressions of the avatar,
especially those expressing positive facial emotions. Compared to the contrast group, the empathic avatar
increases learners’ willingness to continue reading and complete exercises.
(IETC, 2011) and The International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE, 2010), from various
dimensions. The comparison is expected to conclude a better approach for every IETC and ICCE to be held.
Keywords: The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology(TOJET), The Asia-Pacific Society of
Computers in Education(APSCE), Comparative Study
examines the use of digital board game language learning set in a task-collaborative platform, digital learning playground, designed for classroom learning. This study investigates
whether communicative skills and intrinsic motivation could be improved by seeing
relevant context and receiving adequate practice through gaming. Ninety-six high school Taiwanese students (n = 96), who were randomly assigned to an ordinary instruction
group, a board game language-learning group, or a digital board game language-learning
group, engaged in a 50-min English class. Analysis of covariance was used for comparing learning performance through a speaking test between the three groups. A modified intrinsic motivation inventory was conducted to assess learners’ perceptions of learning
experience and an interview was held for details. The quantitative data presents a higher learning performance for the instruction set at digital learning playground. The qualitative data confirms computerized simulation adapted from board game entails context-relevant immersion, encouraging communication and efficient game instruction management for EFL language learning.