Integrating reviewing strategies into shared electronic note-taking: Questioning,summarizing and note reading

This study compared the effects of reviewing strategies in shared electronic note-taking activities, including questioning, summarizing, and note reading, on elementary school student note-taking quality and achievement. A non-equivalent pre- and post-test design was adopted. The participants were 188 sixth grade Taiwanese students in six computing classes. Through random assignment, two classes were assigned to the shared note-taking with questioning condition (SN-SQ), two classes to the shared note-taking with summarizing condition (SN-SS), and two classes to the shared note-taking with note reading condition (SN-SR). Students in each condition were arranged into same-sex dyads. The members of a dyad were assigned to separate computers, seated side-by-side, and required to collaborate with one another on a shared note-taking with reviewing task. The results revealed that the SN-SS students' notes contained more facts and concepts than the SN-SR students', and the SN-SS students achieved better grades on the unit quizzes and overall assessment two weeks later than those in the SN-SR condition.     

Managing and interpreting student actions in an intelligent simulation training system

The main objective of the ISTS project is to develop a simulation-based training system that conducts content training without the human instructor being continuously involved. A prototype for Air Traffic Control (ATC) has been developed by isolating the domain dependent expertise from the generic system. The prototype is modularized to be easily modified, expanded, or adapted to other domains. In order to evaluate a student's performance, a simulation-based training system must be able to accurately interpret student actions. This paper will present a generic paradigm for managing and interpreting the effects of student inputs for an Intelligent Simulation Training System (ISTS).

The Control module is the manager of the ISTS. It is responsible for coordinating the communication between the simulation and the rest of the system. It is also responsible for deciding when and which modules to activate based on a set of prioritized facts. The Interpreter module determines the effects of the student input to the simulation by comparing snapshots of the simulation before and after a student input is executed. It also checks the simulation for late events.     

Participants’ personal note-taking in meetings and its value for automatic meeting summarisation

This paper reports the results of novel quantitative research on multiple people’s personal note-taking in meetings with the long-term aim of aiding the creation of innovative meeting understanding applications. We present three experiments using a large number of group meetings taken from the Augmented Multi-party Interaction meeting corpus. Statistical techniques were employed for this work. Our findings suggest that temporal note-taking overlap information and the semantic content of the written private notes taken by many meeting participants both point to the majority of the most informative meeting events. Thus, the characteristics of note-taking can be seen as a contributing feature for new automatic meeting summarisation approaches and for the development of future meeting browser environments that better support the needs of individuals and organisations.     

Annotations for streaming video on the Web: system design and usage studies

Streaming video on the World Wide Web is being widely deployed, and workplace training and distance education are key applications. The ability to annotate video on the Web can provide significant added value in these and other areas. Written and spoken annotations can provide `in context' personal notes and can enable asynchronous collaboration among groups of users. With annotations, users are no longer limited to viewing content passively on the Web, but are free to add and share commentary and links, thus transforming the Web into an interactive medium. We discuss design considerations in constructing a collaborative video annotation system, and we introduce our prototype, called MRAS. We present preliminary data on the use of Web-based annotations for personal note-taking and for sharing notes in a distance education scenario. Users showed a strong preference for MRAS over pen-and-paper for taking notes, despite taking longer to do so. They also indicated that they would make more comments and questions with MRAS than in a `live' situation, and that sharing added substantial value.     

AN EXPERT SYSTEM FOR ACADEMIC COUNSELING

In recent years, high enrollment has greatly increased the counseling loads of academic advisors at American colleges and universities. Expert systems can assist academic counselors by solving a relatively easy class of problems which deal with the most encountered cases. In this paper, a prototype expert system, CLASS COUNSELOR, is presented. CLASS COUNSELOR recommends a set of courses after an interactive session with the student. It handles the upper division courses of the undergraduate program in the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Florida. The program runs on IBM-AT personal computers and compatibles.     

'Sorting the wheat from the chaff': investigating overload in educational discussion systems

Abstract  This paper reports on research to investigate design features of asynchronous discussion systems for higher education. The research aims to identify features that increase the benefits of discussion systems and reduce the problems. The paper focuses on a major theme that emerged from interviews with learners and teachers: information overload.
Interview findings, together with literature and system reviews, were used to identify four areas of possible system enhancement aimed at alleviating overload: branched message threading; user recommendations of messages; message filtering; and a personal 'clippings' area for useful messages. The paper discusses these enhancements and their evaluation in a prototype discussion system used on a UK Open University course.
Data from the student evaluation indicated that students preferred branched threading to linear threading; they thought filtering and clippings were helpful in principle, although they did not use them very much; and they felt uncomfortable with the idea of recommending each others' messages. Students felt less overloaded in the second part of the course, which was when the system enhancements were made available.     

Developing an expert law tutor

This paper outlines the development considerations which led to the construction of a prototype “expert law tutor”. This is a system which models the competencies of the trained law teacher and is intended primarily for use as an interactive student‐directed multidimensional learning tool. The aim is to computerize those activities which might be encountered in a real‐life tutorial exercise—research, reasoning, problem solving and advising, testing, diagnosis and feedback. The paper takes a liberal view of what constitutes an expert system. The terminology expert system is retained but is defined broadly, perhaps contrary to convention, to encompass not only an advisory component or a diagnostic tool but other tutorial functions. To highlight this difference reference is made to an “expert law tutor”. It is the “expertise” of the human law tutor which is called upon. For this reason the system includes a hypertext library or information component and an multiple choice assessment component as well as a legal adviser. Providing “expert” tutor feedback is a key element in the dialogue between system and student. The prototype system was developed using (inter alia) a rule‐based expert system shell and an object‐oriented hypertext tool, and the paper comments on the features of these development tools.     

Enhancing the recall of presented material

Many educators distribute either complete or incomplete handouts so students can follow along with their lectures. This research examines a teaching system that combines computer-generated graphics presentations and detailed outline handouts with blanks added. An experiment found that this system produced significantly higher short-term recall of a presentation when compared with note-taking on lined paper and with no note-taking. Visual design variables, specifically slide typefaces and type, were also manipulated to examine whether they had independent effects on short-term recall or influenced the benefits from note-taking. No significant main effects or interactions were found for the visual aid variables.     

An exploratory study on how children interact with pedagogic conversational agents

A pedagogic conversational agent (PCA) can be defined as a computer system that interacts with the student in natural language assuming the role of the instructor, a student or a companion. It can have a personality and can generate different sentences according to the agent or the student mood. Empathy with the students' feelings seems to increase their motivation to study. However, the influence of the agent personality and role as well as the students' opinion is still unclear. Therefore, in this article, it is explored with the help of a field experiment, for the first time, how these factors can affect the interaction of children with PCAs, and their opinions according to an anonymous and voluntary opinion questionnaire and some personal interviews.     

Enhancing the recall of presented material

Many educators distribute either complete or incomplete handouts so students can follow along with their lectures. This research examines a teaching system that combines computer-generated graphics presentations and detailed outline handouts with blanks added. An experiment found that this system produced significantly higher short-term recall of a presentation when compared with note-taking on lined paper and with no note-taking. Visual design variables, specifically slide typefaces and type, were also manipulated to examine whether they had independent effects on short-term recall or influenced the benefits from note-taking. No significant main effects or interactions were found for the visual aid variables.     

An artificial intelligence approach to language instruction

This paper describes an implemented, prototype system for a sophisticated, intelligent tutor for instruction in a foreign language. The system is an application of artificial intelligence research in natural language, but it implements several ideas that depart from standard approaches to natural language understanding.

For instance, the semantic analyzer diagnoses several kinds of comprehension problems and semantic errors that a student might make. Some fine distinctions in meaning are represented to detect misuse of words. Not only is a model of good syntax included in the tutor, but also a model of incorrect forms, rich enough to pinpoint specific syntactic mistakes. Finding the intended interpretation is complicated by the likelihood of student errors. Therefore, perfect syntactic form is not necessary for semantic analysis of the student's input.

The problems discussed and solutions presented are closely related to the more general problem of how to respond to a natural language input that surpasses the computer's model of language or of context.     

基于贝叶斯分类器的高校学生信用评价模型

个人信用体系是社会信用体系的基础,而高校学生个人信用评价体系是社会信用体系下个人信用建设的重要组成部分以大学生群体为试点,选取与评价对象密切关系的13个指标建立大学生信用评价指标体系,并利用贝叶斯网络分类器的原理建立高校学生个人信用评价模型.模型结合关联分析的方法来寻找属性变量间的依赖关系,提出了模块化属性结点的思路,能同时实现用户信用分类和用户群体细分的功能.数据实验结果表明,模型有较好的信用评价分类效果.     

How and why do student teachers use ICT?

This paper examines how and why student teachers made use of information and communication technology (ICT) during a 1‐year initial teacher education programme from 2008 to 2009. This is a mixed methods study involving a survey (N = 340) of the entire cohort and a series of semi‐structured interviews with a sample of student teachers within the cohort (N = 21). The study explored several themes, including the nature of student teachers' use of ICT; variation in the use of ICT; support for, and constraints on, using ICT; attitudes to ICT and to teaching and learning more generally. It was found that nearly all teachers were receptive to using ICT – more so than their in‐service counterparts – and made frequent use of it during their placement (internship) experience. The Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) was central to nearly all student teachers' use of ICT, in good part, because it was already used by their mentors and was widely accessible. Student teachers' use of ICT was categorized in three levels. Routine users focused mostly on the use of the IWB for whole class teaching; extended users gave greater opportunities for pupils to use ICT for themselves; innovative student teachers used ICT in a greater range of contexts and made more effort to overcome barriers such as access. ICT use was seen as emerging from a mix of factors: chiefly student teachers' access to ICT; their feeling of ‘self‐efficacy’ when using ICT; and their belief that ICT had a positive impact on learning – in particular, the impact on pupils' behavioural and affective engagement. Factors which influenced ICT use included mentoring, training and support. Limitations on student teachers' use of ICT are explored and it is suggested that new teachers need to be supported in developing a more discerning use as they begin their teaching careers.     

Determining students’ level of page viewing in intelligent tutorial systems with artificial neural network

The concept of level of page viewing (LPV) refers to the extent to which a student actively revises the pages that he or she has to study in tutorial systems. In the present study, an artificial neural network (ANN) model, which is composed of 5 inputs, 20 and 30 neurons, 2 hidden layers, and 1 output, was designed to determine the students’ LPV. After this network was trained, it was integrated into a web-based prototype teaching system, which was developed by ASP.net C# programming language. Additionally, Decision Tree method is tried to determine students’ LPV. However, this method gave wrong results according to expected LPV values. In this system, the student first studies the pages uploaded by the teacher onto the system. After studying all the pages within the scope of a topic, the student can go to the test page for evaluation purposes. LPVs of a student who wants to navigate to the test page are calculated by an ANN module added to the system. On the condition that one or more of the LPV’s are not up to the desired level, the student is not allowed to take the test and is informed of the pages with missing LPV’s so that he can re-study these pages. This prototype system developed based on ANN to determine students’ LPV is essential for intelligent tutorial systems, geared to provide intelligent assistance and guidance. The system can track the pages which the students did not study sufficiently and thus direct them to relevant pages. How much activity the students perform on each page to study is observed before they actually take the test, and the areas which should be further revised are determined much in advance.     

Interactive remote instruction: lessons learned

This paper describes experiences with the use of the interactive remote instruction (IRI) system which was used to teach a computer science graduate course at Old Dominion University during the Fall 1995 semester. Through the use of high-speed networks and high performance workstations, IRI creates a virtual classroom so that geographically dispersed students can fully participate in a class. Central to this system is the availability of a personal workstation to each student through which the class is taken. Placing a workstation at each student's disposal opens the opportunity for student interaction and group collaboration. We compare this approach with other educational settings and describe lessons learned from instructor, student and technical perspectives. We also describe changes we are putting in place for an expanded usage in the coming fall semester using fiberoptic cable supporting a WAN internet protocol.     

Re-engineering IMIS,the German integrated system for measuring and assessing environmental radioactivity

This paper will first outline the tasks assigned to IMIS as laid down in several federal laws of the Federal Republic of Germany with an eye towards their realization, and then we discuss the technical aspects of reengineering IMIS. The requirements for the new version of IMIS are indicated, and we discuss how they should be implemented. It is surprising that before putting the new system into operation it was advantageous to introduce a prototyping phase.We will discuss the requirements leading us to the construction of a rather complex prototype. This prototype was operational and was subsequently evaluated, resulting in very specific recommendations for system construction which could not have been obtained from conceptual considerations only. We point out that these experiments were a crucial means of arriving at our recommendations. Hence we demonstrate a practical approach to system construction for rather large systems integrating networking, client/server architectures and carefully selected software components.     

A Resource Sharing System for Personal Computers in a LAN: Concepts, Design, and Experience

RM is an experimental prototype that supports the use of distributed services by personal computers in a LAN. Using a service request model, RM allows any PC on the LAN to offer and use services, which can be user-written or off-the-shelf applications. A user can start several activities that proceed concurrently and that use services offered by different machines. Program interfaces are provided for the development of distributed applications. Remote execution is supported within the service-request framework. The paper considers issues in resource sharing and discusses the choices that were made for RM. It provides an overview of RM concepts, design, and implementation, and reviews experience using the system.     

Middle school students' flipped learning readiness in foreign language classrooms: Exploring its relationship with personal characteristics and individual circumstances

This study surveyed 387 middle school 7th – graders' flipped learning readiness in their English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classrooms and explored the effects of personal characteristics on their readiness levels. These personal characteristics included gender, the availability of outside-school support and resources, foreign language beliefs, perceptions of their English teachers, and how they use the Internet. Through factor analysis, flipped learning readiness consists of five dimensions: learner control and self-directed learning, technology self-efficacy, motivation for learning, in-class communication self-efficacy, and doing previews. It was found that personal characteristics and individual circumstances, including language beliefs, student perceptions of teacher characteristics, the availability of outside-school support and resources, learning performance, study time and net-surfing time, can make a difference to the levels of the readiness dimensions. These findings may shed light on the middle schoolers' flipped learning readiness in EFL classrooms and provide insights for teachers wanting to incorporate individualized instruction in the flipped classroom.     

An intelligent tutoring module controlled by BDI agents for an e-learning platform

INES (INtelligent Educational System) is an operative prototype of an e-learning platform. This platform includes several tools and technologies, such as: (i) semantic management of users and contents; (ii) conversational agents to communicate with students in natural language; (iii) BDI-based (Believes, Desires, Intentions) agents, which shape the tutoring module of the system; (iv) an inference engine; and (v) ontologies, to semantically model the users, their activities, and the learning contents. The main contribution of this paper is the intelligent tutoring module of the system. Briefly, the tasks of this module are to recognize each student (checking his/her system credentials) and to obtain information about his/her learning progress. So, it can be able to suggest to each student specific tasks to achieve his/her particular learning objectives, based on several parameters related to the existing learning paths and the student’s profile.     

基于人体部件模板组装的服装量身定制技术研究

通过采集人体样本数据,形成人体部件模板系列,根据客户提供的不同类型体形特征数据文件,提取出对应人体特征数据,生成个性化的三维虚拟人体模型,并最终生成个性化服装原型衣片.依照上述技术路线,设计了原型系统的架构,给出了功能结构,最后实现了原型系统.原型系统的运行结果表明,技术路线正确,系统方案合理,有助于推广电子化量身定制(eMTM)应用.