Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

In order to deal with the need of sharing learning objects within and across learning object repositories most of the recent work argue for the use of ontologies as a means for providing a shared understanding of common domains. But with the proliferation of many different ontologies even for the same domain, it become necessary to provide mapping process to perform interoperability. The main key issue must be addressed is to define educational systems interoperability mechanisms to create a virtual learning space. Although many efforts in ontology mapping have already been carried out, few of them use resources properties to generate semantic relations between local concepts. Our approach uses inference rules to combine several matchers in order to discover mapping dynamically and to improve the results qualities.

In order to foster situated learning in a virtual community of practice, we developed a multi-user, real-time, 3D car-driving simulation environment. In such a situation-based learning environment, the availability of enough appropriate learning situations is crucial for success. However, we experienced that often a collaborative usage of the system does not result in a large number of these critical situations. This paper introduces the idea of situation creators, intelligent agents who intentionally create specific situations for learners, into our 3D real-time simulation environment. These created situations challenge a learner much more and force him to react in order to master the driving knowledge.

The semantic annotation tool MemoNote [1] dedicated to teacher enables teacher to annotate digital documents with his own comments and point of view as on paper. The annotations created in the tool have an explicit semantics for both teacher and machine. To assist the teacher to rapidly and fluently create these semantic annotations, the tool provides him with annotation patterns facility. However, the same teacher during his/her activity can work in different contexts, where he/she annotates differently, using a specific group of patterns in each specific context. Consequently MemoNote has to be context-aware in order to adapt to each teacher’s context situation. This article studies and models the annotation context, in order to design context-aware annotation patterns dedicated to teachers.

One objective of our ongoing research is to be able to culturally adapt e-Learning. This paper is focused on describing a methodology to represent cultural groups of learners and adapt the learning session depending on the membership of learners to one or more cultural group.

This paper presents a systems approach to facilitate effective learning object acquisition through the use of communications, modeling, and the agent metaphor. By changing the emphasis that is usually placed on metadata creation and interpretation (which can be problematic) we instead focus on the pragmatics of end use data facilitated through agent negotiation.

About a half century ago, the computer became a model, metaphor and modelling tool privileging the cognitive over the affective, and engendering theories in which thinking and learning are viewed as information processing and affect is ignored or marginalised. In the last decade there has been an acceleration in efforts to redress this imbalance, developing technologies that can begin to measure and manage the role of affect, enabling new theories and interventions in which affect and cognition are appropriately integrated with one another. This invited keynote presents a vision for developing an automated learning companion that jointly supports a learner’s affective and cognitive needs. In particular, I will describe our efforts at MIT to invent several of the affective technologies to enable such a learning companion. The talk will show examples of the state of the art with respect to affect sensing and recognition and with respect to developing strategies for responding intelligently to learner affect.

The increasing demand of distant education and the growing degree of diversity of the learner group have created the widespread practice of e-learning which takes place in virtual learning environments (VLEs). By exploring those VLEs, learners perceive, analyse, assimilate, and interact with the pedagogical presentation and then "construct" their understanding or develop certain skills of the domain.

There is considerable interest today in the use of computer games for student learning. Researchers, as well as educators, recognize that games can engage students in sustained and focused mental activity for extended periods of time. Indeed, game playing often occurs at the expense of more traditional forms of learning and schoolwork. Should we bemoan this fact, or should we seize the opportunity to harness gaming technology for teaching and learning? Does learning by game playing necessarily contradict what education is all about? For those persuaded about the value of learning by game playing, how can the design and use of computer games be introduced into classroom learning that is carried out in the broader context of school-based practices?

In this keynote address, I explore the dimensions of embodiment, embeddedness, and experience in learning by game playing. I argue that these are productive and powerful elements that can help students establish a sense of , develop agency and self-directedness in their learning experience, and, ultimately, construct a personal identity. I shall also examine the construct of in education and address its importance in the light of New Literacies. The foregoing ideas will be presented in the context of ongoing research into learning by game playing at the Learning Sciences Lab of the National Institute of Education, Singapore. The broader goal of this research endeavor is to investigate and design ways in which game playing might be introduced and used in classroom teaching and learning such that the innovation is pedagogically sound and sustainable.

In this era of the Wikipedia and the Podcast, it seems that our approaches to supporting both formal and informal lifelong learning are once again being revolutionized. Yet disappointingly e-learning remains dominated by rigid learning management systems that deliver content in much the same way as CBT systems did thirty years ago. Attempts to bring intelligent technologies into mainstream e-learning have been slowly and steadily infiltrating the thinking of the education establishment – but unfortunately the “slowly” has outweighed the “steadily”.

It is well known that human tutors take into account both the student’s knowledge and understanding of what is being taught, in addition to considering the emotional and motivational state of the student. However, there are many gaps in our understanding of the relationship between cognition and affect in tutoring. We have some insight into how human tutors infer student’s cognitive and affective states, and current research has attempted to apply this knowledge to the inference of such states by computer tutors. There is ongoing research on how human tutors use their knowledge of student’s states in their decisions and actions, and how we might use such research to inform the design of computer tutors.