IADIS CELDA 2010 day 2

Day dawns cloudy and cool with intermittent rain. A full day today with various concurrent sessions followed by presentation of Romanian / Timisoaro history, city tour and conference dinner in the evening. Will help me readjust to the change in time zones as it has been a struggle staying up beyond 8pm. Sorted out wifi access this morning, so all go with blogging as each session runs.


First up this morning, Ioana Ghergulescu and Cristina Hava Muntean (National College of Ireland) present their work on assessing motivation in game based e-learning. Began with an overview of motivation theories (good overview in paper) and explained process undertaken to assess students’ motivation to learn through elearning.

First from Catherine Schifter, Diane Jass Ketelhut and Brian Nelson (Temple University, Philadelphia), on presence, Piaget’s stages of development and middle school children in an immersive virtual game environment. An overview on ‘presence’ Goffman’s social psychology theories and Gibson’s perception learning theory – sense of participation and involvement, being in the environment or perceptual illusion of non-mediation. Wanted to find out if ‘presence’ also in younger children as previous work mostly with adolescent and adults. Used Piaget’s developmental stages as a guide including children moving to ‘formal operational’ stage by age of 11. Small sample found some differences between grade 6 and 7 students in how they engaged with a game with grade 7 students more prepared to interact with the problem solving aspects of the game.
 
Next Hariklia Tsalapatas (University of Thessaly), Olivier Heidmann and presented by Marina Mogli (Elementary School of Portaria, Greece) on Virtual experimentation towards the development of early environmental responsibility skills. Decribed the development and evaluation of a 'game' to help primary school children learn about concepts of sustainability. The environmental game (EnvKids) developed as a Europe wide (Greece, France, Czech Republic and Sweden) initiative. Has three focuses - my home, my town and my planet.

Last paper before morning tea on robot technology and numbers in the classroom with Gunver Majgaard, Morten Misfeldt and Jacob Nielson (from Universities in Denmark). Reported on an initial exploration project using 'cubic user-configurable building blocks' to support the learning of numbers with 6 - 10 year olds including developing understanding of place value, creating large numbers etc. Included demonstration of the cubes (Iblocks) - blocks are lined up and a 'answer' block placed at the end - which will pronounce the number set up (as Danish system of number and place values can be difficult to conceptualise and numbers complicated to pronounce).

After morning tea Ville Karavirta (Aalto University) presented on real world student selected data for education – learning graph algorithms. As with previous presentation, good example of 'making learning visible'. The software developed uses real data (such as coordinates off Google maps and Dijkstra algorithm) - sematic data - and makes the data visual and easier to understand and manipulate.  

Vegard Fleisher Orkelbog (University of Oslo) presented on situated simulation as a learning tool – experiencing Forum Iulium with the iphone (mobile augmented reality). As with two previous presentations, this presents an iphone app, developed to utilise the location function of iphones to provide visitors to an archeological / historical site, access to the background information on the specific place the visitor is currently viewing. Included methods used to assist learners / viewers with matching existing artefacts with the 3D models available in the app.

Then a presentation on the effect of prior knowledge on learners’ navigation of webpage structure with Gokhan Akcapinar and Arif Altun (Hacettepe University). Used concepts of navigation to study whether differences between students with prior knowledge navigated webpages differently. Found difference in that experienced users generally less likely to be linear and inexperienced users tended to follow structure as laid out on learning resource.


Last paper before lunch, exploiting virtual worlds for teachers’ professional development with Kallonis Pavlos and Demetrios Sampson (University of Pireaus). Interesting paper detailing professional development process for teachers. Used concept of synetics - making the strange familiar - to introduce teachers to the opportunities available in using technology to assist with students' learning. Introduced second life by having teachers compare scenarios on learning new skills either through traditional methods or in virtual worlds. Sloodle (second life integration to Moodle) used as platform.

After lunch two papers – first from Sabrina Leone, Guiliana Guazzaroni, Laura Carletti and presented by Tommaso Leo (Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, Italy) on increasing the need of validation of non-formal and informal learning. The case of the community of practice of ‘webm.org’. Based on a social learning framework (e.g. Web 2.0 - user as a node in knowledge creation). So what kind of learning takes place on Web 2.0 - formal or non-formal or informal?? who gains from learning, individual competence or competences which contribute to social advance? In the EU, guidelines have been provided to 'measure' conpetences learnt through non-formal / informal routes but each EU country uses these guidelines in different ways. A webm.org (collating a range of Web 2.0 tools - google docs, wordpress, twitter, facebook, manymoon, dimdim / webed, udutu and smartphones, pdas) Cop (double link COP) for informal learning for evidence based medicine studied to find out role of informal learning. Therefore, important to evaluate how effective webm.org has been in promoting and sharing co-constructed knowledge.

Last paper of the day with Nuno Pena and Pedro Isaias (Universidade Aberta (Portuguese Open University) on the ipteaces elearning framework – analysis of success indicators and the impact of student social demographic characteristics. Introduces the use of Invovlement, preparation, transmission, exemplification, application, connection, evaluation and simulation (IPTEACES) as a instructional design framework to help facilitate elearning by reducing diversity in elearning programmes facing a non-homogenous audience (gender, educational background, previous knowledge, literacy, computer proficiency, organisational culture, values / experiences, inexperience in elearning etc.). Support before student begins (student kit) and easily accessible and prompt support (phone or email helpdesks 24/7)required to support all students embarking on elearning. Evaluation of effectiveness also presented. need to explore this one further as it contains some good links between what works and pedogogical theories.
Not presented by paper provides for interesting reading. Belkcem Mostefai, Faical Azouaou and Amar Balla from the National High School for Computer Science , Algeria, on SQAR: an annotation-based study process for the learner’s personal learning. Survey, question, annotation and review (SQAR) is used as a method to help student’s learn concepts. Of interest is the annotation system developed to annotate webpages – WebAnnot as an extension of Firefox. Students who annotated more and build up substantial ‘clouds’ of various topics tended to learn concept.