Research trends in student response systems: a literature review
In recent years, the use of student response systems (SRS, also known as clickers) in the classroom setting has increased considerably, and researchers have developed a growing interest in their effect on learning and student engagement. This review analyses trends in SRS research by providing a brief history of SRS technology and usage as well as a detailed review of research in this field. In addition, this review focuses on the pedagogical implications of SRSs for education and analyses common criticisms of this emerging educational technology. Finally, research identifying common trends in SRS development is compiled and areas for future research are identified. The outcome of this leads to an understanding of best practices for this technology in a university setting.
Indirect Interaction: A Computing Lecture for Five to Seven Year-Olds
Most papers on introducing children to computing assume the children will interact directly with the technology or task. In this paper, we reflect on a case of designing for indirect interaction - where it is not the children's hands but a facilitator's on the device. The context is a computing lecture we gave for twenty-six children aged between five and seven years old. This was specifically designed to give a stylized experience of being a university student - it is self-consciously a lecture emphasising student-teacher interaction around code. We found a technique from undergraduate engineering education - a partially exposed simulation in a text-based programming language - allowed imaginative interaction from the children as they discovered they could model the impossible.
Data Affordances and the Dynamics of Constraints in Redesign
Designers inhabit a world of constraints - the limitations that shape what solution designs are practical. In this provocation, I would like to suggest that we should not only be interested in the day to day business of identifying what the constraints are and what their impact is, but also in understanding the dynamics of how constraints come into being, how they evolve over time, and how to relax them. Unwieldy constraints are a keenly felt problem, especially when dealing with legacy systems, but how they grow and behave has not been examined greatly in the design community. To begin this conversation, I identify a small set of loose principles of how constraints grow around a system. And I propose Data Affordances as a way of considering how the technology we design today constrains or offers affordances for future design.
Towards an intelligent online textbook for discrete mathematics
We have developed a web-based homework tutor for discrete mathematics that is a step of progress towards building an intelligent adaptive textbook. The student works on mathematical problems in a notation that is closely mapped to the notation the student would be expected to write on an exam paper. The tutor gives advice and feedback as the student is working, in a co-operative manner rather than submission-and-response. This feedback is linked into the topic structure of the intelligent book, allowing the student to query for content material relating to a piece of advice. More than one content item is available on any topic, allowing server rules to choose items the that are likely to be useful to the individual student, while still allowing the student to reject the tutor's selection and choose a different content item.
Intelligent Books: Combining Reactive Learning Exercises with Extensible and Adaptive Content in an Open-Access Web Application
"Intelligent Books" are Web-based textbooks that combine computer-supported exercises with content that is both adaptive and extensible. They impose very few restrictions on the kind of exercise that can be placed within the book, and they allow students to contribute material that they have written, and to incorporate material from the Web into the book. In this chapter, the authors describe the influences that affect the design of intelligent books. These come from looking at the roles that textbooks and course notes play in education, and economic factors that affect the sustainability of intelligent books - competing for the attention of users, and ensuring that network externalities do not prevent a sufficient quantity of material from being usable within the book.
Towards a Supercollaborative Software Engineering MOOC
Recently there has been rapid growth in the number of online courses and venues through which students can learn introductory computer programming. As software engineering education becomes more prevalent online, online education will need to address how to give students the skills and experience at programming collaboratively on realistic projects. In this paper, we analyse factors affecting how a supercollaborative on-campus software studio course could be adapted as a project-led supercollaborative MOOC.
Towards a Diagnostic Toolbox for Medical Communication
Poor communication is a major cause of adverse patient events in hospitals. Although sophisticated simulators are in use for performing medical operations, there is comparatively little technology support being used for improving communication skills including patient history taking. Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing researchers have developed sophisticated algorithms for analysing conversations. We are experimentally developing software that can visualise the combined output of these algorithms, as a diagnostic toolkit for medical communication.
Using a Video-Based Critique Process to Support Studio Pedagogies in Distance Education - A Tool and Pilot Study
Studio courses have become a key way in which professional skills, especially those involving collaboration and design, are taught in many fields, including computer science. Studios typically involve students working on a design problem, periodically presenting their work for critique, and critiquing the work of other students or groups. They support productive inquiry, as well as teamwork, communication, and reflection. However, although studios have become an important mode of instruction for on-campus students, they have not typically been offered for online or distance education students. In this paper we describe a studio critique process that is designed to work asynchronously, using short videos, and a tool that we have built to support it. We also describe qualitative observations from a pilot study, in which video-based critiques were used at a university whose students predominantly study online rather than on-campus.
Writing questions for an intelligent book using external AI
Intelligent Books are Web-based textbooks that can adapt and improve their content and guide students through graphical example exercises that resemble the diagrams and notations a student might use on paper. The exercises use formal AI systems to analyse students' work, and different AI systems are used for different questions. This brings the issue of how a person can write questions if they are not an expert in the AI system used. We describe our experiences developing an authoring tool for electronics questions that use a specialised circuit AI with its own extensive circuit language. The tool works on the principle of exposing an appropriate visual model of the AI, while factoring out the language detail and the architecture of the book itself, and allowing the question writer to decide which parts of the AI model to expose to the student (as the desired mental model for the student).
COMLEX: Visualizing Communication for Research and Saving Lives
One of the major causes of patient harm in hospital is poor communication. We are developing a video review and visualization platform to research and improve medics' communication skills. It intended for use by experimenters, as a deployable training tool for medics, and also for forensic review of communication. It supports pluggable analysis modules and visualizations for research teams, and configurable workflow for educators and hospital administrators.