Search

Despite the positive potential of the online social networking platforms, the longitudinal studies regarding how children participate in digital storytelling communities is still scant in the literature. This study investigated how 26 elementary students participated in a 2-year digital storytelling community mediated by a social network application. By analyzing the students' weekly responses, social networks, and their language learning performance, the results suggested that their oral reading proficiency improved along with their participation in the long-term activity. It was also found that the community features impacted the students' sense of engagement in the activity. The feature of the learning community that allows students to team up with partners to complete a story improved their engagement and motivation. The social network analysis found that multiple literacies including multimedia processing, language, and collaboration were all considered by students as important criteria for the partnership to complete the collaborative digital storytelling work. However, such a prolonged collaborative digital storytelling activity also introduced new challenges for those students demonstrating unfavorable collaboration profiles as they needed to learn how to collaborate in order to team up with others. The implications of the findings for educational practice are discussed.

Help seeking is regarded as an important learning strategy that reflects students' metacognitive and domainspecific skills and knowledge. This study developed a proactive online discussion forum that strengthens social networks in an online discussion forum to facilitate help seeking for problem solving. This forum allowed students to proactively invite friends or potential experts to participate in problem solving. A quasiexperimental approach was conducted with a sample of 37 students. The students' behaviors of problem solving, ego network patterns of problem solving, and perceptions of help seeking were addressed as dependent variables to assess the effect of the proactive online discussion forum. The analysis results revealed that the students in the experimental group exhibited more frequent participation in problem solving, and showed more positive attitudes towards help seeking. The results also indicated that the experimental group demonstrated more in-depth participation patterns of ego networks. The findings provide some evidence for the effectiveness of the proactive online discussion forum in terms of promoting students' participation in problem solving and their attitudes towards help seeking.

Creative Commons (CC) mechanism has been suggested as a potential means to foster a reliable environment for online knowledge sharing activity. This study investigates the role of the CC mechanism in supporting knowledge sharing among a group of university students studying programming from the perspectives of social cognitive and social capital theories. By gathering 40 university students' feedbacks and their behaviors, this study found that, in terms of trust, sharing self-efficacy and outcome expectations, the students had a more positive perception of the CC-integrated platform than that of conventional online sharing. In addition, the students were more likely to favor the CC-integrated sharing platform in which they believed that individual identification and profit were more effectively sustained and protected in the process of knowledge sharing. The students' activities on these platforms and their perception of knowledge sharing also revealed relationships that differed from those found in their performance of programming tasks on other online sharing platforms. This study suggests that the employment of the CC mechanism could be helpful in promoting a more positive perception of and willingness to engage in knowledge sharing, thus ensuring the effectiveness of peer communication and collaboration in stimulating programming performance within the Internet-based collaborative context.

In a classroom, obtaining active, whole-focused, and engaging learning results from a design is often difficult. In this study, we propose a self-observation model that employs an instinctive interface for classroom active learning. Students can communicate with virtual avatars in the vertical screen and can react naturally according to the situation and tasks. Students can also immediately observe themselves mixed with a virtual environment and therefore reflect on the necessary improvements. With the designed system, potential advantages such as motivation, enjoyment, context for situated learning, engagement, social collaboration, and role-playing might arise. To examine the idea, we conducted a case study with 60 fourth grade elementary students to investigate learners' behavior as performers and peer audience and their perception of body movements and speech commands in the designed learning environment. The results show that the students' image in the vertical screen affected the students and the peer audience positively. Moreover, they positively perceived their competence and their enjoyment after they performed contextual learning activities through the body movement interface

A number of studies have been devoted to investigating the influence of educational agents on different aspects of student learning. However, little attention has been paid to the effects of the level-up mechanism of educational agents on students although this is a significant issue. Thus, this study develops an educational agent with the level-up mechanism so that the effects of the level-up mechanism can be addressed. The results of a within-subject experiment conducted in an elementary school showed that the level-up mechanism of the educational agents can help students develop a positive relationship with the educational agent, and further enhance their motivation in terms of attention, relevance, and satisfaction. (Contains 7 tables and 3 figures.)

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. (Contains 4 tables and 4 figures.)

As robot technologies develop, many researchers have tried to use robots to support education. Studies have shown that robots can help students develop problem-solving abilities and learn computer programming, mathematics, and science. However, few studies discuss the use of robots to facilitate the teaching of second languages. We discuss whether language teaching needs robot support, whether robots present an appropriate medium for language instruction, and what challenges must be overcome. In order to explore the possibility of using robots as an instructional tool for teaching a second language, this paper reviews prior studies concerning educational robots and analyzes the characteristics of robots and instructional media. Furthermore, we report on the design and testing of five instruction scenarios for teaching second language. Based on our empirical experience, we provide suggestions for future research directions in the realm of robots for language education. (Contains 3 figures.)

Research on note taking in pedagogical settings has received considerable attention. However, the awkwardness of integrating information across different media formats may present physical and cognitive barriers that prevent students from effectively organizing annotations from both printed and digital content while studying paper textbooks. The purpose of this paper is to develop a cross-media annotation system that incorporates a paper textbook with a computer as an integrated whole to facilitate the question-driven organization of annotations. While taking notes, students can digitally extract printed text and organize the copied passages based on guiding questions, all by using digital pens. Students can also link Internet-based learning resources to printed content to supplement their print-based studies. A user-based formative evaluation was conducted to assess the new functions of the cross-media annotation system and to explore their influence on students' note-taking behavior and performance. The results show that the new functions may facilitate the retention of key concepts of the paper textbooks and may improve knowledge construction based on explicit learning goals. (Contains 1 table and 7 figures.)

Recent advances in ubiquitous computing technologies have brought reality augmentation of traditional objects to context-aware and social supports. Although a significant proportion of students prefer poring over traditional paper textbooks over electronic books, few studies have enhanced reading practice of traditional books with ubiquitous context-aware and collaborative learning supports that provide timely, contextual assistance. This study proposed an innovative approach to develop a paper-based learning support environment in which mobile phones, traditional books and a Web-based discussion forum are integrated together to promote students' acquisition of knowledge. Students receive contextual messages from an online learning community based on their learning status. The timely recommendatory messages aim to facilitate collaboration among community members and offer guidance in students' study. The findings and results of an evaluation show that students' learning tasks and motivation were supported in the paper-based learning environment by community members. Students also generally had positive attitude to the context-aware recommendatory information delivered via mobile text messages. The ubiquity and immediacy of the recommendations may help students reach the right resources at the right time to improve their learning experience. (Contains 5 figures and 2 tables.)