There is a lot of research going in in affective learning. To measure emotions you can either track sensor input, prompt the student for an emotion description, or reason on the student’s general input (via keyboard). A simple way to express emotions is to use emoticons. People using messengers also use emoticons intensively. Why not the same emoticons (for instance from ICQ) in an e-portfolio, or more generally in an e-learning environment. Though, emoticons can lead to distraction, they can also havce some advantages:

• They express in short a motivation state.
• The gesture to express emotions is shorter than typing text.
• Distraction can also have a positive impact: have a break, to bring the brain down.
• Assuming that being in good mood implies being successful, learners will want to show their emotion to fellow students.
• Assuming that being in a bad mood implies being unsuccessful, emoticons can inform others (teachers/fellow students) that help is needed.

Just my five pence thoughts.

The other day, I realised that the best place to learn is the waiting room at my doctor’s place. While being in the waiting queue you can read scientific papers:

• Nobody is disturbing you.
• While being our of office you yet don’t loose time and you can be highly productive.
• The longer you wait the more work you can do as no colleague is distracting you.

Do you know some other funny but efficient places?

This is just a short sketch. The idea is like follows: A student is working within a learning environment such as ActiveMath. Beside an opened book/course the student has also activated the learning diary which is displayed somehow. While the student is writing an entry in his diary, the diary itself asks ActiveMath in the background for the current context. The context information comprises the book’s id and all items of the current page. One could simply assume that while the student is writing the entry he is reflecting on the learning items of the current page.

Today, I read a very interesting AIED 2007 article about emotions during learning. The article title is Getting under the Skin of Learners: Tools for Evaluating Emotional Experience and it is written by Madeline Alsm,eyer, Rose Luckin, and Judith Good.

Some very surprising evaluation results are:

• There is a discrepancy between students recalling an emotion and the emotion estimation by a neutral observer. It suggests that whatever signals the observer receives and interprets, he still might be wrong.
• A typical expectation that students become more confident, feel more pride and less anxiety after a positive interaction with a teacher, is not confirmed.
• One of the positive findings is that certain emotions are not likely to change (boredom, hopelessness) while others change rapidly (relief, anxiety)

I shoudl follow up with that study.

The other day, I was thinking about making e-portfolios compulsory for our ActiveMath students. This requierement has two advantages:

• Students and tutors can observe learning progress.
• I can evaluate e-portfolio use over time during my PhD research.

I’ll think about an initial setup.