Erkki Sutinen visited our group and reported about his work on teaching ICT in Tanzania. It was quite fascinating, as it requires you to change your thinking. Things and attitudes in Africa are so differently that you cannot introduce the idea of ICT in the same way as in Western world. For instance, to introduce the concept of programming, they gave sort of “lego blocks” to the students. These blocks are touchable, i.e., you can feel your program.  Each block had an electronic device, that implemented some function. The function represented either an input, an operation, or an output. By stacking blocks upon each other they formed procedures that perform a function.

The researches explained how to operate with these blocks. Then they just leaned back and observed the student’s creativity. Because the students were so open-minded and have strong roots in their culture, they quickly came up with practical usage scenarios. Consequently, researchers were able to observe the requirements and needs issued by the users themselves. Hence, instead of adapting Western mechanisms to African countries which would hardly work, they investigate approaches stemming from African cultures and try to map to Western countries. A fascinating idea.

Scamper is a brainstorm mind-map technique to collect new ideas related to a focus question. For instance, a focus question could be  “How to improve a web page?” To answer the question one has to collect ideas that are categorized  by 7 questions. What need to be …?

• substituted?
• combined?
• added?
• modified?
• put to other uses?Elim
•  eliminated?
• rearranged?

In the collection phase quantity has preference over quality, i.e., collect as many ideas as possible. Quality assessment comes into play in the next phase. Participants are asked to mark important ideas by bullets (e.g., by red points). The more points the higher the priority of an idea. This way, a quick approach to come up with a schedule of work tasks can be delivered.

I’m wondering if there is a software tool around that provides such a collaborative function and implements the idea of Scamper. Probably, MindManager is a good candidate.

Stephen Downs wrote a very nice overview paper about E-Learning 2.0 and its trends. In that, he describes the evolution of Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and maps the process to the evolution of e-learning by identifying Web 2.0 patterns and explaining how to use them in e-learning. Here are few nice quotes:

•  ”People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors.”
• “… the structures and organization that characterized life prior to the Internet are breaking down.”
• ” … the Web itself was being transformed from what was called “the Read Web” to the “Read-Write Web,” in accordance with Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision.”
• “In a nutshell, what was happening was that the Web was shifting from being a medium, in which information was transmitted and consumed, into being a platform, in which content was created, shared, remixed, repurposed, and passed along.”
• “… Web 2.0 is not a technological revolution, it is a social revolution. [...] Web 2.0 is an attitude not a technology. It’s about enabling and encouraging participation through open applications and services. By open I mean technically open with appropriate APIs but also, more importantly, socially open, with rights granted to use the content in new and exciting contexts.”
• “… online learning software ceases to be a type of content-consumption tool, where learning is delivered, and becomes more like a content-authoring tool, where learning is created
• “It also begins to look like a personal portfolio tool.”
• “… e-learning content is syndicated …”
• In a ubiquitous computing world, we expect to “have learning available no matter what we are doing.”

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.