Leveraging new media skills in a peer feedback tool

Today's youth thrive in informal participatory communities where they not only consume but also act as contributors or producers. Through active participation they develop new media skills encompassing cultural competencies and social skills. In a participatory culture of learning, students' active contributions to their learning are stressed and peer feedback is considered an important component. In this paper we consider how to leverage aspects of these skills and the environments in which they are developed in the design of a peer feedback tool for students engaged in collaborative inquiry learning. The tool needs to be lightweight, and “playful” and draw on these participatory skills in order to entice and motivate students to give and receive feedback.     

Facilitating dynamic pedagogical decision making: PEPE and GTE

The Generic Tutoring Environment (GTE) is centred around a generic instructional knowledge base that facilitates dynamic pedagogical decision making. PEPE is a computational framework for representing the pedagogical knowledge required to dynamically tailor instruction to an individual student. Both the GTE model and the PEPE framework form the basis for an instructional component that orchestrates the courseware's interaction with the student. In this paper, the knowledge content of the two is examined and the role of each in instructional planning is described. In general, it is concluded that PEPE and GTE complement one another and a merging of their ideas would be a worthwhile endeavour.     

Using scenarios to design complex technology-enhanced learning environments

Science Created by You (SCY) learning environments are computer-based environments in which students learn about science topics in the context of addressing a socio-scientific problem. Along their way to a solution for this problem students produce many types of intermediate products or learning objects. SCY learning environments center the entire learning process around creating, sharing, discussing, and re-using these learning objects. This instructional approach requires dedicated instructional designs, which are supplied in the form of what are called pedagogical scenarios. A SCY pedagogical scenario presents the learning process as an organized assembly of elementary learning processes, each associated with a specific learning object and a tool for creating this learning object. Designing a SCY learning environment is basically a two-step procedure: the first step is to select one of the available scenarios, and the second step is to define the domain content. The SCY technical infrastructure then handles the instantiation of the scenario as a SCY computer-based learning environment. In this article we describe the SCY pedagogical design scenarios and report on our experiences in designing four different SCY learning environments.