This study is a ten-year critical review of empirical research on the educational applications of Virtual Reality (VR). Results show that although the majority of the 53 reviewed articles refer to science and mathematics, researchers from social sciences also seem to appreciate the educational value of VR and incorporate their learning goals in Educational Virtual Environments (EVEs). Although VR supports multisensory interaction channels, visual representations predominate. Few are the studies that incorporate intuitive interactivity, indicating a research trend in this direction. Few are the settings that use immersive EVEs reporting positive results on users' attitudes and learning outcomes, indicating that there is a need for further research on the capabilities of such systems. Features of VR that contribute to learning such as first order experiences, natural semantics, size, transduction, reification, autonomy and presence are exploited according to the educational context and content. Presence seems to play an important role in learning and it is a subject needing further and intensive studies. Constructivism seems to be the theoretical model the majority of the EVEs are based on. The studies present real world, authentic tasks that enable context and content dependent knowledge construction. They also provide multiple representations of reality by representing the natural complexity of the world. Findings show that collaboration and social negotiation are not only limited to the participants of an EVE, but exist between participants and avatars, offering a new dimension to computer assisted learning. Little can yet be concluded regarding the retention of the knowledge acquired in EVEs. Longitudinal studies are necessary, and we believe that the main outcome of this study is the future research perspectives it brings to light.

Educational virtual environments: A ten-year review of empirical research (1999-2009)

Wikis provide new opportunities for learning and for collaborative knowledge building as well as for understanding these processes. This article presents a theoretical framework for describing how learning and collaborative knowledge building take place. In order to understand these processes, three aspects need to be considered: the social processes facilitated by a wiki, the cognitive processes of the users, and how both processes influence each other mutually. For this purpose, the model presented in this article borrows from the systemic approach of Luhmann as well as from Piaget’s theory of equilibration and combines these approaches. The model analyzes processes which take place in the social system of a wiki as well as in the cognitive systems of the users. The model also describes learning activities as processes of externalization and internalization. Individual learning happens through internal processes of assimilation and accommodation, whereas changes in a wiki are due to activities of external assimilation and accommodation which in turn lead to collaborative knowledge building. This article provides empirical examples for these equilibration activities by analyzing Wikipedia articles. Equilibration activities are described as being caused by subjectively perceived incongruities between an individuals’ knowledge and the information provided by a wiki. Incongruities of medium level cause cognitive conflicts which in turn activate the described processes of equilibration and facilitate individual learning and collaborative knowledge building.

/pdf/a-systemic-and-cognitive-view-on-collaborative-knowledge-37jd58ghx8.pdf

A systemic and cognitive view on collaborative knowledge building with wikis

The rise of the Internet has enabled collaboration and cooperation on anunprecedentedly large scale. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which presently comprises 7.2 million articles created by 7.04 million distinct editors, provides a consummate example. We examined all 50 million edits made tothe 1.5 million English-language Wikipedia articles and found that the high-quality articles are distinguished by a marked increase in number of edits, number of editors, and intensity of cooperative behavior, as compared to other articles of similar visibility and age. This is significant because in other domains, fruitful cooperation has proven to be difficult to sustain as the size of the collaboration increases. Furthermore, in spite of the vagaries of human behavior, we show that Wikipedia articles accrete edits according to a simple stochastic mechanism in which edits beget edits. Topics of high interest or relevance are thus naturally brought to the forefront of quality.

http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/wikipedia/wikipedia07.pdf

Cooperation and quality in wikipedia

The United States today has approximately 39.9 million immigrants—the largest number in its history (Passel & Cohn, 2012; U.S. Census Bureau, 2011b). As a nation of immigrants, the United States has successfully negotiated larger proportions of newcomers in its past (14.7% in 1910 vs. 12.9% today) and is far from alone among postindustrial countries in experiencing a growth in immigration in recent decades. Notably, nearly three quarters of the foreign-born are naturalized citizens or authorized noncitizens (Congressional Budget Office [CBO], 2011). One in five persons currently residing in the United States is a firstor second-generation immigrant, and nearly a quarter of children under the age of 18 have an immigrant parent (Mather, 2009). As such, immigrants and the second generation have become a significant part of our national tapestry. Just as this demographic transformation is rapidly unfolding, the United States is facing international, domestic, and economic crises (Massey, 2010). Like other historical economic downturns (Simon, 1985), the current recession has served as a catalyst to make immigration a divisive social and political issue (Massey & Sánchez, 2010). Across the nation, immigrants have become the subject of negative media coverage (Massey, 2010; M. M. Suárez-Orozco, Louie, & Suro, 2011), hate crimes (Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund, 2009), and exclusionary political legislation (Carter, Lawrence, & Morse, 2011). Given the demographic growth, however, we now face an “integration imperative” (Alba, Sloan, & Sperling, 2011)—not only for the well-being of this new population but also for that of the nation’s social and economic future. Psychologists are, and increasingly will be, serving immigrant adults and their children in a variety of settings, including schools, community centers, clinics, and hospitals, and thus should be aware of this complex demographic transformation and consider its implications as citizens, practitioners, researchers, and faculty. This report aims specifically to describe this diverse population and address the psychological experience of immigration, considering factors that impede and facilitate adjustment. The report, which includes the recent theoretical and empirical literature on immigrants, (a) raises awareness about this growing (but poorly understood) population; (b) derives evidenceinformed recommendations for the provision of psychological services for the immigrant-origin population; and (c) makes recommendations for the advancement of training, research, and policy efforts for immigrant children, adults, older adults, and families.

Crossroads: The Psychology of immigration in the new century

This paper explores several unsupervised approaches to automatic keyword extraction using meeting transcripts. In the TFIDF (term frequency, inverse document frequency) weighting framework, we incorporated part-of-speech (POS) information, word clustering, and sentence salience score. We also evaluated a graph-based approach that measures the importance of a word based on its connection with other sentences or words. The system performance is evaluated in different ways, including comparison to human annotated keywords using F-measure and a weighted score relative to the oracle system performance, as well as a novel alternative human evaluation. Our results have shown that the simple unsupervised TFIDF approach performs reasonably well, and the additional information from POS and sentence score helps keyword extraction. However, the graph method is less effective for this domain. Experiments were also performed using speech recognition output and we observed degradation and different patterns compared to human transcripts.

/pdf/unsupervised-approaches-for-automatic-keyword-extraction-50qf2tumoq.pdf

Unsupervised Approaches for Automatic Keyword Extraction Using Meeting Transcripts

The next time you find yourself struggling with the details of your software's functionality, back up and tell a story. Talking through simple user scenarios can help keep you on the right track.

Tell Me a Story

Wikis are simple to use, asynchronous, Web-based collaborative hypertext authoring systems which are quickly gaining in popularity. In spite of much anecdotal evidence to the effect that wikis are usable by non technical experts, this has never been studied formally. In this paper, we studied the usability of a wiki through observation and problem-solving interaction with several children who used the tool to collaboratively author hypertext stories over several sessions. The children received a minimal amount of instruction, but were able to ask for help during their work sessions. Despite minimal instruction, 5 out of 6 teams were able to complete their story. Our data indicate that the major usability problems were related to hyperlink management. We report on this and other usability issues, and provide suggestions for improving the usability of wikis. Our analysis and conclusions also apply to hypertext authoring with non wiki-based tools.

Are wikis usable

Wiki as a Tool for Web-based Collaborative Story Telling in Primary School: a Case Study

Browsing through large volumes of spoken audio is known to be a challenging task for end users. One way to alleviate this problem is to allow users to gist a spoken audio document by glancing over a transcript generated through Automatic Speech Recognition. Unfortunately, such transcripts typically contain many recognition errors which are highly distracting and make gisting more difficult. In this paper we present an approach that detects recognition errors by identifying words which are semantic outliers with respect to other words in the transcript. We describe several variants of this approach. We investigate a wide range of evaluation measures and we show that we can significantly reduce the number of errors in content words, with the trade-off of losing some good content words.

/pdf/semantic-similarity-for-detecting-recognition-errors-in-18g910h1qx.pdf

Semantic Similarity for Detecting Recognition Errors in Automatic Speech Transcripts

This paper discusses the design and implementation of processes and tools to support the collaborative creation and maintenance of multilingual wiki content. A wiki is a website where a large number of participants are allowed to create and modify content using their Web browser. This simple concept has revolutionized collaborative authoring on the web, enabling among others, the creation of Wikipedia, the world's largest online encyclopedia. On many of the largest and highest profile wiki sites, content needs to be provided in more than one language. Yet, current wiki engines do not support the efficient creation and maintenance of such content. Consequently, most wiki sites deal with the issue of multilingualism by spawning a separate and independent site for each language. This approach leads to much wasted effort since the same content must be researched, tracked and written from scratch for every language. In this paper, we investigate what features could be implemented in wiki engines in order to deal more effectively with multilingual content. We look at how multilingual content is currently managed in more traditional industrial contexts, and show how this approach is not appropriate in a wiki world. We then describe the results of a User-Centered Design exercise performed to explore what a multilingual wiki engine should look like from the point of view of its various end users. We describe a partial implementation of those requirements in our own wiki engine (LizzyWiki), to deal with the special case of bilingual sites. We also discuss how this simple implementation could be extended to provide even more sophisticated features, and in particular, to support the general case of a site with more than two languages. Finally, even though the paper focuses primarily on multilingual content in a wiki context, we argue that translating in this "Wiki Way", may also be useful in some traditional industrial settings, as a way of dealing better with the fast and ever-changing nature of our modern internet world.

Alain Désilets

Papers

Tell Me a Story

Are wikis usable

Wiki as a Tool for Web-based Collaborative Story Telling in Primary School: a Case Study

Semantic Similarity for Detecting Recognition Errors in Automatic Speech Transcripts

Translation the Wiki way