AIED 2009 - Workshop Enabling creative learning design: how HCI, User Modelling and Human Factors help in 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education

Website http://www.aied2009.com | Edit Freely

Category AIED 2009

Deadline: April 30, 2009 | Date: July 06, 2009

Venue/Country: Brighton, U.K.

Updated: 2010-06-04 19:32:22 (GMT+9)

Call For Papers - CFP

July 6th - 10th 2009, Thistle Hotel, Brighton, UK

http://www.aied2009.com

Background and Motivation

Although the term ¡°Learning Design¡± (LD) has been in use only in recent

years, the earliest work in the field can be traced back to

¡°instructivist¡± approaches, which provided a clear instructional

sequence for teachers to follow. The recognition of the need to make

theoretical findings readily available to practitioners led to extensive

work on Instructional Design Theory, which attempted to make learning

theories more operational. However, the later focus on ¡°constructivist¡±

theories of learning presented more of a challenge to an operational

approach. The development of interest in ¡°Learning Design¡± as a focus of

research began with the realisation that the constructivist pedagogical

theories did not easily transfer to the practice of teaching. The

emphasis on what learners were doing, and how to support their

activities, was much less constrained by constructivism. This dependence

on the context in which learning takes place required an approach to

teaching based on design principles rather than pre-defined

instructional sequences.

There have been attempts to offer ¡°toolkits¡± or software to enable ease

of entry into pedagogic design and support non-specialists in engaging

with learning theories. Despite the effort, existing e-learning systems

and authoring tools have several limitations in respect of support

provided and usability, and cannot accommodate the needs of teachers who

increasingly look for more intelligent services and support when

designing instruction in order to avoid disorientation and develop a

holistic understanding of how all the information fits together.

Providing support by incorporating personalisation technologies into

teachers¡¯ designs could be potentially helpful in formulating teaching

goals and lesson plans and in better accommodating learners¡¯ needs. In

fact, at present, systems do not provide tools for identifying patterns

in effective learning design practice and offer no opportunities for

teachers to personalise the learning experience and collaborate with

peers in developing more effective designs. It also appears to be a

large communication gap between authoring tools and learning systems,

and teachers/learning designers. For example, teachers want to work with

the terminology they are familiar with for describing their teaching and

learning, which of course can create a problem for the exchange of

learning designs using existing systems. Thus, the challenge for the

next generation of Learning Design tools is thus to put the designer

requirements and experiences at the centre of tool development. To this

end, the Workshop will draw to the vast experience of HCI and user

modeling and human factors research.

Learning design is a creative process and tools are prescriptive and

constraining and are often seen more as a hindrance. Thus, it is widely

acknowledged that we need to do more to bridge the education/computer

science divide and create a genuinely interdisciplinary basis for

representing learning design, if we are to succeed in persuading

teachers to work with this approach as the technical complexities

involved are often not perceived by teachers as relevant to their needs.

Moreover, it is important to offer teachers intelligent services, such

as personalisation and content adaptation, matching learners'

characteristics with specific learning designs, and exploiting

teachers-directed feedback about the usefulness and appropriateness of

learning objects or designs for certain learning scenarios. In this

vein, the Workshop considers personalisation in the context of learning

design as an important feature of the next generation of LD tools. This

could be achieved by capturing the needs of each individual teacher or

group of teachers and providing support for reaching a goal that

efficiently and knowledgeably addresses individual or group needs.

However, personalisation would not be achieved by prescribed sequences

of actions and information but by creating a dynamic structure, e.g.

based on ontologies, and more generally using user and community data so

that the Learning Design tools can adapt to the users¡¯ knowledge,

profiles and needs, and that users can consciously adapt the system to

suit their articulated preferences. The Workshop will attempt to address

the challenges discussed above. Furthermore, it aims to explore what

teacher/learning designers-related information should be captured and

how, and what kind of adaptations are needed to support teachers¡¯

individual needs, goals and interests. It will also look at how users'

interactions with designs and annotations of designs and the use of

concepts from controlled vocabularies, taxonomies and ontologies can be

captured in a user-friendly way and used to support the Learning Design

process.

The Workshop Content and Themes

Technology enhanced learning, to be fully effective, requires a

synthesis of insights from the learning sciences and Computer Science,

in particular AI. Broadly speaking, the learning sciences provide deep

insights into the learning design domain, while computing and

particularly AI-based approaches provide formal representations,

reasoning mechanisms and data structures that enable those insights to

be captured in a precise and computationally executable form. There is a

double challenge here, which is at the heart of a successful synthesis.

This half-day Workshop aims to bring together education, HCI and AI

experts to discuss and share ideas about the 21st century view on

learning design, curriculum and AI-based technology to support the

content design, creation, sharing, re-use, modification and learning

that may occur when teaching. Contributions will include theoretical and

applied research, and preliminary results on the following themes:

• Creative Interfaces for creative Learning Design: Needs of the user

and communities, barriers of use, usability and support through

intelligent interfaces. How can research in HCI and intelligent user

interfaces be used to facilitate the process of Learning Design? How can

interaction analysis be used to improve Learning Design?

• Human factor drivers for personalising the Learning Design experience:

Personalisation, re-use, sharing designs from theory to practice to

community. What are the human factors that influence the process of

Learning Design? What community concepts can be exploited to enable

creative Learning Design? What can AI do to capture and represent human

factor considerations, patterns of behaviour and community knowledge for

Learning Design? What AI-based knowledge representation and inference

mechanisms are needed in personalised Learning Design tools? Can these

AI-based mechanisms help to overcome the cognitive demands when using

these tools?

Workshop Topics

Full and short papers that address one or more of the following topics

are welcome

• User experiences when designing a course using existing tools and

identification of their limitations;

• Context-aware design to support Learning Design;

• Context-awareness as a design approach to aid building e-learning

design tools; Can next generation AI reduce cognitive overload to

enhance the usability?

• User-centred design models for Learning Designs (user models,

preferences, usage models, personalisation);

• Human factors experience from the ¡°Learner Designer perspective¡±, e.g.

users approach to design, users tool preferences, priorities, re-use of

designs;

• HCI design to overcome barriers of use;

• Recommendation systems and personalisation for Learning Design:

designing rule of thumb or heuristics, inference on ontological models,

inference theory and architecture, nearest neighbour for ¡°concept¡±

recommendation; Can they help with tool usage? How can pedagogical

approaches be used in Learning Design to personalise the learning

experience?

• Drawing from research and experience from other applications to see

how Education tools might benefit from AI.

• Community-based and collaborative approaches. Does a community or

collaborative approach ease the learning design task?

• Intelligent interfaces to aid the creative process of Learning Design;

• User modelling to assist Learning Design tools to enhance

personalisation features.

Submission Format and Procedure

Full papers should not exceed 10 pages and short papers should be up to

5 pages. Authors should follow the same template that is used for the

main conference. All papers should be formatted according to IOS Press

guidelines (formatting instructions are available on the IOS Press

Authors Corner webpages at: www.iospress.nl/). Workshop papers will be

published in full length in the workshop proceedings and presented

orally at the Workshop. The papers will be printed locally for

dissemination at the AIED Workshops and kept as a PDF file resource on

the website. Please, submit your paper by e-mail to both Patricia

Charlton (patriciadcs.bbk.ac.uk) and Kyparisia Papanikolaou

(spapdi.uoa.gr) by April 16, 2009. Portable Document Format (*.pdf) is

preferred.

Important Dates

April 16, 2009: submission of papers

May 20, 2009: notification of results

End of May 2009: delivery of camera-ready paper

Workshop Programme Committee

Liliana Ardissono, University of Torino, Italy

Stefano Cerri, University of Montpellier II, France

Patricia Charlton, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK

Brock Craft, Institute of Education, UK

Ines Di Loreto, Dept of Informatics and Communication, University of

Milan, Italy

Maria Grigoriadou, University of Athens, Greece

Jelena Jovanovic, University of Belgrade, Serbia

Diana Laurillard, Institute of Education, UK

George Magoulas, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK

Alvaro Ortigosa, Universidad Aut¨®nonoma de Madrid. Spain

Kyparisia Papanikolaou, School of Pedagogical and Technological

Education, Athens, Greece

Barbara Schmidt-Belz, Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information

Technology, Germany

Martin Wolpers, Fraunhofer-Institut f¨?r Angewandte Informationstechnik

FIT,Germany

Workshop Organisation

Patricia Charlton, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK

Maria Grigoriadou, University of Athens, Greece

Diana Laurillard, Institute of Education, UK

George Magoulas, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK

Kyparisia Papanikolaou, School of Pedagogical and Technological

Education, Athens, Greece

Contact Person

For any questions regarding the Workshop, please email George Magoulas

(gmagoulasdcs.bbk.ac.uk)