Niiagata 2: ICALT 2007 notes

Day 3 of my trip = Day 1 of ICALT 2007, The IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, Niigata, Japan, 18th-20th July 2007 [conference website and programme]

About 300 attendees showed up, 90% of expectations (10% cancelled their trips due to either transport disruptions or anxieties caused by the nearby earthquake the other day). What follows is my retrospective account of the first conference day. There are several hundred papers being presented, typically in 7 parallel sessions all day long for three days, so I’m only giving a one-line ‘gestalt summary’ of my selective list. I encourage you to visit the conference website for pointers to the authors and links to their papers.

After the formal conference opening and some welcoming remarks from Prof. Toshio Okamoto, the opening keynote address, ‘New educational technology models for social a personal computing’, was presented in a nice double-act by Eileen Scanlon and Tim O’Shea. Eileen set the background and surveyed the landscape, overviewing the framework she and Tim have been developing over the years (they assesses some 15 key dimensions of elearning environments, including contibutions to simulation, motivation, discovery, and serendipity. Tim then talked about the phenomenal range of activities underway at the University of Edinburgh, where he is Principal (Vice-Chancellor) – his challenge has been to balance the relationship between Tradition (a 400-year-old University, consistently one of the world’s highest-rated) and Innovation (particularly in IT and Medicine, where staff and students love to do their own thing). This balance is precisely what they have achieved, and Tim gave numerous examples of the hundreds of programmes now underway in Virtual University of Edinburgh, including virtual farms for observing and monitoring (real) livestock in real time (click thumbnail at right to enlarge), award-winning simulation environments from the School of Medicine, and an amazing array of Second Life activities [linked here], some of which I have blogged previously courtesy links from Austin Tate.. Tim felt that, having lived through waves of optimism and pessimism in his 37 years in the area, he was now in a highly-optimistic phase, as current Web2.0 zeitgeist was a harbinger of great things to come. This is indeed the optimistic portion of what I’ll be expressing in my own keynote on Friday, though I’m going to be much grumpier about the state of elearning today – I think that some of Tim’s infectious optimism rubbed off on me when we were office-mates some 33 years ago, but my grouchy pessimism is probably home-grown!!]

Below are random snippets of other talks I attended – bear in mind that these are already pre-selected by me from among the hundreds of presentations, based on perusal of the one-foot-thick proceedings.

“An Experimental CALL Systems Enhanced with Wiki” (Masahiro Mochizuki). Students use a Computer Assisted Language Learning System to watch language-instruction videos, then pause the video to comment in a Wiki, and the sytem provides a tight coupling between the classroom-centric CALL environment and the personal laptop-centric commenting environment.

“NATA: Not Afraid To Ask” (Ko-Kang Chu et al). NATA is (essentially) a back-channel-chat question-editing-and-queuing system with a built in reward system to encourage shy or timid students to pre-formulate and ask questions in a face-to-face classroom system. Empirical studies, although very culturally-specific, show very strong results in getting students to ‘come out of the closet’ and ask pertinent questions.

“Is Less Actually More? The Usefulness of Educational Mini-games” (Alex Frazer et al). A study of 30 BBC-produced short edutainment titles looks at the good and bad attributes of these educational games, finding that (sadly) most of them are alarmingly shallow and short on follow-through and deep cognitive modeling of any kind – and recommends a few dimensions along which these (and future) games could be dramatically improved.

[Lunch was then served! Very nice buffet – in a room eerily reminiscent of Second Life, because the room was full of tables with no chairs: the tables turned out to be very effective ‘social magnets’… you took your buffet plate, when full, over to a random table to intermingle… I was surprised at how well it worked… the tables were too low to be of any use during a stand-up lunch, but worked more effectively than empty space. The Second Life comparison arises because everyone just appeared to be randomly hovering with their food, in well-formed social circles… just what you see in many Second Life environments – random collections of groups schmoozing.]

“Activity Plan Structure and Processing in Virtual Environments for Training Supported by Intelligent Tutoring Systems” (Letica Sanchez et al.). A transition-network plan parser, reminiscent of what I remember of the classic planning work of Tate and others, provides an over-arching structure for predicting and analyzing optimal study and training sequences.

“A Lightweight Open Space for the Classroom – Collaborative Learning with Whiteboards and Pen-Tablets” (Henning Breuer et al). A powerful pattern-matching environment allows Breuer to specify context, problem, and activity sequences in order to create a generic set of ‘overlays’ that can be instantiated in specific learning situations to be deployed on a wide range of delivery architectures, from tablets, to whiteboards, to PDAs.

[Heh… at this point, jet lag and/or PowerPoint Overload forced me to retreat to my hotel room for a 1-hour power nap – did the trick beautifully! The sun had come out finally, and the accompanying photo (click to enlarge) shows the view from my room on the 26th floor, looking westward towards the Sea of Japan]

“A Collaborative Support Tool for Creativity Learning: Idea Storming Cube” (Chun-Chieh Huang et al.) These guys take the impossible challenge of teaching creativity, and make a promising go of it: they incorporate ideas about creativity ranging from de Bono to Czikzentmihalyi, and incorporate the best ideas in a brainstorming tool that encourage users to sketch ideas on a ‘Rubik’s Cube’ interface where they can then rotate the surfaces to be exposed to ideas from their peers; they use a closed-world domain so they can score student suggestions and give them constructive feedback.

“An Interaction Study of Learning with Handhelds and Large Shared-Displays in Technology-Enriched Collaborative Classrooms” (Chen-Chung Liu et al). These guys have attempted to foster better peer interactions in a conventional classroom by giving small groups (3 or 4 students, each with a laptop) a large local shared display, augmented by a giant front-of-classroom display for all groups to share. Liu et al undertook a very detailed empirical study in which they studied video records of all the interactions and scored every comment and gesture, scored by a pair of trained judges (who obtained high inter-judge reliability), using content analysis and sociolinquistic dialogue-scoring techniques (very relevant for KMi’s FlashMeeting studies now underway).

“From Knowledge Publishing to Peer Review” (Akihiro Kashihara dn Yasuhiro Kamoshita). This project, also described at http://wlgate.ice.uec.ac.jp, was the star of the day for me: the clearest and best-presented paper I’ve seen in a long time – great graphics, great content. Kashihara described the sensemaking activities of a modern student, expressed in terms of the students navigating, reorganizing, re-presenting (in a linear fashion) some prepared hypertext material, and then undertaking peer-review of their fellow students’ outputs. Navigation involves traversing hyperlinks in the normal manner, but with the added twist that every navigation episode is annotated by the students themselves using one of six pre-defined labels (e.g. support, elaborate, compare, rethink, apply). This annotation is a kind of cognitive articulation exercise that helps foster understanding. The resulting annotated structure is output in a linearized form which is effectively a structured table of contents that can then be compared by fellow students in a manner that (according to Kashihara when I asked him during question time) is much more manageable than just turning them loose on arbitrary linked hypertext structures. This looks like a natural companion approach to what Simon Buckingham Shum is doing in KMi with Compendium and Open Sensemaking Communities.

[Night-time: a group of UK-ers, including the Japanese-speaking ex-Romanian Dr. Alexandra Cristea, who is now head of the Intelligent and Adaptive Systems Group at the University of Warwick, went into central Niigata for a roam-around, and stumbled into a random-but-pretty-decent restaurant, where we had, essentially, “one of everything”. I have no idea what we had, because Alexandra and the waitress resolved it all in Japanese. But it was excellent… especially the (nearly) raw beef. Given the nearby nuclear spillage the other day, we tried to insist on food that was neither moving nor glowing, but somehow I think our concerns were not conveyed upwards. The meal was excellent. The photo (click on thumbnail to enlarge) shows a random street scene in Niigata as we were on our way to the restaurant.]

Glad to see Dave Millard from Southampton, who was in our restaurant crowd last night, is blogging this event too…

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