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Full-Text Articles in Education
Scrutinizing The Cybersell: Teen-Targeted Web Sites As Texts, Darren Crovitz
Scrutinizing The Cybersell: Teen-Targeted Web Sites As Texts, Darren Crovitz
Faculty and Research Publications
Darren Crovitz explains that the explosive growth of Web-based content and communication in recent years compels us to teach students how to examine the “rhetorical nature and ethical dimensions of the online world.” He demonstrates successful approaches to accomplish this goal through his analysis of the selling techniques of two Web sites targeted to a teen audience and his description of a project in which team members devise ways to teach students to consider the language and design elements of a selected site.
Assessing Online Discussion Forum Participation, Matthew Shaul
Assessing Online Discussion Forum Participation, Matthew Shaul
Faculty and Research Publications
As a socially constructive learning tool, discussion forums remain central to online education. They have continued to evolve in functionality, acquiring ever-increasing usability features. However, development has lagged in providing instructors the means to assess student work in forums. The author submits an overview of his software program that provides instructors with the means to evaluate forum work quickly, easily, and repeatedly. The software accomplishes this by accessing the forums' underlying database, searching for manifest and latent data, and calculating data associated with an array of metrics. This is a Web-based tool built on Open Source and standards-based languages, providing …
Pedagogical Agents As Learning Companions: The Impact Of Agent Emotion And Gender, Yanghee Kim, A. L. Baylor, E. Shen
Pedagogical Agents As Learning Companions: The Impact Of Agent Emotion And Gender, Yanghee Kim, A. L. Baylor, E. Shen
Yanghee Kim
The potential of emotional interaction between human and computer has recently interested researchers in human–computer interaction. The instructional impact of this interaction in learning environments has not been established, however. This study examined the impact of emotion and gender of a pedagogical agent as a learning companion (PAL) on social judgements, interest, self-efficacy, and learning. Two experiments investigated separately the effects of a PAL's emotional expression and empathetic response. Experiment 1 focused on emotional expression (positive vs. negative vs. neutral) and gender (male vs. female) with a sample of 142 male and female college students in a computer literacy course. …
Desirable Characteristics Of Learning Companions, Yanghee Kim
Desirable Characteristics Of Learning Companions, Yanghee Kim
Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications
This study investigated the desirable characteristics of anthropomorphized learning-companion agents for college students. First, interviews with six undergraduates explored their concepts of desirable learning companions. The interviews yielded agent competency, agent personality, and interaction control. Next, a controlled experiment examined whether learner competency (strong vs. weak) would relate directly to agent competency (high vs. low) and to interaction control (agent-control vs. learner-control). The dependent measures included learners' perceptions of agent functionality, their self-efficacy beliefs in the task, and their learning. The results indicated that academically strong students perceived the high-competent agent higher than the lowcompetent agent and showed higher self-efficacy …