High Tech High CEO Larry Rosenstock describes a vision for education that embraces learning that flows from personal interests, passion for discovery, and a celebration of art, technology, and craftsmanship.
IEEE CIG Special Session: Emotion in Games - Sensing and inducing player experience and affe [...]
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The IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing is a new journal intended to be a cross disciplinary and international archive journal aimed at disseminating results of research on the design of systems that can recognize, interpret, and simulate human emotions and related affective phenomena.
Link to the journal
A few months ago we acquired a new headset with a brain-computer interface called EPOC; a product developed by Emotiv Systems.
The headset allows the gathering of data in three categories of inputs: conscious thoughts, emotions and facial expressions. There is a lot to say about the capabilities of EPOC to measure emotion-related data and about executing specific actions based on previously trained thoughts, but we have been dedicating some effort to test the effectivity in the identification of facial expressions and the results are pretty interesting.
EPOC picks up signals of the facial muscles through EEG sensors. It is in this way that expressions like smiling, laughing or jaw or teeth clenching are detected by the system once it has been trained by a particular person. Detections are generally very fast (10 ms) and the degree of accuracy is quite good.
The possibilities of EPOC for the educational and gaming industry are huge. Further news in our research will be announced in this blog.
For more information visit Emotiv.
Social learning in Facebook: an experience at UOC was presented in the 6th Chair of UNESCO in e-learning
The experience aimed to test an open learning model, understood as a virtual learning environment open to the Internet community, based on the use of open resources and on a methodology focused on the participation and collaboration of users in the construction of knowledge.
The subject of the course ‘Journeys 2.0′ lasted 5 weeks, was launched through Facebook and used a specifically designed open methodology. This methodology of the course is based on the creation of a learning community able to self-manage their learning process. For that a facilitator was needed and also a central activity was established for people to participate and contribute in the community.
The main hypothesis was that students join the course because of personal motivation, interests and desire to learn in a collaborative experience with others. From the point of view of engagement, one of the keywords of the course, results will be presented soon.
One of the simplest and most commonly-used tools for measuring the affective dimension of user experience is the verbal self-response survey. Unfortunately, these tools aren’t always effective because users sometimes unintentionally repress or don’t recognize their own emotions. By contrast, non-verbal tools use the concept of “affect-tagging” to capture a more intuitive, instinctive emotional response from the user about their immediate emotional state. By presenting users with animated, multimedia emotional characters instead of words, affect-tagging has proven to be better at detecting low intensity emotions, particularly those most common in an HCI context.
To assess the validity of affect-tagging as a new method for measuring user experience, Mary Frances Jones from the Georgia Tech University and the Affective Technology Research Group conducted a survey to compare verbal self-response surveys vs. non-verbal self-response surveys. Based on a review of the literature, the hypothesis was that affect-tagging could capture more clear and meaningful data, and ultimately richer insights into the user’s overall experience with an interface.
At the time of this report, some participants are still completing the survey. However, early analysis of the data suggests that, compared with traditional verbal surveys, affect-tagging shows promise for detecting the presence of negative, low intensity emotions which users are notoriously less likely to self-report in verbal surveys. This could be promising as a means of measuring user emotion with more reliability, especially when combined with other non-verbal, physiological measurement techniques such as eye tracking, facial scanning and galvanic skin sensing.
The E-Learn–World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, & Higher Education is an international conference organized by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE) and co-sponsored by the International Journal on E-Learning.
The last edition was organized in Vancouver (Canada) and brought experts in these fields from around the world. The use of web 2.0 tools in learning scenarios, open resources and evaluation were among the main themes of the sessions.
Our team presented a paper where we showed the first steps that the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya is following in its effort to introduce the affective dimension in the core of the e-learning design process. We believe that our first stages could be useful for other institutions interested to include the affective dimension within the design of their online environment. We have concluded that three steps should be the starting point: a specific methodology to gather affective information, a set of general affective principles to guide designers’ tasks and “testing & playing” with new tools and methodologies already available in the market.
Please find the paper by clicking here
The Joy of Learning team has been developing a project aimed to evaluate the overall satisfaction and the affective responses of our students when performing tasks in a virtual learning environment.
We have triangulated three complementary affect assessment methods: facial expression interpretations, pupil scanning and students as self-evaluators (participant self-assessment).
At the moment we can offer some results and conclusions that may be useful for other institutions in their attempts to assess learning tools from an affective point of view.
The HCI in Emotion workshop will take place on the 1st of September in Cambridge, United Kingdom.
This year’s workshop is focusing on the development of affective technologies for real-world applications and the issues that this orientation brings to our research.
The workshop is adressed for individuals working in the different fields affected by emotion, giving them a podium to raise their questions and work with like-minded people of various disciplines on common subjects.
The Joy of Learning team will present a paper called ‘Case study on the integration of the affective dimension in the design of virtual learning environments: evaluating emotions, supporting design and experimenting new methodologies‘.
This paper presents a proposal for fully online or blended learning universities to introduce the affective dimension in online learning design.
The proposal is supported on three bases: a system for affective assessment (based on the combination of FACS, pupilometry and self-assessment), a set of principles to integrate affective elements within course design and some further steps for innovation and experimentation with new technologies and methodologies.
The Sloan-C International Symposium on Emerging Technology Applications for Online Learning took place on 17, 18 and 19 June in San Francisco, California. It is one of the leading events in the USA bringing together professionals to exchange innovative e-learning practices and knowledge.
This year’s Symposium was a great success in terms of the number of people taking part, breaking new records. Many of the lectures and workshops focused on the use that a great number of educational institutions, and higher education institutions in particular, are making of the most successful social tools, and reflected on the ways to apply them to learning. Other aspects, such as increasing ubiquity, greater possibilities for collaboration using the new tools, open content and the Web 3.0 as the next big thing, also played an important part in many of the presentations.
The Office of Learning Technologies’ Joy of Learning team attended so as to be able to present a poster on the Enjoy Guidelines, which were shared and discussed with different innovation and research groups from universities from around the world. Thanks to all of you for your interesting contributions to our work!
The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) continuously gains international recognition. This Saturday, the UOC was awarded for its leadership in technology education with the “Center of Excellence” award by the New Media Consortium (NMC), an international consortium of universities, and museums dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and technology. It is the first time a European institution recieves a Center of Excellence Award.
Both, Llorenç Valverde, Vice Rector for Technology and Eva de Lera, an Educational Technology researcher from the Office of Leraning Technologies, collected the award at a ceremony held at the NMC Summer Conference in Monterey (United States). During the ceremony, the Rector of the UOC, Imma Tubella, also conveyed his gratitude to the NMC through the following video:
This award is considered an important recognition to the latest accomplishments of the university in creating innovative technologies. An example of it, is the project MyUOC, the new virtual campus of the university, which allows both teachers and students to build a virtual environment according to their needs. MyUOC also offers the possibility to customize the learning experience through the homepage of the virtual campus. In addition, ts open source nature allows to integrate modules from other learning platforms, providing flexibility and interoperability.
With this award, the NMC also valued the UOC leadership to promote collective collaboration for the development of open source and innovative educational technology. A sample of it was the Open EdTech 2008 meeting held in Barcelona last November, hosted and organised by UOC, whwre over thirty international experts in education and educational technology were gathered to discuss the challenges of education in the XXI century.
UOC’s new learning environment was presented at MIT on March 9th, 2009 (view MyUOC ppt).
