Tutorial - How to Apply Software Architecture and Patterns to Tutoring System Development?

Patterns can be applied in - code, design, architecture, project management, testings

design patterns - pattern for object creation, object structure, object behavior

singleton pattern - assure only one instance of a class and the access to it.

I presented poster title - "Pundit - Intelligent recommender of courses" in a poster session today. People gave same really good feedback and some showed great interest about the system and ask a lot of interesting questions. Overall it was a good experience and it was nice to see people commenting on our work and appreciating it.

KEYNOTE TALK: OSMAR ZAIANE
Title: Social Network Analysis for the Assessment of Learning

Paper -"Mining Bodily Patterns of Affective Experience during Learning"

why monitor body movement?
- emotions drive actions, bodies act.
- not susceptible to social editing like facial features

- body pressure measurement system (BPMS)
- posture can be quite diagnostic of affect

Three papers that will be presented in this session are nominees for best paper.

The first one is -
"Effort-based Tutoring: An Empirical Approach to Intelligent Tutoring"

Making wayang math tutor better -

student model - mistakes, hints, time

example, if less mistakes, less hints, less time => mastery without effort, decision => increase problem difficulty

what is problem difficulty?
correctness effort factor = (mistakes made by student)/ (maximum mistakes students made)

tests to determine problem difficulty -

how accurate problem difficulties are?
axiom - pairs fo similar problems should have similar difficulty level

different from rest?
different from each other?
similar to itself?

parameters to switch topics or knowledge units -
knowledge units are chunks of problems that use similar skills

Key note talk from
Cristina Conati is going on.

Topic - "Data-based Student Modeling in Exploratory Learning Environments"

Exploratory Learning Environments (ELE) - Designed to help users acquire knowledge by freely experiencing a target domain.

Afternoon session in EDM conference is going on.

Current presentation is focused on inquiry learning. To identify students needing inquiry support, they implemented a system. Here is the link.

Here is the project description.

While going through Fast Company's list of "100 Most Creative People in Business 2010" that Hui Soo posted yesterday, I came across STACEY SIMMONS and a tool named Omnicademy that she created. Its still in testing stage but Its purpose is VERY similar to what we are trying to accomplish with Teaching and Learning Network. I like how Omnicademy successfully accomplishes in stacey's words - "taking the best part of the classroom and the best part of the Internet". I also like how they have limited functionality rather than going for everything. Because there can be many possibilities when you combine social networking with course delivery but not everything is going to work.

Here is a blog post analyzing the impact of Google Pac-Man on productivity.

Google wave is now available to everyone. No invites required. Here is the official blog post.

Here is the link. Important thing to note is integration of those videos with Facebook, one can create time coded(?) notes while watching the videos and share it with friends on Facebook and other people (though it does not seem to work). But I think all these things are accomplished better by Critter. Because I might not have all my classmates on Facebook and I might not necessarily want to add them. That's where the Teaching and Learning Network (TLN) comes into the picture. Because with the TLN, you will have all your classmates automatically added to the course you are taking. Hence, I think moving forward, integration of Critter with TLN will make it a very powerful tool for learning.