Computers in Education:
Advances in Software Technology
J.UCS Special Issue
J. Ángel Velázquez-Iturbide
(Depto. Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos I
Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain
angel.velazquez@urjc.es)
Francisco José García-Peñalvo
(Depto. Informática y Automática
Universidad de Salamanca, Spain
fgarcia@usal.es)
We live in the information society. Consequently, computers are
nowadays ubiquitous in every aspect of our lives. Computer
applications are used in many central sectors of our society: health,
bank, security, etc. Of course, education is not an exception, and it
introduces unique technical, managerial and most importantly
pedagogical issues. These unique features make computers and education
a field of study on its own.
This special issue features nine extended papers selected from the
Proceedings of the X Symposium on Computers in Education (SIIE 2008)
[Velázquez-Iturbide, 08]. SIIE already exhibits a long tradition and
acknowledged prestige in Latin America. It also has a tradition of
publishing selected papers [Bravo, 05; Fernández-Manjón, 07;
Llamas-Nistal, 03; Mendes, 08; Ortega, 01]. In the last edition, 69
papers were accepted, resulting in an acceptance rate of 42%.
The variety of educational software is very rich, as illustrated in
this special issue. The nine articles included can be classified into
three groups, namely e-learning and web-based educational software,
user-centered educational software, and visualization tools.
A first group of articles deal with e-learning and web-based
educational software. e-Learning and its different blended-learning
variants are nowadays ubiquitous, at least at the university
level. These articles illustrate some of the most relevant issues in
e-Learning.
The first article, "Innovation and Quality in
e-Learning: a European Perspective", is authored by Dondi and
is a general, comprehensive discussion on quality in e-learning. It is
a common trend to think of e-learning as a monolithic technological
and social model of learning. The author calls the attention to the
diversity of sectors, roles and visions where e-learning takes
place. Each of these dimensions has unique characteristics and values
that influence expectations and ultimately quality criteria. The
article elaborates this framework and gives recommendations to
organizations involved in e-learning.
The article by Díaz et al. is titled "A Meta-Modeling based Approach
for the Multidisciplinary Design of Web-based Educational
Systems". The article addresses the multidisciplinary nature
of web educational systems. Experts in different disciplines have
different perspectives and therefore use different specification
languages and tools. The authors propose an approach based on allowing
each expert to use the tools she is proficient in and then integrate
the different designs by using meta-modeling techniques. They
exemplify their approach by combining two modeling issues: educational
design and web design. The meta-model uses model-driven development
(MDD) techniques and applies model transformations, and validation and
verification rules. As a consequence, completeness, consistency and
integrity are guaranteed.
The second group of articles is concerned with user issues. There are
many different issues in and forms of user-centered educational
software. The articles here included are good representatives of them:
user motivation, automatic assessment and correctors, interactive
tutors, accessibility, and support to learning styles.
The first article in this group is "Application Scenarios
for the Learning Objects Pool", by Dinis and Rodrigues da
Silva. The authors are concerned with motivating users to produce and
rank high-quality learning objects. The Learning Objects Pool is a
system designed to increase user motivation. It is based on the
"stock exchange" metaphor, which poses a healthy competition
by assigning credits to users and setting a value cost for each
learning object. Details of the credit-based system are given, in
particular the configuration mechanism. Finally, three different
scenarios are elaborated of different contexts of use.
The article titled "Learning to Program with COALA,
a Distributed Computer Assisted Environment" is authored by
Jurado et al. Learning to program is a challenging activity and many
efforts are devoted to improve it. COALA is an effort that intends to
give to students and instructors distributed support for programming
assignments. The main features of COALA follow. First, it is an
extension of a professional tool, the Eclipse IDE. Second, it supports
delivery, reception, testing, assessment, notification and annotation
of programming assignments. Third, it assesses correctness (by means
of test cases) and code style (by means of software metrics
represented as fuzzy sets). Finally, it provides an annotation tool to
the instructor for free handwriting of comments on the student’s
code.
The article by Mikic-Fonte, Burguillo-Rial and Llamas-Nistal is
titled "TQ-Bot: An AIML-based
Tutor and Evaluator Bot". The authors introduce TQ-Bot, a
tutoring system that is at the cross of e-learning platforms,
intelligent tutoring systems, and conversational robots (also called
bots). TQ-Bot orients students in e-learning courses, through
conversations in natural language, to the right contents. Students can
ask general and course-specific questions, and the bot gives her
advice and guides her through the learning path. Students can also use
the bot for self-assessment. TQ-Bot provides the instructors with
several facilities aimed at developing course-specific contents. In
addition, the system delivers different statistics about the students’
opinion and about students’ performance.
The article "Eduquito: Virtual
Environment for Digital Inclusion of People with Special Educational
Needs" is authored by Santarosa and Basso. It addresses
access of people with disabilities to educational software. Being
accessibility an important issue of human-computer interaction, it
neither can be forgiven to assure digital inclusion into
education. The article describes the challenges of digital inclusion
and the solutions given in a web-based educational system, called
Eduquito. In particular, the central element of the system is
individual and collaborative work by means of projects.
Silva and Andrade present the article "Development of a Web
Application for Management of Learning Styles". Learning
styles are often used in pedagogy and in adaptive hypermedia. The
authors here present a web system called Management of Learning
Styles, intended to gather and process data about individuals from
learning styles questionnaires. The main design decisions and design
steps of the application are described. The main contribution of the
article is the evaluation of the application with respect to usability
and user acceptance (both teachers and students). The article clearly
describes the procedure and results of this evaluation. In particular,
the results were positive, which encourages the authors to spread the
application for more extensive use.
The third group of articles also focuses on a particular class of
software technology, namely visualization. The aim of visualization
can be stated as making visible what is hidden, by using graphical
representations. The two articles here featured represent two kinds of
visualization, namely information visualization and software
visualization. Although the latter can be considered a particular case
of the former, their research interests and communities are currently
different.
The article "Semantic Spiral
Timelines used as Support for e-Learning" is authored by
Gómez-Aguilar, Therón-Sánchez and
García-Peñalvo. They introduce a visualization tool for
e-learning activity called Semantic Spiral Timelines (SST), which
integrated into Moodle. The particular use of information
visualization sought here is visual analytics, where the user can see
at a glance visual relations and patterns of student activity. The
article describes the user interface of SST, the format and semantics
of the graphical elements, and its interaction functions. All of them
were tuned to provide elaborated, meaningful views from the huge
amount of raw data of opportunity to edit this special issue.
The last article, by Almeida-Martínez, Urquiza-Fuentes and
Velázquez-Iturbide, is titled "Visualization of Syntax Trees for
Language Processing Courses". Language processors are complex
systems that can benefit from visualization techniques to better
understand their internal workings. VAST is a system aimed at
visualizing and animating syntax trees. A unique feature of VAST is
that it was designed to provide independence between the parser
generator and the tree visualizer. The authors describe the
specification of tree generation and manipulation in a parser
generator, and the visualization and animation of syntax trees
(currently, for bottom-up parsers). They also describe
visualization features to cope with large syntax trees, and to show
the relation of the visualization to the input stream. Finally,
they report on the procedure and results of a pedagogical
evaluation and two usability evaluations.
The editors wish to thank Professor Hermann Maurer (Managing
Editor) and Ms. Dana Kaiser (Assistant Editor) of the Journal of
Universal Computer Science for giving us the opportunity to edit this
special issue.
We also want to thank the effort of the additional reviewers of
this special issue: Mordechai "Moti" Ben-Ari (Weizmann
Institute of Science, Israel), Karsten Henke (Ilmenau University of
Technology, Germany), Robert Lewis (University of Lancaster, Great
Britain), Ralf Klamma (RWTH Aachen, Germany), Lauri Malmi (Helsinki
University of Technology, Finland), Maximiliano Paredes-Velasco
(Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain), Guido Roessling (Darmstadt
University of Technology, Germany), and Marc Spaniol (RWTH Aachen,
Germany). This work was partially supported by projects
TIN2008-02670-E/TSI and TIN2008-04103/TSI of the Spanish Ministry of
Science and Innovation.
References
[Bravo, 05] Bravo, J., Fernández-Manjón, B.,
Sánchez-Pérez, J.M. (eds.): Computers and Education: Research
and Experiences in eLearning Technology, Journal of Universal Computer
Science, 11(9), 2005.
[Fernández-Manjón, 07]
Fernández-Manjón, B., Llamas-Nistal, M.,
Fernández, R.Á. (eds.): Computers in Education: New
Developments in e-Learning Technology, Journal of Universal Computer
Science, 13(7), 2007.
[Llamas-Nistal, 03] Llamas-Nistal, M., Fernández-Iglesias,
M.J., Anido-Rifón, L.E. (eds.): Computers and Education: Toward
a Lifelong Learning Society, Kluwer Academic, 2003.
[Mendes, 08] Mendes, A., Pereira, I., Costa, R. (eds.): Computers
and Education: Towards Educational Change and Innovation, Springer,
2008.
[Ortega, 01] Ortega, M., Bravo, J. (eds.): Computers and Education:
Towards an Interconnected Society, Kluwer Academic, 2001.
[Velázquez-Iturbide, 08] Velázquez-Iturbide, J.Á.,
García-Peñalvo, F.J., Gil-González, A.B. (eds.):
X Internacional Symposium on Computers in Education, Ediciones
Universidad de Salamanca, 2008.
J. Ángel Velázquez-Iturbide
Francisco José García-Peñalvo
Madrid and Salamanca, Spain, March 2009
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