Evolution of Teaching and Learning Paradigms in Intelligent Environment

309 Pages·2007·7.924 MB·English

by  Raymond A. Tedman, Debra K. Tedman (auth.), Lakhmi C. Jain, Raymond A. Tedman, Debra K. Tedman (eds.)

LakhmiC.Jain,RaymondA.TedmanandDebraK.Tedman(Eds.)
EvolutionofTeachingandLearningParadigmsinIntelligentEnvironment
StudiesinComputationalIntelligence,Volume62
Editor-in-chief
Prof.JanuszKacprzyk
SystemsResearchInstitute
PolishAcademyofSciences
ul.Newelska6
01-447Warsaw
Poland
E-mail:[email protected]
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Lakhmi C. Jain
Raymond A. Tedman
Debra K. Tedman
(Eds.)
Evolution of Teaching
and Learning Paradigms
in Intelligent Environment
With 57 Figures and 24 Tables
123
LakhmiC.Jain RaymondA.Tedman
FoundationDirectoroftheKESCentre SchoolofMedicine
SchoolofElectricalandInformation GriffithUniversity
Engineering Medicine andOralHealthCentre
UniversityofSouthAustralia PMB50,GCMC,9726,Queensland
Adelaide Australia
MawsonLakesCampus E-mail:r.tedman@griffith.edu.au
SouthAustraliaSA5095
Australia
E-mail:[email protected]
DebraK.Tedman
KingsChristianCollege
68GemvaleRoadReedyCreek
Queensland4227
Australia
E-mail:[email protected]
LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2007925678
ISSNprintedition:1860-949X
ISSNelectronicedition:1860-9503
ISBN978-3-540-71973-1SpringerBerlinHeidelbergNewYork
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Preface

Teaching and learning paradigms have attracted increased attention in
the last few years. Improved access to high speed Internet services and the
massive increase in popularity of the Internet have paved the way for
alternative but effective approaches in teaching and learning.
This book on the evolution of teaching and learning paradigms in
intelligent environment presents the latest ideas pertaining to educational
pedagogy. The authors have recognised the role of constructivist thinking
in teaching and learning plus the importance of providing a wide range of
mental resources to encourage cognitive growth in students.
Electronic learning or e-learning is rapidly transforming the teaching
and learning environments of tertiary education facilities, further moulding
the educational pedagogy to match the virtual digital modes of communi-
cation favoured by teenagers during their secondary education. Teachers
need to recognise that while technology should empower the learning
process it is important not to neglect educational issues during the
systematic analysis and design of the technologies for specific learning
purposes. Recent advances in e-learning have emphasised the importance
of personalised learning ontology or customising of learning material and
activities to provide a personal environment for each learning activity. This
means adapting the learning content, its sequencing and maybe some
aspects of the learning process so that it can be adapted to different users
with different capabilities. This push for personalised learning has also
focused upon the need for refining data mining methods to classify
e-learning problems e.g. to detect irregular learning behaviours, to study
learning system navigation and optimisation, to investigate clustering
according to e-learning system usage and to improve systems’ adaptability
to students’ requirements and capacities.
Thus, this book presents an exciting collation of the latest developments
in e-learning through case studies, reviews and discussions of soft ware
development internationally.

L. C. Jain
R. A. Tedman
D. K. Tedman

Editors
Contents

1. Introduction to the Evolution of Teaching and Learning
Paradigms …………......................................................................1
Raymond A. Tedman and Debra K. Tedman

2. Why Designers cannot be Agnostic about Pedagogy:
The Influence of Constructivist Thinking in Design
of e-Learning for HE ..…………………………………………..7
Miguel Baptista Nunes and Maggie McPherson

3. Problem-Based Learning in an e-Learning Environment:
A Case Study at Griffith University School of Medicine ……31
Raymond A. Tedman, Heather Alexander, and Robert Loudon

4. Educational Ontologies Construction for Personalized
Learning on the Web …………………………………………..47
Apple Wai Ping Fok and Horace Ho Shing Ip

5. Sequencing in Web-Based Education: Approaches,
Standards and Future Trends …………………………….......83
Sergio Gutiérrez and Belardo Pardo

6. From Dungeons to Classrooms: The Evolution
of MUDs as Learning Environments ………………………..119
Brian M. Slator, Otto Borchert, Lisa Brandt, Harold Chaput,
Kellie Erickson, Gabriel Groesbeck, Jacob Halvorson,
Justin Hawley, Guy Hokanson, Dan Reetz, and Brad Vender

7. The Development of an Approach to Learning
Within the Middle Schooling Paradigm ..…………………...161
Debra Tedman

8. Applying Data Mining Techniques to e-Learning
Problems ………………………………………........................183
Félix Castro, Alfredo Vellido, Àngela Nebot,
and Francisco Mugica
viii Contents
9. Data Mining of Virtual Campus Data…………………….....223
Alfredo Vellido, Félix Castro, Terence A. Etchells,
Àngela Nebot, and Francisco Mugica

10. Technology and Pedagogy – How to Learn Technique …….255
Riitta Penttinen and Sari Minkkinen

11. Authoring and Management Tools for Adaptive
Educational Hypermedia Systems: The AHA!
Case Study ………….................................................................285
Paul De Bra, Natalia Stash, David Smits, Cristóbal Romero,
and Sebastián Ventura
Introduction to the Evolution of Teaching
and Learning Paradigms
Raymond A. Tedman1, Debra K. Tedman2
1 School of Medicine, Griffith University, Medicine & Oral Health Centre,
PMB 50, GCMC, 9726, QLD, Australia
2 Kings Christian College, 68 Gemvale Road
Reedy Creek, Qld 4227
Australia
Summary. The increasing popularity of the move to e-learning or web-
based education throughout the world has not only accompanied advances
in information technology, but has brought about a recognition of the impor-
tance of the need for teachers to keep pace with changes in teaching and
learning in areas of organisation, curriculum, infrastructure and pedagogy.
Constructivism has been an underlying pedagogy that has influenced educa-
tion since the middle of the twentieth century and continues to form an impor-
tant foundation for e-learning. It continues to guide the move to help students
acquire the higher level cognitive abilities of comprehension, application,
analysis, evaluation and hypothesis creation. This chapter provides a brief
overview of the changes in teaching and learning including the latest ideas,
theories and technologies being applied in web-based education world-wide.
1 Introduction
Evolution and change in information technology and educational techno-
logies are important forces driving developments in education [1]. These
changes have significant impacts on educators and developers. Claus Pahl
illustrated the impact of change through emphasising the interrelationship of
organisation, curriculum, infrastructure and pedagogy in the construction of
the teaching and learning environment (TLE). Advances in cognitive sciences
and education usually precede the development of the conceptual frameworks
for learning support so staff involved in teaching and learning need to keep
pace with changes in all four areas of the TLE and be able to adapt to the
changes and to manage the changes.
R.A. Tedman and D.K. Tedman: Introduction to the Evolution of Teaching and Learning Paradigms,
Studies in Computational Intelligence (SCI) 62, 1–6 (2007)
www.springerlink.com © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007
2 Raymond A. Tedman and Debra K. Tedman
During the mid to late 1900s, Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues rec-
ognised that learning could be divided into three categories or domains
(Bloom’s taxonomy of learning behaviours); cognitive (knowledge), affec-
tive (attitude) and psychomotor (skills) [2–5]. For each of these domains
there exists a hierarchy of learning behaviours starting from the ability of
the student to acquire knowledge or recall information, ideas and princi-
ples, through to abilities to comprehend, apply, analyse, evaluate and finally
create new structures, hypotheses, programs etc. Educators in the secon-
dary (high school students) and tertiary (universities, colleges etc) sectors
have had varying successes in helping students reach the higher levels of
this hierarchy. There are still university courses where teaching and learn-
ing are largely teacher centred and reward knowledge acquisition and under-
standing with little opportunities for application and no opportunities for
students to reach the higher levels of the cognitive processes. However,
there has been an underlying pedagogy that has influenced education
throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and guided the move to
help students acquire these higher level cognitive abilities. This is constru-
ctivism.
Piaget recognised that education cannot succeed without recognising,
using and extending the “authentic activity” with which a child is “endowed”
[6]. He further acknowledged that schooling should be adapted to the child
and in doing so educators should consider the psychological development of
the child in the design of educational activities. Thus, Piaget was an early
advocate of the constructivist pedagogy. In the constructivist view of
learning, meaning that is constructed by an individual is dependent on the
situation itself and the individual’s purposes and active construction of
meaning [7]. Constructivism recognises that prior experience has an influ-
ence on the way phenomena are perceived and interpreted. These authors
recognised the importance of active construction of meaning on the part of
the learner.
Hendry and King [8] have approached constructivism with a view to
understanding the neurological processes that are occurring during learn-
ing. They view specific knowledge as specific spatio-temporal patterns of
impulses and completion of a pattern of impulses knows, that is perceiv-
ing, ideating or reasoning. Along with Iran-Nejad [9] they interpret con-
struction as the integration of patterns in a new form in the same region
through synaptic growth. Simultaneous construction in various modality
specific sensory areas was considered to be equivalent to Iran-Njad’s [9]
idea of dynamic self-regulation. Hence, to help young people construct
knowledge the teacher must ascertain children’s ideas evoked by various
contexts [8, 10].
Introduction to the Evolution of Teaching and Learning Paradigms 3
2 Chapters Included in this Book
This book on the evolution of teaching and learning paradigms in intelli-
gent environment presents the latest ideas pertaining to educational peda-
gogy. The authors have recognised the role of constructivist thinking in
teaching and learning plus the importance of providing a wide range of
mental resources to encourage cognitive growth in students as recognised
by Bereiter [11].
In their chapter on the influence of constructivist thinking in the design of
e-learning, Nunes and McPherson emphasise that only with a clear sense of
the theoretical foundations that underpin assumptions about learning and
cognition, can an efficient online learning environment be appropriately
designed. Technology should empower the learning process. It is important
not to neglect educational issues during the systematic analysis and design
of the technologies for specific learning purposes. Constructivism in online
learning is not intuitive to either learners or tutors. Constructivist e-learning
requires a set of information, communication and social skills that need to
be acquired prior to engaging with online learning activities. Additionally,
and during the delivery process, both tutors and learners need the support of
adequate learning resources, designed explicitly according to a constructiv-
ist approach.
The chapter by Raymond Tedman, Heather Alexander and Robert Loudon
illustrates this interaction between pedagogy and technology through a case
study into the development of a new medical curriculum using Problem-Based
Learning as an underpinning teaching/learning strategy. In this curriculum, the
latest developments in constructivist learning guided the design and imple-
mentation of an online delivery system that emphasised staff–student interac-
tion in teaching, learning, assessment and evaluation at a new medical
school in Griffith University on the Gold Coast, Australia.
Hendry and King [8] believe that we need to modify our commonsense
notion of communication as a transmission of knowledge to the relativity
of evocation of knowledge. Knowledge is evoked in others through speech
and writing and the meaning to words comes from the neural processes.
The theory implies that within a classroom, with universal stimulus situa-
tions and given that children can have different ideational and logico-
mathematical patterns, students might become interested or curious at
different times and in various parts of a situation and exhibit different per-
formance outcomes. This reinforces the importance of personalised learning
ontology. The chapter on educational ontologies for personalised learning
by Fok and IP addresses the issues and methodologies in the design and
construction of education ontology and discusses the necessities and issues