HCC class lecture 6 comments John Canny 2/7/05

Administrivia

Projects ! Start thinking about a project for this semester. Wednesday will be a brainstorming and critique session. Please bring a written description and/or a sketch of your project idea to class on Wednesday. Note: this doesn’t have to be your final project idea. We want to give early feedback.

Projects on Learning 1. PACT: An authoring scaffold for instructors. Problem: Most university instructors are unfamiliar with best- practices for technology-assisted teaching (scaffolds, inquiry learning), or with the principles they embody. Primarily, instructors want to reduce the time spent teaching, and are secondarily interested in improving pedagogy. Approach: Develop an easy-to-use course authoring tool that appears to be a labor-saving tool through structure and re-use of course content. Scaffold instructors in best practices through design patterns, progressively formalize through links to learning theory.

PACT envisionment

Projects on Learning 2. Guided tutoring Problem: The most effective instruction is learner-centered, and base on a learner’s current conceptual understanding. This understanding must be identified and diagnosed – i.e. new information must be reconciled with old concepts. Approach: Its hard to understand students thoughts from their writing, but often learners share similar misunderstandings. But mining a collection of student responses, an instructor can diagnose a few common problems and present them to the class. Use Information retrieval methods (clustering, relevance feedback, document-based retrieval).

Projects on Learning 3. Meta-review on learning approaches. Problem: There are many approaches that facilitate learning in the classroom, but it is often unclear which ones are most effective. Approach: Conduct a meta-review of quantitative classroom studies and “normalize” the outcomes. Come up with a short summary of which methods have been the most effective.

Projects on Language 4. Metaphors and social conventions. Problem: Metaphors are widely used in user interface design because they allow users to “transfer” understanding from a physical concept. But metaphors are usually cultural as well as physical (e.g. windows and trash cans are cultural artifacts). Approach: Consider some popular UI metaphors, and discuss the implications of their cultural element. Are their non- physical but cultural “metaphors”? Can they be used in design? UI design also emphasizes “conceptual models,” how do these relate to physical and cultural metaphors?

Projects on Language 5. Voice and genre analysis. Problem: Bakhtin and others emphasize “voices” and genres in understanding texts. Many voices interleave in a typical text, and understanding it requires knowledge of other texts that it might borrow from. Approach: Analyze a corpus of related documents with known authors to look for the author’s “signature”. Check co-authored documents for passages by particular authors. Try this also for a fictional work, looking for voices of characters.

Projects on Language 6. Implications of intertextuality. Problem: Texts that are created through a “regenerative” process have special statistical properties (a Zipf distribution), what real text corpora have. But this doesn’t explain explicitly texts “borrow” from other texts. Approach: Take a text corpora of texts that are likely to inter- relate (e.g. news stories or articles from one magazine). Look for passages of text that were excerpted from earlier docs.

Activity theory 7. Hand analysis of a human activity. Problem: Construct an “activity map” for a common activity that you know about. Approach: Consider the kinds of “participation” in the activity, i.e. the roles of the actors in the activity, and the genres of the tools or documents. See if you can follow the evolution of the activity over time: i.e. the way the “object” is transformed, or the way relationships change.

Social networks 8. Role analysis Problem: Analyze a dataset (e.g. the Enron dataset) to discover social roles etc. from users’ participation. Approach: Role analysis from the “recipe book” of social net algorithms, or something better.

Peripheral participation 9. Peripheral participation Problem: Discover the progression of a user from “peripheral” to “central” participation in a community. Approach: Use a public dataset like an open-source developers blog. Use social net algorithms like centrality. Look for the progression of individuals centrality over time. OR Do the same analysis by hand using cues in the messages themselves.

Actor-Network analysis 10. Understanding “references” to other texts. Problem: The meaning of texts depends on how they “borrow” from other texts. There are many forms of borrowing, some of which refute or oppose the earlier text. “Modalization” is a term to describe this process. Approach: Study the language used when referring to earlier texts in either (i) academic publications or (ii) .

Discussion questions Start discussing project ideas. If you have no idea yet, think about an educational project (that would use today’s reading).

Assignment for next time Write up an idea for your project, that you can discuss with a group next time. Be prepared to give a short (2 minute) oral description to the class at the end of lecture. (no reading for next time).