L'éducation est-elle un produit marchand ou, mieux, l'éducation est-elle un service marchand ? Cette question est analysée par Pierre Moeglin et Gaëtan Tremblay dans un article de la dernière livraison de Distance et savoir. La question est d'importance d'une part parce que le discours dominant tendrait à nous faire penser que la réponse est positive, d'autre part parce que les appels d'offre auxquels nous répondons semblent penser que la réponse est positive. En particulier, quiconque a été confronté aux évaluations par la commission européenne sait que la question économique est des plus sensibles...
read more...

The search for authenticity of learning situations is a concern for most designers of TEL environments. Most of them realise soon that this is a desperate project since any environment is a representation of some kind of a reference, often called "reality", which keeps staying at a distance. To be as close as possible to reality does not mean much, unless we can qualify or quantify the closeness. Indeed, this is a challenge and we are not be well equipped today to take it up. A solution might be to find a theoretical framework within which we can formulate the problem...
read more...

Moher's team, the inventor of embedded phenomena, has designed a new generation of learning space. A space which blows the boundaries of the screen, and even of the internet: Wallcology. The quality of the technological implementation and the precise reporting of the first case studies create the context to raise very interesting question about authenticity and the design of learning situations.
read more...

"Ambient learning" is one of the TeLearn.org keywords. This expression is not easy to translate in an other language than English, and eventually it is not easy to grasp in theoretical or technological terms. It seems reminiscent of the IST expression "ambient intelligence" or "ambient computing"... this post is a starting point to explore what "ambient learning" could mean.
read more...

To answer this question (or to take up this challenge) we propose to start from what we observe: the learners' behaviours in the course of an activit. These behaviours are components of a dynamic sequence of actions and feedback exchanged by the human being and an environment. Actually, what we observe is not just a human being, but a human being interacting with an environment in order to achieve a certain goal. From this we derive the characterisation of a conception in the model we are constructing.
read more...

This first post intends to open a thread of discussion, clarification and investigation of a proposal for modelling students' "knowledge" in a way which satisfies two requests: (i) to make sense from a learning perspective, (ii) to be accessible to computational representations. Indeed this is a challenge since the beginning of research in AI in Education. Anyway, let's try...
read more...

An embedded phenomenon is the emergent property of the behaviours of a set of "distributed media located around the classroom representing 'portals' into [the] phenomenon depicting local state information corresponding to [its mapping onto the physical space of the classroom]." The space of the class becomes the interface with the model which has been implemented; but it is more than that...
read more...

The Washington Post has recently drawn our attention to the release of a report to Congress by the US Department of Education, which --­shortly said--demonstrates that educational software have no significant impact on student performance. This is a good news, to some extend, since it seems that in general no one can demonstrate whatever in our domain...
read more...

Lorsque je cherche un article ou un livre pour les besoins de mon travail, me rendre dans une bibliothèque n'est plus la seule solution. Je trouve une grande part de la documentation dont j'ai besoin grâce aux abonnements électroniques auxquels mon laboratoire souscrit, et—de façon plus incertaine mais souvent surprenante—grâce à ...
read more...

About 10 years ago, John Self wrote "If a field is to call itself ‘AI in Education’, then it seems necessary for it to say what it considers ‘education’ to be. However, despite its name, AI-ED has never been concerned with education in its broad sense but only with the specific issue of learning." Reading again the introduction of his essay on "Computational mathetics", I thought that this is an issue worth to consider again as we are about to consider our metadata from an international perspective.
read more...