the need for intercultural awareness and skills emerges strongly in both distance learning courses, and in social life in multicultural societies. the study of online language transactions is therefore an important aspect of the emerging culture and sociolinguistics of computer mediated communication. the research reported in this paper concerns perceptions held by students in an iranian univer...

The recent three-dimensional virtual environment applications of Virtual Reality have a strong impact on the way the users interact with computer-generated spaces and on the role of the computer as a supportive tool and as a mediator for learning, as well. The researchers in the field of Educational Technology are content to build conceptual frameworks to study the cognitive representations for...

This article discusses the training of communicative skills by fostering the reflection of speech-receptive action and the opportunities for using software for this purpose. Most frameworks for the training of communicative behavior focus on fostering the observable speech-productive action (i.e. speaking); the individual cognitive processes underlying speech-receptive action (hearing and under...

This paper presents a model of learning as a social process incorporating multiple distinguishable phases that constitute a cycle of personal and social knowledge-building. It explicitly considers the relationship of processes associated with individual minds to those considered to be socio-cultural. This model of collaborative knowledge-building incorporates insights from various theories of u...

In recent years computer science courses have become more and more common in science and engineering degrees. However, lecturers face a complex task when teaching this subject: students consider the subject to be unrelated to their core interests and often feel uncomfortable when facing computational concepts for the first time. A non-traditional approach might help students to overcome their d...

Learning styles are considered among the significant factors that aid instructors in deciding how well their students learn a second or foreign language (Oxford, 2003). Although this issue has been accepted broadly in educational psychology,further research is required to examine the relationship between learning styles and language learning skills. Thus, the present study was carried out to in...

Computer war strategy games offer a challenging domain for AI techniques for learning because they involve multiple players, the world in the games is only partially observable and the state space is extremely large. Model-based reflection and self-adaptation is one method for learning in such a complex domain. In this method, the game-playing agent contains a model of its own reasoning process...

Simulations provide a suitable environment for discovery learning, but are not pedagogically effective unless exploration tasks are suitably scaffolded. We are developing an architecture for a computer based learning environment that includes a multi-agent based simulation, a causal modeling tool, and a set of contextualized scaffolds provided by a virtual agent to help middle school students l...