This paper reports early findings of an ongoing study to determine the use and impact of social educational software at undergraduate level. It summarizes the theoretical background to the educational use of social software and suggests directions for future research. The primary aim of the study was to capture and describe the extent and patterns of use of educational software and Web 2.0 tech...

Educational software should be designed by development teams with actual teachers. Thus, implementations of this type of software would be able to cover most teaching requirements and to adjust to different teaching principles. Moreover, some more work should be done to abstract common patterns in educational software so that software engineering methods can be adapted to suit educational needs...

Instructional design is a fundamental base for educational technologies as it lays the foundation to facilitate learning and teaching based on pedagogical underpinnings. However, most of the educational technologies today face two core challenges in this context: (i) lack of instructional design as a basis (ii) lack of support for a variety of instructional designs. In order to address these ch...

Software development is currently experiencing significant growth, and the need to improve user interfaces is an important factor. Given this situation, interface design patterns have emerged as a new means of improving the user experience. However, their use has not been adequately studied for use in specific domains such as education. For this reason, it is necessary to analyze design pattern...

October 2008 Preliminary version Please do not quote! Abstract. This paper examines the patterns of educational assortative mating in East and West Germany. In the literature it is well known that individuals do not mate randomly according to social and cultural traits. Marrying within a socio-economic group can lead to polarization and exacerbating economic inequality. In the US, there is a co...

4 Games are not a new concept in learning. Game-based 5 learning, simulations, and serious games are known pedagogical 6 methods used to build on the inherent playfulness of learners. 7 Technological advances and the popularity of learning 8 management systems are making it easier to implement 9 gamification, analyze the resulting engagement and playfulness, 10 and modify the implementation if ...

In this paper, we propose a pattern language for Generative Participants. Recent education more and more requires methods to cultivate creativity in the students. A Generative Participant proposed in this paper is a teaching style aimed to cultivate creativity in its students. In a project-based environment, a Generative Participant teaches by actually participating in creative activities to st...

Beyond the kind of processes dealt with the IMS LD specification, there are other kinds of processes, which are repeated periodically in learning environments that have not already been described yet due to the lack of mechanisms to describe them effectively. Inspired by the standard specification of language processes in the business area and taking into account the patterns philosophy used in...

One of the main problems with e-learning environments is their lack of personalization (or adaptivity). They cannot offer customisation for the student; they can only offer identical contents to all the consumers. Educational Adaptive Hypermedia (EAH) environments should be the answer to this problem. Adaptive Hypermedia is a relatively new field (starting around the early 1990s), but it alread...

Analysis of interaction patterns is one of the most important indicators of quality of learning in educational web forums. Social Network Analysis is gradually assuming importance in the study of interaction patterns as it focuses on the analysis of the interrelationships between individuals thus providing a holistic perspective on group performance. However, most of the studies that use SNA in...