Explore! Possibilities and Challenges of Mobile Learning

Maria F. Costabile, Antonella De Angeli, Rosa Lanzilotti, Carmelo Ardito, Paolo Buono, Thomas Pederson developed the program Explore! It is a mobile game that is meant to replace the pen and paper format of a game called Gaius' Day. Gaius' Day is a learning game typically played by students at archeological sites in Italy. In the game groups of students are given "missions" that they have to accomplish that end up leading them around the site and teaching them about the history of the site.

Explore! keeps track of all the details of the missions and contains the glossary that they use to look up information about the site. The results of their user study showed that while overall the students enjoyed the mobile app more, they were able to complete their missions much more quickly and accurately when using pen and paper. Part of this is speculated to be because in the mobile app, you have to complete the missions sequentially where as with pencil and paper, the group can strategize and complete the missions in an efficient order.

I find it humorous that the app meant to help this game actually makes it worse and that it is preferred by the users. But if we didn't have "failures" we wouldn't make much progress. I really don't think failure is an appropriate word because it still does contribute knowledge to the field. More specifically, what not to do.

Opening Skinner's Box

This was definitely the most interesting book we've read yet. "Open Skinner's Box" is about some of the greatest, and sometimes most disturbing, psychological experiments of the 20th century. Lauren Slater really got into her research for this book. She hunted down old colleagues and family members of the ones who conducted these experiments as well as some of the participants. She even recreated some of the studies to see if she would react the same way as the participants. Many times throughout the book, Slater struck me as crazy herself. Of course then she admitted that she did have mental issues in the past. There you go.

But I did like the way it was written. It didn't feel like a text book. It felt more like a novel. A crazy novel with a few more vivid adjectives than were probably necessary. But still, it was enjoyable.

Inmates Part 2

Yikes! I'm kinda behind! After reading about how much he hates programmers and how horrible they are at design, it was difficult to pick this book up again. At least he was kinder this time around and offered good advice instead of complaining about terrible design the whole time.

Personas are a tool for software design. Basically, you come up with this imaginary person and design the software for them. But it is not simply, "Let's call him John" and that's that. No, you have to come up with their life stories, habits, family, pets, pretty much every thing about them. This helps you understand how someone will use the software and ends up being better for design than creating software for some anonymous person.

An Interface for Targeted Collection of Common Sense Knowledge Using a Mixture Model

Robert Speer, Jayant Krishnamurthy, Catherine Havasi, Dustin Smith, Henry Lieberman and Kenneth Arnold worked on developing a user interface to help build a "common sense" knowledge database. The main purpose of this interface was to get users to enjoy using this interface so that they are more comfortable and provide better training for the system.

In their system, common sense knowledge is represented as concepts and features. For example "door is part of a house". To build this data base, the team created a "20 Questions" interface. Their hypothesis was that creating a user interface that was interactive and enjoyable would be better at retaining users than a static data entry form. For their user study, they had some users use their 20 Questions system and other users just used a data entry form. They found that those who used 20 Questions were able to complete their task much faster than those who used static data entry. Users also felt that the 20 Questions interface was much more enjoyable and that they felt it adapted itself to their use a lot more.

There are just somethings that are easier done by humans. The problem is that most humans don't want to do these things. Interfaces like this one, interfaces that turn a task into a game, would be very effective at "tricking" people into accomplishing these tasks. As time goes on, I think human computing will more and more become an effective way of generating knowledge.

Collaborative Translation by Monolinguals with Machine Translators

Daisuke Morita and Toru Ishida of Kyoto University have developed a system to help monolinguals work together using machine translation to create accurate document translation. Machine translation is really useful but is not always accurate. It sometimes produces output with grammatical errors that can cause the receiver to misunderstand the intended message.

In this system, the initial message is translated to the second language. Next the receiver edits the document to correct grammatical errors and clarify ambiguities as he or she thinks is correct. The document is then machine translated back to the sender. Now the sender checks this message to see if the receiver correctly understood the message. If so, they are finished. If the message comes back and the wrong idea is expressed. The original sender will rewrite the message that caused confusion to better convey the correct idea.

This sounds like a good idea but to me it sounds like miscommunication could still occur pretty frequently especially if one party decides to use cultural idioms. I do think it could be of some use though and is probably more accurate than machine translation alone.