Communication and Analytical Skills Development

The Teachable Agents (TA) project is under way.  In June two training sessions were held with natural science teachers as well as computer lab teachers from all of the participating schools. The teachers learned how to create concept maps using the Betty’s Brain TA software. The software has also been implemented at all of the schools.

Steve presented at the 3rd International Conference on eLearning 2008 conference in Cape Town on Kusasa: Developing analytical thinking skills. About 130 delegates from 20 countries attended the conference to share and discuss e-learning at school and tertiary education levels. The Kusasa presentation was well received. Two papers of particular interest to us: Developing Critically Thoughtful, Media-Rich Lessons in Science by Philip Balcaen of the University of British Columbia, Canada, and Technology-Assisted Reading for Improving Reading Skills for young South African Learners by Gerda van Wyk and Arno Louw, both from the University of Johannesburg.

Steve is currently overseas presenting at the ED-MEDIA 2008 (Austria) and Games, Learning and Society 2008 (USA) conferences.

On the Kusasa project we have seen a shift in emphasis from development of materials toward implementation. Much of the work during June has focussed on dealing with site-specific technical and organizational issues and on incorporating these learnings into our system approach.

The evaluation approach seeks to mirror the approach of Kusasa and correspondingly is developmental, iterative and continuous. Feedback is provided to, in the first instance, the Kusasa project team and to educators. Already this kind of feedback is proving valuable and has led to changes in the pacing and structure of the implementation design.

Technical efforts have focussed on understanding Edubuntu deployment scenarios and on improvements to the VMware virtual machine that we use for project deployment. The review group constituted to review new development work is now up and running and the first of these reviews has taken place. The material under review has been published on the project wiki.