Affective Learning Technologies

What are we doing?
The design of collaborative learning activities has not been informed by the underlying affective dynamics learners go through. Although emotions have generally been recognized as having an impact in learning, particularly during collaborative activities, researchers have found them hard to research and model. Recent advances in biomedical engineering, neuroscience and data mining have increased researchers attention to this issue. We are at a point where significant accuracy in recognizing basic emotional states is feasible through a number of approaches. The identification of affective and mental states provides a magnifying glass into the processes involved in collaborative learning activities.

Why?
New data collection and processing techniques to be developed in this project will allow researchers to record the interactions (speech and text) and physiological signals of learners engaged in a collaborative activity (both online and face to face). As part of the development work sensors that record physiological signals while students collaborate (in a laboratory scenario) will be integrated with software that processes these signals, merges it with behavioural information (i.e. what learners write) and identifies the affective states that individuals go through while they collaborate. This will constitute the first research environment to study the affective and physiological aspects of collaborative learning.

What have we done so far? - News

• Rafael A. Calvo. "Incorporating Affect into Educational Design Patterns and Frameworks". The 9th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies. July 14-18, 2009. Riga, Latvia
• AIED workshop "Closing the Affective Loop" http://aspire.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/AffectLoop.html
• 1st International Workshop Affect and Educational Design Patterns @ICALT2009 Rafael A. Calvo, Michael Derntl http://www.weg.ee.usyd.edu.au/icalt09
• Collaboration with California State Fullerton to develop learning support tools for the performance arts.

Who

• Rafael A. Calvo
• Omar Alzoubi
• M. Sazzad Hussein
• Kim Sungkwhan (Mac)