[IAEP] Thoughts on Pedagogy and supporting activity creators

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 9:01 AM, Caroline Meeks
<caroline at solutiongrove.com> wrote:
> These are some of my thoughts in response to both Walter's New Year's
> message and Bryan's threads on supporting easier activity creation.

> 

I like concrete user stories that help situate thinking.  So let's make up
> a story of the young teacher and the similarly aged aunt/uncle of one of the
> students who has recently graduated from a local technical computer skills
> program and has the desire to volunteer to spend hours with the young
> teacher helping to create a Sugarized activity that the students will use.
> You can set this story in Nepal or Birmingham but take a minute to make a
> mental picture of these people working together; Situated Cognition theory
> says that you will learn better and remember more if you have rich
> imagery.   :)
>
> So the teacher wants to help the students with a problem that they will be
> tested on using standardized testing. Perhaps it's using a grammatical
> structure that is present in the official formal language but not present or
> different in the local vernacular,  e.g. "I ain't got no pencil" to "I don't
> have any pencils".  The teacher has a bunch of zeroxed sheets of exercises
> that have been used since the mimeograph ages and the school has always
> gotten very low standardized test scores in this area.

I want to tackle such problems in greater generality. Does anybody
know of usable computational models of transformational grammars that
we can use to generate language exercises? I see that
Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) is a large field, one that
I have not yet had time to learn to navigate.
-- 
Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name
And Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai