David, For frameworks, you may want to look at "achievement systems" and "reputation systems" (e.g. karma on slashdot). I just helped a colleague with his grant proposal about adding achievement systems to a peer review-based authoring environment, Expertiza, so we did some literature review for that. It's a well-developed topic in gaming and in internet-based community studies. It involves creating an "economy" of good deeds, basically. In more advanced systems, users can define or co-define which deeds are considered "good." -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. <a href="http://www.naturalmath.com">http://www.naturalmath.com</a> social math site <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath">http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath</a> future math culture email group <a href="http://www.phenixsolutions.com">http://www.phenixsolutions.com</a> empowering our innovations <div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 7:48 PM, David Van Assche <<a href="mailto:dvanassche@gmail.com">dvanassche@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Having pondered this a bit more, I came up with a practical example. Lets say we have a student in Uruguay, lets call him Fernando, and lets say we have a student in the UK, lets call her Suzy. Suzy's Spanish is not great, as she hasn't had the chance to delve into it practically, nor is she getting the right idea about how everyday Spanish is used in Spanish countries, having relied on terrible cliched examples of her antiquated text books. Fernando's English is not very good, seeing as the only English he is subjected to are pirate movies he buys from the local market, so he's learned more slang than real English. His school isn't even teaching English, but he desperately wants to learn it. Colabot knows both of these users, as it has analysed every willing user's e-portfolio, and knows they would compliment each other perfectly say by sharing the Speak activity. Colabot could suggest times at which these 2 students could meet virtually and collaborate in order to improve their language skills. Colabot could keep track of their on going meetings, showing the amount of hours spent on language learning. Colabot could even give out an award or recognition after the students had spent X amount of hours learning together. The great thing about this example is that it seems to me to be pure construcionism with technology at its simplest and its best. The 2 students are teachers to each other, and colabot is there purely in the capacity a teacher normally should be, to guide the learning process. kind Regards, David Van Assche<div><div></div><div class="h5"> <div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Walter Bender <<a href="mailto:walter.bender@gmail.com" target="_blank">walter.bender@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div><div></div><div>On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 7:00 AM, David Van Assche<<a href="mailto:dvanassche@gmail.com" target="_blank">dvanassche@gmail.com</a>> wrote: > Something has been in the back of my head for a while now, ever since I've > seen the impressive capabilities of being able to share an activity with > your neighbourhood. Being able to cooperatively use applications brings a > new level of playability to it all, and it reminds me of when I first saw > the ability for a computer game to be 'multi-player.'This gave it an extra > dimension, and with it came the idea of awards for completing certain > things, which would be displayed in your dashoard somewhere.The award system > seems even more relevant for education than it did for games. We'v aleady > mentioned the benefits of an award sysem so I'm not going to regugitate > that, but what hasnt''t really been spoken about is, how and what kind of > personal details should the journal store and share. I see this as a > customisable option, something that can be as simple as only sharing first > names, or sharing the name of your pet, your favorite colors and foods, the > languages you speak. > > This detailed information about a person is extremely valuable to the > underlying system, as it can potentially match people against each other. > This would allow for some interesting possibilities when it comes to > collaboration, such as the system suggesting users to challenge/collaborate > with based on personal information. I thought about having a robot that > lives on an irc channel capable of helping with the collaboration procedure, > as well as listing achievements, giving data on which users want to > collaborate, giving help on how collaboration works with particular > activities, listing which servers have open collaboration, showing the most > used/highest rated collaborating activities, etc. > > I havent thought about this too much in depth, but I know coding a bot is > not too hard. I see it as an extension to the speak AI, and encouragement to > join irc. We can even get the bot to accept uploads of raw learning > materials categorised by subject, which can then be used by content > creators. it itself could give out quizzes based on particular subjects, or > interesting pieces of information/knowledge. It could be taught new > information, by feeding it localised knowledge. It would be important to > know where we set the limits to what it can do. > > Just some food for thought... > > David (nubae) Van Assche > </div></div>> _______________________________________________ > IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) > <a href="mailto:IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org" target="_blank">IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org</a> > <a href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep" target="_blank">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep</a> > In general, the idea of bots living in the Sugar neighborhood is a theme we haven't explored very much. It would be nice to come up with a simple, consistent framework for creating such a resource. Making it available through IRC as well is a cool idea. -walter -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs <a href="http://www.sugarlabs.org" target="_blank">http://www.sugarlabs.org</a> </blockquote></div> </div></div> _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) <a href="mailto:IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org">IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org</a> <a href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep" target="_blank">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep</a> </blockquote></div>