Survey: How do you regulate your learning process?
I’m at a critical stage. I need your help, because you are the target audience of my research. I have been working with the Knowledge & Data Engineering [KDEG] research group in TCD for just over two years now. KDEG pioneers research in knowledge driven systems. Over here, we’re interested in things like Management of Network and Telecommunication, Technology Enhanced Learning, Autonomic and Adaptive Web based Systems and aspects of Health Informatics. Me though, I’m focused on supporting the modeling and acquisition of higher-order cognitive competencies within the context of web-based eLearning services. This includes those useful abilities like communication and critical thinking.
How can you HALP?!
I have put together a survey on metacognitive awareness.
This survey should give me an idea about what strategies you use when you learn. The reason that I am starting to really talk about it now is that I need to understand my audience. Who is my audience? Well, you; people in Ireland who uses the internet for personal reasons and for work, and that may one day participate in learning online. For this I need to get a general grasp of the similarities, the differences, and trends in peoples awareness of their own cognition. Then I can figure out how many people will have to participate in an experiment with my software. I need to know how many people will indicate whether my service actually works. I hope that you will take 10 minutes of your time in order to fill out my metacognition questionnaire.
This service is called Goby. In nature, the Goby fish lives in symbiosis with the burrowing shrimp; serving as a watchman in return for a place to live. Goby is a symbiotic service that engages in a dialog with the learner, and gathers meta-data from the host system in order to model and support the acquisition of a particular cognitive competency.
Basically, I’m interested in skills like communication, social cognition, and in particular metacognition. Right now, the software models a learners metacognition in a way analogous to how we understand our own mental models. The technical model is just like a programed representation of these mental models. You can learn a bit more about the approach taken here.
Why Blog?
I also think that blogging could be a really important to get my thoughts out there, especially because of the self-reflective nature of the process. The research process so far has taught me so much, not only about the adaptive eLearning domain and cognitive processes, but about myself, my own personal strategies, and research ethics, as well as the struggle to balance work and life. Over the remainder of this process I am going to try and set aside some time to write up my experiences, both academic and personal, of going through the PhD process.
Gushy prizes
Participants will be entered into a draw for a 50 euro Amazon voucher as well. Thank you in advance for your response, your input is key to getting my research into the next stage.
This entry was posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Learning, Personal, PhD, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
