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FUNDERS
 University of Joensuu
 Department of Computer Science and Statistics @ University of Joensuu
 Academy of Finland
 European Commission
 European Social Fund
 TEKES - National Technology Agency of Finland
 SIGCSE - ACM Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education

INDUSTRIAL PARTNERS
 Assa Abloy
 Connexor
 Discendum
 Heureka
 Karjalainen
 Lingsoft
 Microsoft
 Nokia
 Sordino Information Systems

CONFERENCES, WORKSHOPS & SUMMER SCHOOLS

Past
 IEEE 4th International Workshop on Technology for Education in Developing Countries, July 10 -12, 2006, Iringa, Tanzania
 Malta International Summer School on Educational Technology in Cultural Context, June 20 - 25, 2005
 Taiwan International Summer School on Educational Technology in Cultural Context, Taiwan, June 28 - July 3, 2005
 International Conference on Educational Technology in Cultural Context, Taiwan, July 7, 2005
 Mekrijärvi International Summer School on Educational Technology in Cultural Context, Finland, September 25 - 29, 2005
 See more...

MIRRORWOLF (PROJECT HAS ENDED)

Project's web-pages:
http://cs.joensuu.fi/pages/edtech/mw/

The MirrorWolf (MW) project aims at developing novel technologies for learning communities, whether companies or more traditional school settings. At a general level, these technologies, or tools, should help their users to comprehend their individual work process and collaboration within the teams they are involved in, and based on their acquired impressions and analyses, develop their work and practices further on. The techniques to be applied include information retrieval, visualization, group technologies, and computational linguistics.

We see the areas of learning, studying, and working approach as overlapping each other. Therefore, the basic motivation to design these kinds of tools stems from the problems occurring in virtually any modern learning or working setting:

  1. Students as well as employees (i.e. learners) need to track their learning or working processes in order to improve their skills.

  2. Groups, especially those working in distance, need a better understanding on how their contributions and roles fit together.

  3. Most of the concrete artefacts constructed in modern learning or working places are some sort of texts. There is an apparent need to compare and interrelate texts together, for example to trace an individual author, compare similar texts, assess texts etc.

In this project, we follow the participatory design method. However, it needs to be enhanced by formative evaluation, or early stage evaluation within their potential future users. In our case, this means that two companies test and analyse the usability of the tools and some up with respective suggestions at regular intervals over the whole research period. In these primarily group processes, we make use of creative problem solving methods.

MW will create tools for educational institutions and business enterprises focusing on multiple objectives and making use of continuous evaluation schemes in learning environments. The elements to be developed in MW and their correlation, seen from a holistic point of view, are organic in their continuous evaluation schemes.

The technologies to be developed will be built on the earlier results of the research team, particularly those designed in the Thinking Tools for the Net (TTN) project during years 2000-2003. These include automatic essay assessment, concept mapping and visualization of collaborative work.

The previous project TTN was funded by the National Technology Agency of Finland, TEKES.

This project is funded by the European Commission - Research Directorate and National Technology Agency of Finland, TEKES and participating companies:

Project Manager Gaetano La Russa, firstname.lastname@cs.joensuu.fi

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