This piece explores technologies for freer communication "with" machines, i.e. bots (chatbots or conversational agents), rather than the concept of speaking "to" machines, such as Intelligent Assistants (IA) like "Alexa." Bots are computer programmes which simulate natural intelligent communication using text or…

Dialogue systems, commonly called as Chatbots, have gained escalating popularity in recent times due to their wide-spread applications in carrying out chit-chat conversations with users and accomplishing tasks as personal assistants. These systems are typically trained from manually-labeled data and/or written with handcrafted rules and often, use…

The integration of information and communication tools in education has been a common trend in the last decade which resulted in increased student engagement, motivation, and even achievement and learning. Despite these improvements, science teachers still report challenges with its use in science education. Several abstract topics in chemistry…

Secondary teachers use digital resources for teaching, yet little is known about how they find, evaluate, organize, and share these resources. This basic qualitative study was conducted to fill the gap and examine the experiences and practices of secondary educators in curating digital resources. Findings on how teachers manage digital…

The purpose of this study was to determine how the use of www.achieve3000.com, as a computer-based supplemental English Language Art (ELA) instructional tool, affected middle school students' ELA achievement. 455 middle school ELA students from the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades participated in this study. The collected student achievement that…

In writing studies research, automated writing evaluation technology is typically examined for a specific, often narrow purpose: to evaluate a particular writing improvement measure, to mine data for changes in writing performance, or to demonstrate the effectiveness of a single technology and accompanying validity arguments. This article adopts a…

There is a growing body of research looking at young people's use of digital technology in informal contexts. However, there is a gap in the literature about how to describe and categorise young people's digital practices in such contexts. This gap is important because in order to be able to understand the differences between young people's…

The current article describes an exploratory study that focussed on joint attention behaviour--the basis of interaction predicting productive collaboration--to better understand collaborative problem solving, particularly its social aspects during remote dyadic interaction. The study considered joint attention behaviour as a socio-linguistic…

Computational chemistry modeling activities that took place as part of a course in physical chemistry are described. The main software tools used by the students were Avogadro and ORCA, which are freely available on the Internet for academic use. Avogadro is molecular visualization software, which can be used not only to prepare input files for a…

Virtual proctoring technology is credited with increasing the accessibility of exams by enabling students to participate in exams at any time and place. In this field experiment, students were randomly assigned to virtual proctoring or traditional on-campus examination to evaluate the effect, nature and timing of implementation barriers for online…

This paper outlines the potential gains for Constructionist research and praxis in modelling that might be obtained by recognising the power of the Patch--a humble computational being in the NetLogo modelling environment that has been overshadowed by its more popular fellow agent, the Turtle. To contextualise this opportunity, I describe how…

One of the main goals of assignments in the academic environment is to assess the students' knowledge and mastery of a specific topic, and it is crucial to ensure that the work is original and has been solely made by the students to assess their competence acquisition. Therefore, Text-Matching Software Products (TMSPs) are used by academic…

Manually determining concepts present in a group of questions is a challenging and time-consuming process. However, the process is an essential step while modeling a virtual learning environment since a mapping between concepts and questions using mastery level assessment and recommendation engines is required. In this article, we investigated…

Technology-driven videos can promote a quick animated reception, perceptions of sensorial familiarity, and kinesthetic awareness that synergize these constructs. Scripted educational virtual reality scenarios can, therefore, encourage viewer recognition and understanding of the emotional effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. Litz et al. (2009) posit…

Automated essay scoring (AES), where natural language processing is applied to score written text, can underpin educational resources in blended and distance learning. AES performance has typically been reported in terms of correlation coefficients or agreement statistics calculated between a system and an expert human examiner. We describe the…