Educational Technology & Society

This issue contains special section on the East European Perspective on Information Technologies in Education, guest edited by Prof. Samvel Shoukourian, Head, Department of Algorithmic Languages, Yerevan State University, Armenia. Prof. Shoukourian is also an Academician of National Academy of Sciences of Republic of Armenia. The articles in this issue are based on the International Workshop on Information Technologies in Education, that took place in Yerevan, Armenia during 13-17 June 2005.

Preparations for The IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT2006) are now on the track. The ICALT2006 will take place in Kerkrade, The Netherlands during July 5-7, 2006. Please visit the website of the conference for further details:

http://lttf.ieee.org/icalt2006/

http://www.ask.iti.gr/icalt/2006/

You are also welcome to complete the FREE MEMBERSHIP FORM for Technical Committee on Learning Technology. Please complete the form at: http://lttf.ieee.org/join.htm.

Besides, if you are involved in research and/or implementation of any aspect of advanced learning technologies, I invite you to contribute your own work in progress, project reports, case studies, and events announcements in this newsletter. For more details, please refer author guidelines at http://lttf.ieee.org/learn_tech/authors.html.

Kinshuk
Editor,
Learning Technology Newsletter
kinshuk@ieee.org

Guest Editorial: Information Technologies in Education – An East European Perspective

Distance learning has become a key technology for many disciplines during the past several years. It has evolved remarkably during the same time, but its utility is still lacking in many respects in comparison with traditional learning. Due to likely stagnation in the increase of traditional learning activities and, meantime, emergence of totally new education related concepts like continuous/life-long education, distance learning seems to become a necessity for building ever smarter advanced learning technologies in the future.

In the late 90’s, integrated computerized frameworks supporting traditional learning reached maturity and became the commodity on the market. The variety of applications and environments such as e-content development automation, desktop publishing, data visualization, office and management automation became widely available and impressively easy to use. On the other hand, distance learning nowadays already offered a variety of infrastructural/architectural concepts, each requiring complex computerized frameworks. Thorough performance studies of these concepts are difficult and rare and, therefore, the understanding of delivered performance is poor. As a consequence, framework development is platform dependent and expensive, and just few vendors currently offer applications and problem solving environments for distance learning systems.

At this moment, there is a great deal of confusion and uncertainty about the future of distance learning. The essential increase of framework prices in the distance learning market has engaged a lot of criticism which often ignores the achievements of distance learning research over the last years. There is a real danger of the “bandwagon effect” of making mistakes in managing distance learning technology. According to it, a large propagandistic effort was made to show the need and support for this technology in order to get further public acceptance and budgets. The bandwagon’s four flat tires are caused by the lack of: frameworks software, skilled developers, guideposts (heuristics about design and use), and applications which can be softly moved on the distance learning track. We share the view that the evolution of scalable distance learning systems will be defined and limited by one factor, the ease of development and use. The ease of development and use is a consequence of using a high-level developer and user languages which should not resemble the architectural properties of the underlying platforms.

Almost half of software in systems being developed today and thirty-seven to fifty percent of efforts throughout the software life cycle are related to the system’s user interface. The same seems to be here in framework’s user interface.

For this reason issues and methods from the field of user-framework interaction (UFI) affect the overall process of framework development (FD) tremendously. Yet despite strong motivation amongst organizations to practice and apply effective FD and UFI methods there still exist major gaps of understanding both between suggested practice, and how framework is actually developed, and between the best practices of each of the fields. There are major gaps of communication between the UFI and FD fields: the methods and vocabulary being used in each community are often foreign to the other community. As a result, product quality is not as high as it could be, and (avoidable) rework is often necessary. In addition, FD methods and techniques are often perceived by UFI specialists as tools that are only re-served to computer scientists and of little or no relevance to UFI. And vice versa: UFI contents are often perceived by framework developers as after-thoughts or side-tools that do not necessarily affect the quality of framework.

This is the reason we tried to gather in one conference-room developers of SAKAI framework, users of educational CEENet network and developers of distance learning courses from Yerevan State University and other Armenian educational and research institutions as well.

The theme of this first workshop sponsored by Yerevan State University, OSI East-East Program and OSI-Armenian Foundation is to attempt to enumerate and understand these gaps of understanding and communication, with an eventual goal of proposing ways to bridge these gaps.

The bridge should be built from two sites simultaneously. For instance, FD frequently employs requirements elicitation techniques that involve framework goals, procedures, and operators. UFI typically uses task modeling involving task, sub-tasks, and temporal operators between. While these two techniques are different in purpose, they are surprising close to each other and this feeling arises during the common work.

This workshop can improve framework development and UFI education and practice by raising awareness of UFI concerns among FD researchers, educators, and practitioners, and vice-versa. It can also show the places where an attention to concerns from one field can inform the other field’s processes, and showing how methods and tools can be augmented to address both FD and UFI concerns.

We hope that will have an opportunity to make the workshop regular.

Samvel Shoukourian

Head, Department of Algorithmic Languages

Yerevan State University

samshouk@sci.am

Armenian Reading Equipment with Voice (AREV): A System of Information Communication for Persons with Impaired Vision

1. Introduction

Integration of blinds into society is one of major goals of any civilized country. In Information Age there is a possibility to achieve this goal by using Text-to-Speech (TTS) Synthesizers, systems and special equipment. Absence of an Armenian TTS and high cost of existing foreign language TTS licenses virtually leaves out of reach such technologies for blind Armenians. There are 4000 blinds and much more persons with poor eyesight which are excluded from processes of Information Society.

YCRDI has developed a system for persons with impaired vision in Armenian. The system was developed, tested and implemented in some specialized organizations in Armenia and proved extremely useful. Approaches adopted in the design process, achieved results and system implementation are an example of possibility to solve the problem using computer systems for Blinds (CSB).

Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesizers are essential part of any CSB, but operations carried out by a blind person to read any text, to enter data, to edit them etc, are something which should be developed and made accessible for a blind person.

One of such widely known systems is JAWS developed by Henter Joyce. The major restriction of this system is the high cost, English language and Windows knowledge as a must. These factors makes its usage for Armenian blinds unacceptable and until now there are no known examples of its usage in Armenia.

2. Principles of AREV development

Some basic principles were used during AREV development, which are considered essential for a success of such systems.

1. The system should not depend on age and education level of persons with impaired vision.

2. The system should be able to work in stand-alone, group or distant modes of operation.

3. The cost of a system should be affordable for blind persons, which usually have limited financial resources. Technical and software means ought to be off-the-shelf.

4. The system should be open for incorporating new functions and should not depend on progress of technology.

5. The system should be user friendly bearing in mind the limitations of blind persons.

6. After short initial training a blind should be able to perform all functions without assistance.

7. The system should be developed by phases according to priorities of functions (on the principle: the most important function – first).

Investigations carried out by YCRDI specialists in boarding school for children with impaired vision and with Association of Blinds of Armenia showed great interest and expectations with such development.

Based on these principles, TTS synthesizer for Armenian language was developed and tested on several groups of blinds and its quality was considered corresponding to the internationally achieved results for other languages.

In AREV system operations are performed by a specially designed software package. Here a user needs to press a certain key to perform the necessary function. The function is automatically performed by the existing software without further user intervention. This principle called “any program from AREV command set without intervention” proved very effective. The package, being open, if necessary, may include new functions.

The keyboard training which is an essential part of the system, is working in self-training mode making the training process independent of abilities, education and age of the trainee.

The system is expandable and new functions are included as soon as such demand arises. Thus, possibilities of Russian and English languages inclusion, writing and playing music, playing chess, etc were investigated and became part of the system.

3. AREV main functions

The system fulfills the following functions:

· Keyboard self training

· Creation of textual, graphic and voice personal libraries

· Forming of documents and textual materials. All known edit functions are possible (Font, Style, Size, Copy, Paste, Find, Select, etc)

· Carrying out scanning and archiving of documents, books and texts in personal library. As a package for OCR Fine Reader 5.0 Arm is used

· Reading texts with a selected speed, voice (man, woman) and screen magnification

· Navigating in arbitrary Web sites, reading page content and, if necessary, to store it in user’s personal library

· Search of necessary information in Internet

· Send/get textual, voice and graphic information via e-mail

· Input/Output textual information by Floppy and Flash devices

· Write down music and print out notes

· Making records, inputting, outputting voice on CD