Papers by Roland Hübscher

IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, 2010
Group projects are an important component in many courses. Instructors can allow students to form... more Group projects are an important component in many courses. Instructors can allow students to form their own groups or assign them to increase the effectiveness of the group. Most computational tools supporting the assignment of students to class project groups use some general criterion, for instance, maximizing the diversity of the group members. However, frequently, the instructor needs to consider additional context-specific criteria and preferences which force the instructor to figure out the assignment of the students by hand instead of using a software tool. Difficult and time-consuming, this task can easily result in suboptimal assignments. In this paper, a method is introduced that allows the instructor to combine a general criterion and a flexible set of context-specific preferences to describe the type of groups preferred. The heuristic Tabu Search algorithm finds solutions satisfying most preferences.

This concise text provides an accessible introduction to artificial intelligence and intelligent ... more This concise text provides an accessible introduction to artificial intelligence and intelligent user interfaces (IUIs) and how they are at the heart of a communication revolution for strategic communications and public relations. IUIs are where users and technology meet-via computers, phones, robots, public displays, etc. They use AI and machine learning methods to control how those systems interact, exchange data, learn from, and develop relations with users. The authors explore research and developments that are already changing human/machine engagement in a wide range of areas from consumer goods, healthcare, and entertainment to community relations, crisis management, and activism. They also explore the implications for public relations of how technologies developing hyper-personalised persuasion could be used to make choices for us, navigating the controversial space between influence, nudging, and controlling. This readable overview of the applications and implications of AI and IUIs will be welcomed by researchers, students, and practitioners in all areas of strategic communication, public relations, and communications studies.

This article discusses the change in the notion of scaffolding from a description of the interac-... more This article discusses the change in the notion of scaffolding from a description of the interac-tions between a tutor and a student to the design of tools to support student learning in pro-ject-based and design-based classrooms. The notion of scaffolding is now increasingly being used to describe various forms of support provided by software tools, curricula, and other re-sources designed to help students learn successfully in a classroom. However, some of the criti-cal elements of scaffolding are missing in the current use of the scaffolding construct. Although new curricula and software tools now described as scaffolds have provided us with novel tech-niques to support student learning, the important theoretical features of scaffolding such as on-going diagnosis, calibrated support, and fading are being neglected. This article discusses how to implement these critical features of scaffolding in tools, resources, and curricula. It is sug-gested that if tools are designed based on...
Intelligent user interfaces (IUIs)
Strategic Communication and AI, 2021
Strategic Communication and AI: Public Relations with Intelligent User Interfaces
Transforming HCI
Information Systems and Information Technology, 2014

In recent years, there has been an upsurge of approaches based on a socio-constructivist framewor... more In recent years, there has been an upsurge of approaches based on a socio-constructivist framework to help students learn science and math. As such, the notion of scaffolding is now increasingly being used to describe the support provided to students to learn successfully in such environments. In the past two decades, varied approaches to scaffolding student learning have been put forth. Scaffolding has been provided in the form of paper-and-pencil tools, technology resources, peer support or teacher-led discussions. The original notion of scaffolding, as used in the initial studies of parent-child interactions or in teacher-student interactions, seems somewhat narrow to explain the multifaceted nature of learning in complex learning environments, especially when it involves helping an entire class of students learn successfully. However, by broadening the scope of scaffolding, we seem to have missed some of the key features that are 3 crucial to successful scaffolding. While acknowledging that the original notion of scaffolding that described the one-on-one interactions between an adult and child is not adequate for describing the complex nature of learning in a classroom, we emphasize that some of the critical elements of scaffolding are missing in the evolved notion. We discuss the key aspects of scaffolding and how we can design and implement these features in the changed context of scaffolding classroom communities.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2002
Adaptive navigation support can be of great help in large hypermedia systems supporting learners ... more Adaptive navigation support can be of great help in large hypermedia systems supporting learners as well as users searching for specific information. A wide variety of adaptive mechanisms have been implemented in existing adaptive hypermedia systems that provide better and better suggestions to the user what hyperlinks to follow. We suggest that adaptive navigation support should scaffold a learner in an educational hypermedia system to select the appropriate links. We show that this implies that selecting a link is an educationally relevant activity that should not always be reduced to a trivial task by powerful adaptive mechanisms. It follows that learners require sometimes different kinds of adaptive navigation support than users looking for information. Finally, we will suggest how to extend current mechanisms to provide scaffolded navigation support to learners.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2004
Adaptive navigation support normally attempts to make selecting a relevant hyperlink as easy as p... more Adaptive navigation support normally attempts to make selecting a relevant hyperlink as easy as possible. However, in educational applications, this may have negative learning effects since selecting a link is sometimes an important educational problem for the student to solve. To provide appropriate scaffolding to students, it is necessary to understand how they navigate in hypermedia sites. By grouping students with similar conceptual (mis)understanding we were able to uncover a small set of characteristic navigation patterns, and to demonstrate that students with similar conceptual understanding have similar navigation patterns.
Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Computer support for collaborative learning - CSCL '97, 1997
Concepts, Methodologies, Tools and Applications
Design patterns have received considerable attention for their potential as a means of capturing ... more Design patterns have received considerable attention for their potential as a means of capturing and sharing design knowledge. This chapter provides a review of design pattern research and usage within education and other disciplines, summarizes the reported benefits of the approach, and examines design patterns in relation to other approaches to supporting design. Building upon this work, it argues that design patterns can capture learning design knowledge from theories and best practices to support novices in effective e-learning design. This chapter describes the authors’ work on the development of designs patterns for e-learning. It concludes with a discussion of future research for educational uses of design patterns.

Proceedings of the 42nd annual Southeast regional conference, 2004
Usability has often been sold as the silver bullet for solving the problems of unprofitable onlin... more Usability has often been sold as the silver bullet for solving the problems of unprofitable online stores. Although better usability will generally improve these sites and their potential for success, usability alone will not result in a highly thriving online presence. After all, no reasonable person will spend money at an untrustworthy online store no matter how usable and pretty the site may be. In this paper, we examine the multifaceted notions of trust and trustworthiness and how they can be applied to Ecommerce stores. Trust in online stores strongly affects consumers' purchase decisions. While the majority of trust research lies in sociology and psychology, it is also relevant to Ecommerce. We argue that high usability of an online store does not imply that the store is also trustworthy and, based on a theoretical discussion of trust, formulate a few design guidelines for designing for trust.

Analyzing Navigation Patterns to Scaffold Metacognition in Hypertext Systems
Springer International Handbooks of Education, 2013
ABSTRACT One of the affordances of hypertext environments is the freedom to choose the order of i... more ABSTRACT One of the affordances of hypertext environments is the freedom to choose the order of information presentation. However, learners may have difficulty self-regulating their learning in order to make navigation decisions that align with their goals. This chapter presents our work in helping students learn from hypertext using the CoMPASS hypertext system in middle school science classes. The CoMPASS system design includes navigable concept maps that reflect connections among concepts in the domain of physics and are used to help students understand the relationships between science ideas. In CoMPASS, students’ self-regulated behavior is detected through the use of computer-generated log files that allow us analyze student navigation behavior post hoc and create clusters of navigation patterns. We are then able to examine these clusters of navigation patterns to determine differences in students’ SRL processes and the types of scaffolding that they may need. This chapter presents five different navigation pattern clusters that have been identified as typical of students’ navigation behavior in CoMPASS. We further discuss how these clusters will be matched to the navigation behaviors of future students and used to inform an algorithm that will provide adaptive real-time navigation prompts in order to scaffold metacognition and self-regulated learning.

Visual Language Theory, 1998
The main reason for using visual languages is that they are often far more convenient to the user... more The main reason for using visual languages is that they are often far more convenient to the user than traditional textual languages. Therefore, visual languages intended for use by both computers and humans ought to be designed and analyzed not only from the perspective of computational resource requirements, but equally importantly, also from the perspective of languages that are cognitively usable and useful. Theoretical and practical research on visual languages need to take into account the full context of a coupled human-computer system in which the visual language facilitates interactions between the computational and the cognitive parts. This implies that theoretical analyses ought to address issues of comprehension, reasoning and interaction in the cognitive realm as well as issues of visual program parsing, execution and feedback in the computational realm. The human aspect is crucial to visual languages, and therefore we advocate a correspondingly broadened scope of inquiry for visual language research. In this chapter we describe aspects of human use of visual languages that ought to be important considerations in visual language research and design, and summarize research from related fields such as software visualization and diagrammatic reasoning that addresses these issues. A framework consistent with the broadened scope of visual language research is proposed and used to categorize and discuss several formalizations and implemented systems. In the course of showing how a sample of current work fits into this framework, open issues and fruitful directions for future research are also identified.
Rewriting interaction
Conference companion on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '95, 1995
... I Rewriting Interaction Roland Hubscher Department of Computer Science & Institute of Cog... more ... I Rewriting Interaction Roland Hubscher Department of Computer Science & Institute of Cognitive Science University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309-0430 (303) 492-4932 rolandh@cs.colorado .edu ABSTRACT ...
Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Computer support for collaborative learning - CSCL '97, 1997
In this paper, we explore the learning that occurred in two types of collaborative learning envir... more In this paper, we explore the learning that occurred in two types of collaborative learning environments in a seventh grade life sciences classroom: an intra-group environment and an intergroup environment. Students used both types of collaboration tools, each tuned to the needs of the task they were doing within or across groups. We found that the learning outcomes in the two collaborative settings were different. During the intragroup collaboration, students focused more on the structure and behavior of the designs. The inter-group environment on the other hand, led them to discuss the function/s of their models, ask for and provide justifications for the functions. We discuss the results and suggest integration of the inter and intra group tools.

Journal of Visual Languages & Computing, 1997
Visual rule-based languages have been used quite successfully to program graphical simulations. T... more Visual rule-based languages have been used quite successfully to program graphical simulations. They all use rewrite rules, which have the often-mentioned advantage that a program can supposedly be extended simply by adding a few more rules. In practice however, the rules tend to depend on each other, and instead of just adding rules, existing rules need to be changed. Visual constraint rules combine ideas from rule-based programming and constraint programming to create declarative forward-chaining-like rules that can be used in a more modular way to support iterative programming. Libraries of visual descriptions can be built and reused to compose complex behavior, which makes exploring the space of possible descriptions of simulations easier. This is valuable for the intended educational use of Cartoonist, a visual programming environment to build simulations. Furthermore, constraint rules also provide a way to describe a variety of parallel behaviors that are important in simulations, yet are not supported by similar systems.

Human–Computer Interaction, 2003
In this paper, we have discussed the design of CoMPASS and the theoretical foundations that it is... more In this paper, we have discussed the design of CoMPASS and the theoretical foundations that it is based on. CoMPASS is a hypertext system that presents students with external, graphical representations in the form of concept maps as well as textual representations both of which change dynamically as students traverse through the domain and make navigational decisions. In a study in which middle school students used CoMPASS, we analyzed students' navigation paths as well as their learning outcomes. A comparison class in which students used the system without the maps for navigation provided us with information about students' use of the maps for navigation and its effect on their learning. We found that students who used the maps version of the system performed significantly better in a concept mapping test as well as an essay test and their navigation was more focused. We have discussed the findings of the study and its implications for designing hypertext systems.

Educational Psychologist, 2005
This article discusses the change in the notion of scaffolding from a description of the interact... more This article discusses the change in the notion of scaffolding from a description of the interactions between a tutor and a student to the design of tools to support student learning in project-based and design-based classrooms. The notion of scaffolding is now increasingly being used to describe various forms of support provided by software tools, curricula, and other resources designed to help students learn successfully in a classroom. However, some of the critical elements of scaffolding are missing in the current use of the scaffolding construct. Although new curricula and software tools now described as scaffolds have provided us with novel techniques to support student learning, the important theoretical features of scaffolding such as ongoing diagnosis, calibrated support, and fading are being neglected. This article discusses how to implement these critical features of scaffolding in tools, resources, and curricula. It is suggested that if tools are designed based on the multiple levels of the student understanding found in a classroom, tools themselves might be removed to achieve fading.
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Papers by Roland Hübscher