Ben Chang

National Central University | NCU · Graduate Institute of Learning and Instruction

This paper examines and outlines the future exploration of AI companions, focusing on three main areas. Firstly, it defines AI companions as sophisticated AI entities designed for supporting and enhancing human experiences in daily activities, such as learning, working, and others. They encompass emotional, social, and practical aspects of daily li...

Indonesian workers in Taiwan have been taking synchronous online courses to enhance their education for several years. Still, the most crucial part of a synchronous course, the interaction quality, in the past, in general, was highly disturbed by the workers' busy daily work and had room to improve. Therefore, improving online interaction quality i...

Form-focused deductive grammar learning approach is an effective way to facilitate language learners to memorize atomistic grammatical rules. However, beyond retaining isolated grammar rules, learners can benefit from using web based concept map, a visualized utility, to overlap grammar rules and achieve holistic comprehension. Therefore, this rese...

Cognisant that the examination-driven culture in most Asian schools will hinder future educational innovation, a group of concerned Asian researchers started collaboration in 2014 to develop a theory to serve as a guide to design interest- driven learning activities. This endeavour then spawned the development of the Interest-Driven Creator (IDC) T...

Social networks provide traditional concept mapping of new opportunities for concept construction with grouping, social interaction, and collaborative functions. However, little effort has been made to explore the effects of social network–supported concept mapping compared with traditional individual concept construction. This paper explores the e...

On social network sites, students establish relationships with peers and teachers, and they prefer to foster friendships with people who exhibit similar characteristics to them. However, the rapid changes and complications of information sharing and social networks creates difficulty in understanding students’ homophily in social learning activitie...

The interest-driven creator (IDC) theory is being developed as a group endeavor by Asian researchers to articulate a holistic learning design theory for future education in Asia. The theory hypothesizes that students, driven by interest, can be engaged in the creation of knowledge (generating ideas and artifacts). By repeating this creation process...

p class="3">Today’s learners can easily share their thoughts on their social networks, and this movement, undoubtedly, has been affecting their learning. However, learners in such an ad hoc social network environment need a deliberate design to support their idea sharing and concept exchange. Gaining insights into how to stimulate concept sharing i...

Asian education is known for its examination-driven orientation, with the downsides of distorting the processes of learning and teaching, diminishing students’ interest in learning, and failing to nurture twenty-first century competencies among students. As a group of Asian researchers, we have been developing Interest-Driven Creator (IDC) Theory,...

This study explored the potential of Second Life (SL), a popular multi-user virtual online environment, for university counseling. University students (n = 312) were asked to evaluate three counseling channels (i.e., traditional face-to-face, internet, and SL) based on a range of media features deemed relevant and important to counseling and to ass...

Social media can benefit English as a foreign language (EFL) learning, but learners need a deliberate approach to pursue deeper learning. To this end, the aim of this study was to design a prewriting activity using a mobile-based concept map to assess participants’ writing performance in different aspects of writing. The designed prewriting activit...

The effects of video gaming have been explored extensively in many learning-related fields. However, limited research has investigated whether the frequencies of exposing to gaming environments influence students' Chinese reading comprehension, arithmetic word problem test, spatial recognition, and graphical patterns recognition. To address this is...

With the advantages of an engaged and authentic role-play game (RPG), this study aims to develop an RPGenhanced English for specific purposes (ESP) vocabulary-acquisition framework, providing teachers and students a systematic way to incorporate RPG into ESP learning. The framework is composed of five parts: Goal, three-level vocabulary sets, RPG c...

This study examined how to foster pupils' mathematical communication abilities by using tablet PCs. Students were encouraged to generate math creations (including mathematical representation, solution, and solution explanation of word problems) as their teaching materials and reciprocally tutor classmates to increase opportunities for mathematical...

Peer response is useful to improve student writing. However, traditional peer response takes a single mode, which has some problems, such as effort for preparation of documents or ambiguous feedback. To address these problems, this study presents two peer response approaches, that is, an integrative approach and a game-based integrative approach. A...

This study aims to investigate how cognitive styles and the levels of prior abilities influence frustration tolerance and learning achievement in an interactive group-based videogame named "Multiple-Choice Practice Island." In the aspect of cognitive styles, differences between field dependent and field independent students were explored. The resul...

Although well-designed scaffolding may assist students to accomplish learning tasks, its insufficient capability to dynamically assess students' abilities and to adaptively support them may result in the problem of overscaffolding. Our previous project has also shown that students using scaffolds to solve mathematical word problems for a long time...

Recently, research on computer-assisted language learning has been growing. However, little research is conducted to explore the strategic social interactions of students who learn English as a foreign language (EFL) in a virtual world. The purpose of the study was to investigate how 52 EFL college students engaged and interacted socially in virtua...

Competition has been prevalent in all types of childhood activities including playing, learning, and living. Studies have shown that a well-designed competitive activity can motivate students to perform at an increased level. However, there have been few research studies on the relationship between learners' preferences and performance in relation...

In classroom, group competitive game is widely believed to be a motivation-enriching strategy, and has been suggested as a way to stimulate participants' engagement. However, different students perceive the same competitive activity with different feelings. The more we understand students' characteristics, the more adaptive support we can provide s...

College students are going to face a new stage career as soon as they graduate from school, and how to assist college students to step into the career well is a very crucial issue in the college career counseling programing. Regarding the college career counseling programing, in general, the student-oriented activity helping the student to have the...

The present study explores the potential of Second Life as an alternative channel for university psychological counseling. The media affordances of traditional face-to-face counseling, internet counseling and Second Life counseling were rated along nine distinct features identified as most relevant to psychological counseling. Data collected from a...

This project analyzed the effectiveness of a city-wide wireless weather sensor network, the Taipei Weather Science Learning Network (TWIN), in facilitating elementary and junior high students ’ study of weather science. The network, composed of sixty school-based weather sensor nodes and a centralized weather data archive server, provides students...

The study reports a highly interactive classroom environment in which the students do not use the desktop, laptop or PDA with keyboard, mouse, or pen, but the hand-motion as an input method. The classroom setting is no more one student with one computer, but the whole class with a large shared display and all the students interact with their peers...

The potential of involving video game in learning is being increasingly acknowledged. In order to study the last decade game-based learning development spectrum, a meta-research based on four hundred and thirteen journal papers collected from more than seventeen technology enhanced learning journals was applied. Different perspectives, such as tech...

Technology has changed the ways we do things. Traditionally, counseling used to be in a face-to-face environment to help those in need. But today, there are more and more new technologies being applied to counseling. One of the developing trends of counseling is cyberization. College students are facing the need of counseling on their job-hunting,...

The successful adoption of technologies in classrooms, we argue, relies on a greater emphasis on content-related pedagogical models for technology enhanced learning design. We propose the content-first design, an approach to creating content sample in the one-to-one classroom—classrooms with a wireless enabled computing device available for each st...

In 2004, a city-wide weather wireless sensor network, Taipei Weather Inquiry- Based Learning Network, composed of sixty school-based weather sensor nodes and a centralized weather archive server was established to facilitate students having weather science inquiry-based learning. The network covers the whole Taipei City, collects the city's weather...

In 2004, a city-wide weather wireless sensor network, Taipei Weather Inquiry-Based Learning Network, composed of sixty school-based weather sensor nodes and a centralized weather archive server was established to facilitate students having weather science inquiry-based learning. The network covers the whole Taipei City, collects the city's weather...

In traditional computerized classroom, such as computer laboratory, each kid is equipped with one desktop (or laptop) for learning. This kind of computerized classroom, one kid one desktop, has some disadvantages. For example, the cost of establishing the classroom, like the computer laboratory, is high and the kids are constrained in their seats w...

Digital games are engaging and capturing the attention of many people around the world. Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) are quickly gaining popularity. Although most of the MMOGs on the market are designed for entertainment, more and more researchers are exploring the possibilities to apply MMOG technology in learning. These researchers...

Social interactions profoundly impact the learning processes of learners in traditional societies. The rapid rise of the Internet using population has been the establishment of numerous different styles of network communities. Network societies form when more Internet communities are established, but the basic form of a network society, especially...

Until now desktop, laptop and PDA are the major hardware technology used in establishing digital learning environment, in which the software and hardware design concept in mine is one computer one learner. The information technology design now is adult-oriented, not kid-oriented. Kids have their requirements in using information technologies, but n...

International conference meetings play important role in exchanging researchers' ideas. Further conversations are often triggered by asking questions in conferences. How to use the mobile devices computing power to increase the amount, raising the quality of interactions, and facilitating presenters in collecting audiences' questions in conferences...

The past researches indicated that game-based learning attracts and motivates children. More and more educational games are developed for children in classroom. At the same time, a growing number of children have their own portable computing devices such as personal digital assistant (PDA), notebook, tablet PC, etc. in their life. One-on-one digita...

educational computing refers to a scenario where every student in a group or class uses a computing device equipped with wireless communication capability to conduct a learning task. This paper, drawing from design experiences with our digital classroom environment series and other studies, attempts to describe a few valuable 1:1 design perspective...

The era of 1:1 educational computing environment where each student has one mobile computing device is not far away. When such technology designed for individuals is applied to group learning, several student grouping problems could be encountered. In this paper, three issues are identified to illustrate the vision of the 1:2 educational computing...

Physical manipulatives have been applied in traditional education for a long time. This paper proposes that by embedding computing power in manipulatives computers can monitor students' physical manipulations to support learning. This paper also describes the design of a digital desk prototype, called ArithmeticDesk to illustrate the vision of comp...

This paper describes a platform,that supports for one-on-one digital learning. The platform is named “DCE”, which stands for digital classroom environment. It consists of four major modules, curriculum (including activities) module, user data module, communication module, and external interface module. An application example of DCE was described an...

This paper describes the concept of educational robots and gives an experiment of using a facial expression robot as the interface of learning companion. After surveying learning companion systems we found some deficiencies about these systems. Therefore we make use of the facial expression robot in learning and try to find out a solution to make u...

This paper describes a case study on adopting TIPS pedagogy in a general physics course. The TIPS pedagogy is reviewed with ARCS model on how to motivate students by technologies, such as network and IrDA devices. This study also proposed observations of students' motivation and changing behaviors.

The era of 1:1 educational computing environment where each student has one mobile computing device is not far away. When such technology designed for individuals is applied to group learning, several student grouping problems could be encountered. In this paper, three issues are identified to illustrate the vision of the 1:2 educational computing...