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By Joel Deshaye
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Photo by Joel Deshaye for the College of Graduate Studies & Research |
It’s a long way from South America, but research at the University of Saskatchewan could soon be helping students in towns all over Colombia.
Juan Diego Zapata-Rivera, a doctoral student in computer science at the U of S, has already shown that the software he helped design can improve communication in educational contexts.
Now Zapata-Rivera hopes to bring technology he designed here to his home country of Columbia. He believes problems like crime and poverty can be reduced if new technologies can be used to improve the education system there.
He is helping to develop a system called I-Help that uses artificially intelligent programs called "agents" to help students contact each other and share information. By analysing data provided by the participants, the agents help students with questions find students with answers. And if the students don’t have answers, the agents find teachers who do.
The computer interface will help teachers know more about their students, says Zapata-Rivera. With today’s large classes, he says we need to be able to teach groups with diverse needs. But right now, "if you are teaching 100 students it is impossible to go to every student and ask them what they know."
In the future, he says, "we won’t be teaching the same thing for everyone. There might be one student who doesn’t know how to turn on the computer. That’s what I should teach him, how to turn on the computer. Another student might be an expert and I should teach him something else."
Zapata-Rivera’s main project, ViSMod (Visualization of Student Models), could be used with I-Help to enhance the use of computers for collaboration in educational contexts.
ViSMod will let the students express their opinions about their knowledge. The computerized agent then shares this information with teachers so that they can know their students’ individual aptitudes and abilities and then help them accordingly.
Using special graphs, students represent their knowledge visually. They can enlarge or shrink colored bubbles that represent different abilities. A student might enlarge a bubble for a particular mathematical concept if they think they are proficient in that area.
Then the computerized agent brings the information to the teacher so that the teacher and student can collaborate to assess the student’s performance.
I-Help is the umbrella project for ViSMod and is available to U of S students in some classes. I-Help is an on-line public forum for posing questions, replying, and exchanging information. But it doesn’t have to be public. "There are private discussions using agents and your agent is going to contact someone who knows about your question," says Zapata-Rivera.
Zapata-Rivera credits Dr. Jim Greer, his supervisor, for keeping him motivated. He and Greer have published papers on ViSMod and on a similar project called ConceptLab. They have traveled to promote both projects.
But Zapata-Rivera is most interested in applying his knowledge. "I want this to be used. That’s why I’m here. I’m planning to use this with some schools in Colombia."
He plans to visit Colombia next year before moving there when his wife is finished her master’s degree and when his newborn son will be ready to travel. He wants his research to have a positive impact for the Colombian people.
"We are a country with many problems. We have problems with guerrillas and drugs," he says, and adds that the focus of many good people is on solving problems like crime. But he believes education must also be a priority. "Some people think it is only rich people who can afford such a system [in which new technologies are used to improve education]. But I don’t believe so. I think poor people should be able to use this kind of system to develop and create their own ideas and use them to help themselves."
"That’s why I’m going back [to Colombia]. I hope I will be working full time with my own group trying to expand the benefits of this program in different regions. We have to do this to change our international image."
Joel Deshaye writes profiles of U of S graduate students as part of a fellowship with the College of Graduate Studies and Research.
