Creative Engagements - 2005 Conference Session 8

Thursday 14th July - Saturday 16th July 2005
Mansfield College, Oxford

Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers

Session 8: Engagement with Space, Place and Case
Chair: Pericles Tangas

Spending Time Writing Rhymes: Representations of Schooling, Writing, and the Teenage Experience in Rap
Susan Weinstein
Department of English, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

Rap is a particularly self-referential musical genre. One of the ways that rap talks about itself is by representing the experience of the young, aspiring artist developing his or her (though usually his) lyrical skills at home, on the streets, and in school. Given the immense popularity of rap among adolescents from all socio-economic and ethno-racial categories, it is instructive for educators to be familiar with the ways that rappers construct literacy and schooling in their lyrics. After all, as with most popular art forms, rap both reflects and influences the experiences of those who listen to it. The lyrics of popular rappers, therefore, have much to teach educators about the messages that are being generated by and communicated to contemporary teenagers about the value of schooling, of out-of-school learning, of creativity, and of writing. This presentation will specifically look at the lyrics of Kanye West, Mos Def, and Nas, among others, and will draw on the presenter’s ethnographic research with urban youths in Chicago, Illinois and Baton Rouge, Louisiana to examine how current aspiring rappers are continuing and/or challenging the representations of established artists.

A Virtual Character for Face to Face Interaction with Children in E-learning
Roya Foroughi
Darmstadt University of Technology, Department of Computer Science, Graphical Interactive Systems (GRIS), Computer Supported Learning, Darmstadt, Germany

In the past few years advancements in internet and communication technologies have contributed to reaching new frontiers in distance and online education.
In the context of asynchronous learning, despite the increasingly improved features and infrastructures, these environments often remain uninspiring and too serious to provide a suitable learning environment for children.
In this paper we present the integration of a virtual character into an asynchronous learning platform that interacts with children during their learning process, providing them with personal greetings and useful feedback messages and real time information on their learning performance.
This feature can be considered as a complementary element aiming to compensate for lack of face to face contact with the teacher. The presence of this talking virtual human apart from providing a fun element, serves in provoking motivation and in praising children on their learning success.
In realizing this work, current standards in the area of computer supported instructions have been taken into careful consideration in order to comply with the architectural requirements and common data exchange between content and runtime environment. This ensures reusability and ease of integration of our virtual character in any standard conform learning environment.
In order to show compatibility and implementation requirements, we have integrated the virtual character into SCORM runtime environment. We intend to create a plugin from the virtual character and its necessary software to further ease the integration procedures.
The paper will discuss the pedagogical impacts and educational benefits of this work in the context of children education and will also provide an insight into learning management systems, common standards in the area of E-learning and their importance for this work. Further more the integration of the virtual human into virtual learning environments will be briefly explained.