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ACADEMIC YEAR	2009
NAME	YACHI, Masahiro
TITLE	A Method to Create Educational Tools with Visually Captured Learners' Interests
ABSTRACT	This dissertation proposes a method to create educational tools with visually captured learners' interests, for building learning environment based on learner's context. Learners' motivation is one of the large topics in education field. This research is an attempt to introduce learner's participation in educational tools authoring process, to use learners' interests directly into their educational tools, that may raise their motivation. This research focused on video medium, to bring learner's context into educational contents. Video medium can directly capture the concrete image of learners' experience or learner's expected experience, without translating into language. While its current use in education focuses on effective transition of knowledge by guiding the learners' viewpoint, the educational tools proposed in this dissertation give an interface for learners to observe their own unedited video footage, and asked them find the viewpoint of their own. This requirement for these educational tools are as follows; 1) learners to bring their own unedited video footage, 2) learning supporters to create video editing tool that fits and guides the learning activity, and 3) appropriate interface to support learner's interaction in the learning community. To create such educational tools, this research introduces an educational tool authoring system, Partage. Partage is a web-application, which consists of 2 servers; server for managing and delivering video, and server for customizing and providing video editing functions. In total 5-year experiments, 348 learners in 2 elementary schools and 2 universities have experienced the educational tools made by Partage. In the period for integrated study at an elementary school, students created their videos to introduce their surrounded environment to visitors. These videos were made of directly captured learners' viewpoints, without using storyboards. Students first edited the video to create the structures, and put their narration in both Japanese and English afterwards. In an English activity at an elementary school, teachers and students created electronic picture cards with visually captured items available in learner's daily life. This activity introduced a teacher-children collaborative model to create and use their personalized teaching materials, with pronunciation support for interactive whiteboards. In an English class at a university, students post-recorded their voices into video, which is originally in their mother tongue, to practice English conversations in specific situations. This activity made learners to review and discuss on their translation and recordings multiple times, and got used to the actual situation of the language use. In an English and a specialized course at a university, learners used a streaming lecture video player with note taking interface, which automatically adjusts the playback status of video by analyzing learners' note taking. This activity allows learners to train their listening and note taking skills, by using their favorite lecture video recorded in their target language. In all empirical practices, learners were learning through their own context, instead of learning through the finished video contents. They were performing their learning activity by repeated trial and error editing, with video-editing tools provided by Partage. This research gives a chance to use learner's video as a learning material and provided editing-tools for learners to learn how to learn using learner's context, which was proved to raise learners' motivation. Additionally, these tools realized a process to raise active learners, who have a will to solve the similar problems in everyday world, without any supports from the tools. In the dissertation, the necessity of learners' interests in learning environment is described in chapter 1, and the characteristics of video medium and video editing functions follows in chapter 2, to propose a method to create educational tools using learners interests, for specific learning needs. Chapter 3 describes the design and implementation of the system, and its performance evaluation. Chapter 4 summarizes 4 empirical practices in language education, and chapter 5 to 8 describes each practice in detail. Chapter 9 evaluates the method to create educational tools with visually captured learner's interests, based on the practices, and chapter 10 concludes this dissertation. Keywords: Video Medium, Video Editing, Motivation, Learner's Interest, Language Education
CONTACT	To obtain the whole paper, please contact; YACHI, Masahiro (yachi at sfc.wide.ad.jp)

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