Learning support research issues have huge relation with ICT progress. This paper introduces three big innovations of ICT, and describes their contributions into learning support technologies. This paper also gives recent research issues for learning support technologies and their future's view.

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A VR-based astronomy learning support system which allowed a student to interact with the learning environment through bodily motions was developed. Proposed system consists of two learning environments. In one environment, the student looks around the stars in the virtual sky by moving a viewpoint. In another environment, the student overlooks the solar system and simulates the orbital motion of the earth by manipulating an interface device. By switching these environments and changing the observational day, the student can observe the sphere freely. Results of evaluation on manipulability showed the proposed system to be based mainly on the manipulation by bodily motions allowed to intuitively manipulate than a system to be based mainly on the mouse device.

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Direct-touch interfaces such as touch-sensitive electronic whiteboards are effective for educational use because of their intuitiveness and interactivity. However, the fact that the presenter's hands cannot avoid appearing on the screen causes two serious problems. First, the presenter's hand movement for manipulation tends to distract the audiences' attention from contents. Second, the presenter tends to occlude contents. In this paper, we developed a new electronic whiteboard system with multi-touch gestures and a special pie menu interface. This pie menu is shown behind the presenter's palm and thus invisible to the audience. It allows both novice and expert users to manipulate the contents and minimizes distraction of the audience's attention on the contents. A series of quantitative evaluations show the effectiveness of our system.

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It is very important for lecturers to give their students tuition in an understandable way. To do this, the lecturers should pay attention to how they speak in order to effectively convey the meaning of what we are trying to say to students. The lecturers' manner of speaking affects how well students understand lecturers' speech and influences the listeners' overall impression of speech. This paper examines and reports on how various acoustic features included in a lecture speech influence the understanding, and change the impression, of the speech, which is determined by performing tests involving trial subjects. We use lecture speech recorded at a university. First of all, we have conducted a questionnaire for students who attended to a lecture for each lecture. And, relationships between items of the questionnaire were investigated. The result showed that satisfaction level and intelligibility of a lecture for students depends on the lecturers' manner of speaking. In addition to this, the manner of speaking was highly related to various acoustic features such as rate of utterance. In this paper, we focused on the following acoustic features: rate of utterance, loudness, intonation, vocal clarity, and short pauses, and analyzed these features. This study discusses on correlations between these features included in the lecture speech and the impression of listeners based on results of questionnaires that were answered by students.

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Some of the unnatural co-occurrence expressions consisting of a noun n, a case particle c, and a verb v (<n, c, v>) used by learners of the Japanese language are caused by errors of verb selection. This paper proposes a method of providing candidates for appropriate alternative verbs to replace the v in learners' co-occurrence input <n, c, v>. We assume that a verb of unnatural co-occurrence (an error verb) tends to have an occurring environment similar to an appropriate verb (a possible correction of the error verb). Based on this hypothesis, the method produces candidates for appropriate alternative verbs that are estimated to comprise natural co-occurrences with the <n, c> portion of learners' co-occurrence input using statistical information from a large-scale Japanese corpus in descending order of occurring environment similarity with the original verb. Results of international students editing their own Japanese compositions using a system incorporating the proposed method showed that unnatural co-occurrence expressions in their compositions were reduced by 30%. This result shows that the proposed system is useful in aiding Japanese learners' word selection in co-occurrence expressions.

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Paper-Top Interface (PTI) is the integration of notebook (paper) and digital learning material for promoting annotation as note-taking in a class. We designed and developed a PTI prototype system that uses a visual-marker-based AR (Augmented Reality) technique and projects digital learning materials onto the corresponding pages on the notebook on a desk. One of the PTI's advantages is that a student is promoted to write his/her learning outcomes on the pages of his/per notebook using pencils (and/or pens). We conducted a preliminary experiment. The experimental results revealed that the PTI is not inferior to popular note-taking styles and can be accepted by students.

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We developed a new type of lecture recording system which can synthesize on a lecturer's PC screen, blackboard writing and a lecturer's image in real time by using a video camera. This system can automatically make the lecture video that integrates blackboard writing and a lecturer's image with a teaching material. The efficiency of the review rises because the student watches the lecture video made by this system. Utility of this system was considered by the comparison verification experiment with a past technique and the evaluation of the student and the lecturer.

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This research proposes an integrated learning media with support of various learning activities. The integrated learning media is one that integrates the following components: (a) the components of learning activities about the learner information, the learning purposes, activities and actions; (b) the learning function components which can display, edit, and mash up the learning information; and (c) the learning outcomes/histories generated in learning activities. To achieve the integrated learning media, first we arrange and systematize the concepts about learning activities and the relations among these concepts as an ontology. Then, we combine the learning function components developed based on the ontology into the integrated learning media. In the media, all of the learning outcomes/histories are managed according to SCORM standards. Thus, the learner can get support of various learning activities. Additionally, the learning outcomes/histories can be accumulated, shared and reused in the learning community.

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A computer-assisted instruction system for self-teaching of discriminating Chinese four tones was developed, and provided through the internet to Japanese college students in beginner's course of Chinese language. By selecting suitably, according to the ability of each student, among uses of screening, practicing and reviewing, and also among bi-syllabic word lists with different degree of difficulty, the required learning time for achieving the goal could be reduced. Precise acoustical data of the Chinese tones were utilized for designing the CAI system, Inexperience in tonal perception by Japanese students was taken into consideration in the method of compiling word lists. Characteristics of the errors found in the scores of examinations given to about 100 students were analyzed, and they were referred to in constructing the CAI system. Improvement of the scores before and after practicing by using the CAI system was examined for 40 students, and it was ascertained that the CAI system served as an effective supporting technique of self-teaching for the retarded students to catch up on their study.

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Hands-on experiences are indispensable to train IT operators adding to theoretical learning. Especially in order to understand network behavior and to acquire network operational techniques, it is important. However, students cannot make any misoperation on the Internet because it became a social infrastructure and it is difficult to make changes on Internet configurations. In order to solve this dilemma, some hands-on environments separated from real environments are proposed and implemented. Meanwhile, as evaluation of network techniques becomes a hot topic, several network testbeds are implemented in the world. In this paper, we describe the StarBED and SpringOS can satisfy the requirements to build hands-on environment. Moreover, we explain instances; "SOI Asia 2008 Spring Global E-Workshop" and "Hands-on for Network Incidents" which used StarBED, to demonstrate the effectiveness.

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This paper proposes a method to diagnose and to grade learners' Prolog programs. To diagnose a learner's program, both the learner program and correct answer programs are converted into graphs where their nodes correspond to sub-goals and links corresponds to data flows. Sub-goals are then classified into one of three components of recursive way of thinking. The learner program is diagnosed by comparing its graph with the graphs of the correct programs. We evaluated the system's grading by comparing it with teacher's grading. Correlation coefficients for two programs are both 0.944.

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Self-directed learning in hyperspace requires learners to self-regulate their learning process. In particular, planning the navigation paths is one of the important self-regulation activities. However, it would be quite hard for learners to accomplish navigation planning in case they could not obtain information necessary for navigation planning from a learning resource such as Web-based learning resource. Our approach to this issue is to author such information from Web-based learning resources to attach it to them as metadata. This paper discusses what kind of information is necessary for navigation planning, and proposes an authoring method including metadata description with XML. This paper also demonstrates an authoring support system, which aims at reducing authoring load by extracting the information for navigation planning from the Web-based learning resource to present it to the author.

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Current fitness activities that include daily exercises play a greater role than ever before. This paper proposes a cooperative system focusing on the rope jumping for skill development of learners. This system was designed and developed based on video-diaries in SNS (Social Networking Service). In order for learners to explore and develop skills, the system provides a recommendation message having a hyperlink to another article and a graph that presents birds-eye-view of relevant skills with hyperlinks. The pattern of the message is selected by the characteristic information of a physical activity from a video. A graph is generated by the track back among diaries. Finally, an evaluation of the system revealed that the conceived functions were effective for learners' exploring and developing skills through browsing activities and an awareness of the relationship between skills on the system.

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In this paper, we describe an improvement of AirTransNote, a student notes sharing system which facilitates collaborative and interactive learning in a regular lecture at conventional classrooms. Former AirTransNote employs ultrasonic pens and PDAs for collecting student notes on paper sheet. However the facilities required special skills and extra burdens for learners. We introduced anoto-based pens to reduce the burdens, and compared it with former system. From the experimental lectures, we confirmed that the simplicity and the stability of the anoto-based pen facilitate active participation of low-performing students. Also these factors reduced high-performing students' uneasy feeling for checking note by the system. Although the anoto-based pen is feasible, it requires teachers to manage relations between a penID, a learner, and a seat position. In order to relieve the burdens on managing relations, we proposed an instant sheet mapping method. The method utilizes learners' signatures on a special seatmap sheet, and dynamically relates the penID and the seat position from the signatures. We conducted an experimental lecture session at an elementary school, and confirmed the function effectively works for younger schoolchildren.

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This paper proposes a new Project-based Learning (PBL) environment for software engineering education. In the proposed environment, teachers can easily monitor values of several metrics, which measure product or process status for each student group, and compare these values between the groups. We confirmed through test-classes that the proposed environment enabled us to better advise and assist groups.

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The purpose of this paper is to evaluate efficacy on SceneKnowledge. Questionnaire method was employed during two academic years in order to clarify the efficacy from the following three viewpoints, (1) the merits of using video scene for learning, (2) the learning outcomes that students annotate to video scene, (3) the learning outcome that students summarize the whole course by selecting about 10 scenes. As the result of the analysis, it is found that (1) the divided scene and the comments written on a scene enabled students to summarize the contents. Secondly, (2) the students were able to understand the contents of the course by reflecting their own ideas and rethinking as to write comments. Furthermore, they were able to think deeply on the contents by comparing their own comments with others'. It encouraged students to get more interest on the contents. Lastly, (3) the students were motivated to use the functions of SceneKnowledge during the course because they were required to submit assignments, which was to make summary on the course. They referred to their viewpoints in order to arrange their own ideas for the assignment.

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In this study, we focused on the river phenomenon, which can be seen through the portable terminal. This was useful for the river field observation. The movie contains two kinds of phenomena which are difficult to understand from factor of time scale and spatial scale, for example, fluctuations of flood discharge in flood and micro habitats of benthic organisms etc. As a result of the user's behavioral observation and questionnaire survey, it was found that the user paid special attention to the hierarchical organization of the river system and its habitat subsystems by taking information from the movie contents into the field. And the user was able to observe the river phenomenon from various aspects.

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