When a metaphorical game succeeds, it succeeds because it creates structurally similar cognitive demands—not because it is fun, novel, or symbolic.

In other words, the brain doesn’t care about your metaphor. It cares about what it has to think about during the activity.

From a cognitive architecture viewpoint, activities are not designed to “create engagement,” “break up the session,” or “get people talking.” Those may be side benefits, but they are never the goal. The purpose of an activity is to create conditions where the learner must activate, retrieve, apply, or integrate the target schema.

When aligned to cognitive architecture, interactive activities can beautifully satisfy SDT’s psychological needs: Autonomy: choosing strategies, making decisions Competence: clear and informational feedback, achievable challenge Relatedness: coordinating, negotiating, helping But motivation is a multiplier, not a substitute

Despite their increasing use, there's limited evidence that AI-generated avatars significantly improve learning outcomes.

A study by Sung and Mayer (2012) suggests that any graphic in a learning experience will fall into one of these three categories: Instructive images: These visuals directly support learning and facilitate essential cognitive processing of core concepts. For example, a diagram illustrating Porter’s Five Forces can help students better understand this business strategy framework. Decorative images: These graphics enhance aesthetics but don’t influence learning. For example, an image of a business handshake can be visually appealing but won’t support or obstruct students’ understanding of negotiation strategies. Distracting images: Sung and Mayer call this category “seductive” images. While these visuals may relate to the topic, they impede learning because they require extraneous cognitive processing. As an example, consider a complex organizational chart of a full corporation in a lesson on team leadership. The image connects broadly to the lesson but also highlights a lot of irrelevant details, distracting students from the key concepts.

Logically if we think about feedback as correcting errors, then it makes sense that we would want pretty immediate feedback. But if we think about feedback as another presentation of the information, then a space ought to improve learning.

“Personal and Professional Support” is now the largest theme by far, stealing most of its new ground from “Technical Assistance & Troubleshooting.”

First, we prompt seven state-of-the-art generative text-to-image models (DALL-E 3, Midjourney v6, Firefly 2, Imagen 2, Imagine, Realistic Vision, and Stable Diffusion XL Turbo) to create 10,320 synthetic marketing images, using 2,400 real-world, human-made images as input. 254,400 human evaluations of these images show that AI-generated marketing imagery can surpass human-made images in quality, realism, and aesthetics. Second, we give identical creative briefings to commissioned human freelancers and the AI models, showing that the best synthetic images also excel in ad creativity, ad attitudes, and prompt following.

The polite version yielded better learning outcomes, and the effect was amplified in learners who expressed a preference for indirect feedback, who had less computer experience, and who lacked engineering backgrounds. These results confirm the hypothesis that learners tend to respond to pedagogical agents as social actors, and suggest that research should focus less on the media in which agents are realized, and place more emphasis on the agent's social intelligence.

Neuroscience techniques can only reliably answer “how” people behave or process information, but they should never answer “why” people behave the way they do.

<p>The purpose of this project is to support a personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning experience. Central to the study introduced here is the <a href="http://communitiesofinquiry.com/sub/coi_model.html">model of a community of inquiry</a> that constitutes four elements essential to an educational experience: </p> <ul> <li><a href="http://communitiesofinquiry.com/sub/cognitive.html">Cognitive Presence</a></li> <li><a href="http://communitiesofinquiry.com/sub/social.html">Social Presence</a></li> <li><a href="http://communitiesofinquiry.com/sub/teaching.html">Teaching Presence</a></li> <li><a href="http://communitiesofinquiry.com/sub/methodology.html">Methodology</a></li></ul>

Some students spend many hours communicating asynchronously, having a much richer dialogue than could have been possible through the best face-to-face facilitation.