We did it!! Our paper has been accepted to Educational Technology Research & Development!! I am truly moved to have been accepted into a journal that I have long admired—a journal that is synonymous with Educational Technology!! Since my master’s program, this has been one of the journals I have always held in high regard, so I am overwhelmed with emotion to have a paper accepted here. The theme of the accepted paper is “Conomi+,” the final project I was involved with at BEAT.

This project started with a question about collaborative filtering: Is it truly beneficial for learning to recommend learning content that perfectly matches a learner’s interests? We conducted our research based on the hypothesis that by recommending learning content that is “close but not exact” to a learner’s interests, we could broaden the scope of their background knowledge and improve their English vocabulary proficiency (top-down processing). We were also able to obtain a patent for this algorithm.

I am deeply grateful to Professor Kitamura at Tokyo Keizai University and Professor Matsukawa at Osaka University, who have always supported me, for their help in getting this paper accepted. Without these two professors, this acceptance would not have been possible. I am very thankful to both of them. Thank you very much. I would also like to thank the reviewers. I learned a great deal from the process.

I am currently working on other research with these two professors as well, and I look forward to turning that work into research results too.

Alright! Time to work even harder!!

Yamada, M., Kitamura, S., Matsukawa, H., Misono, T., Kitani, N. & Yamauchi, Y.Collaborative filtering for expansion of learner’s background knowledge in online language learning: Does “top-down” processing improve vocabulary proficiency?, Educational Technology Research & Development, in printing

Project Page
The University of Tokyo BEAT http://fukutake.iii.u-tokyo.ac.jp/archives/beat/