In learning, the gradual withdrawal of adult (eg, teacher) support, as through instruction, modeling, questioning, feedback, etc., for a child’s performance across successive engagements, thus transferring more and more autonomy to the child.
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Monthly Archive for November, 2005
Page 2 of 4
With Patrick, we are participating in this workshop in Oulu, Finland. The place is quite amazing. There is already snow all around and the temperature is ‘-8′. The daylight is quite different from what you can get in Rome. Tonight we will try to get to see the Northern Lights.
Lorenzo Viscanti stricked again. He is working on his project on the freedom of press/ideas, trying to visualize/aggregate news with opposing opinions on recent facts.
Recently he released a news search engine that fetch 150 sites and gather 1200 ca news each day.
Tags: citizen journalism, clustering, information retrieval, Latent Semantic Analysis, machine learning, politics, text data mining
Radical Cartography groups a collections of projects that explores the way of using map-based visualization to support the exploration of urban phenomena. Some maps use distortions, others simply data visualization techniques. Some other projects enhance the simple experience of a map adding multimedia content.
The whole set of projects results of extreme interest and richness.
Tags: information visualization, map algorithms, maps, urban exploration
The authors tried to make their own first impression of Nice different than the pre-packaged touristic itinerary. They cut the map, tried to alternate modes of documentation and talked to the residents about how they understand their city.
Tags: hack, maps, psychogeography, urban exploration
Location awareness (LA) is an hot topic in this period, due to its application on the development of location based services (LBS) that could offer a new gamma of opportunities for mobile users. This talk will present various attempt to incorporate LA on mobile services and the analises of some unsatisfactory obtained results. In fact, adding this features is not always positive for the users’ interaction on the device. Some results shows that automatic positioning may decrease collaborative performances. Others, shows that messaging based on location does not solve the ambiguities of context definition. The summary of the presentation will focus on research techniques used to enquiry mobile interaction design and usability of the interfaces.
Here are the slides I am presenting tomorrow at the HCI group at EPFL.
Tags: location awareness, Location Based Services, new technology
M. Esbjörnsson and A. Weilenmann. Mobile phone talk in context. In A. Dey, B. Kokinov, D. Leake, and R. Turner, editors, Modeling and Using Context, proceeding of the 5th International and Interdisciplinary Conference CONTEXT 2005, volume LNAI 3554, pages 140–154, Paris, France, July 2005. Springer.
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This paper presents a study of mobile phone calls in context. The authors argue the benefits of investigating empirically the ways in which a place is interactionally constituded as appropriate or not for a mobile phone conversation.
The findings show that availability is always negotiated and cannot be inferred a priori, as it is not always even agreed by the participants to the conversation.
Tags: Location Based Services
The Public Private Matters project set out to explore the possibility of creating a web application that would allow young people to engage with issues of power, citizenship and politics. It was intended to support the development of their active participation as citizens. A literature survey identified the need for the system to make users feel that they have a ‘voice’ and that their views ‘count’; to allow them to appreciate others’ perspectives, values and beliefs; and to identify how power, politics and citizenship acts take place in local communities as well as nationally and internationally.
?The project has led to the development of the World Power League, a prototype web-based application created in late spring and early summer 2005. It allows users to cast votes in a series of ‘duels’: two people are randomly selected from a database, and users have to vote for which they feel ought to have more power. The results of voting are automatically arrangement hierarchically in the league itself, allowing users to see the results of group voting, and to see if their votes match up with the overall tally. They can also then nominate themselves as candidates in the league by drafting a manifesto, identifying issues related to power, politics and citizenship that they would like to change, and submitting it to the system.?
Tags: education, learning technology, pedagogy, politics
In game theory, a Schelling point (also called focal point) is a solution that people will tend to use in the absence of communication, because it seems natural, special or relevant to them. The concept has been introduced by the American economist Thomas Schelling in his book The Strategy of Conflict (1960).
Consider a simple example: two people unable to communicate with each other are each shown a panel of four squares and asked to select one; if and only if they both select the same one, they will each receive a prize. Three of the squares are blue and one is red. Assuming they each know nothing about the other player, but that they each do want to win the prize, then they will, reasonably, both choose the red square. Of course, the red square is not in a sense a better square; they could win by both choosing any square. And it is the “right” square to select only if a player can be sure that the other player has selected it; but by hypothesis neither can. It is the most salient, the most notable square, though, and lacking any other one most people will choose it, and this will in fact (often) work.
From Wikipedia
Tagyu suggests tags for your content. Give it a URL or some text, and it will give you some suggestions for tags.
How does it work? Tagyu compares your text to things that other people have written and how they’ve tagged it. It uses that information to pick some tags that seem appropriate.
I found the idea extremely cool because it fits perfectly on my idea that the push for a common ontology should be collectively constructed and that the real intelligence comes from people and not from the machine.
Tags: clustering, machine learning, natural language processing, tagging, text data mining
As I am proceeding with my thesis work, I came to develop an information retrieval system for virtual post-its attached to a shared map. One of the idea I am currently exploring consists in building a procedure that puts together a keyword by keyword matrix, having them extracted from the messages left in the system.
One idea is to preserve the keyword order as extracted by our part of speech tagger, to form kind of n-grams. We plan to use this sequences to convoy more or less “energy” in the retrieval process.
Now, with Pierre, we discussed a bit this idea and he raised the concern that is difficult to defend the fact that word order is predictive of semantical structure and in turn to meaning.
If somebody in the audience has a pointer to this matter, please comment on.
(and yes, thanks in advance 
)
Tags: clustering, context, Latent Semantic Analysis, text data mining
For one to two days, players roam through the city in small groups. GPS makes it possible to know the position of the team members (and of other players or objects). To prove they’re the most worthy order of pilgrims, a team will need to demonstrate their knowledge of medieval Amsterdam by doing location-based media-assignments on the city’s history.
As they wander through the streets of medieval Amsterdam, they get in virtual phone contact with characters that provide information on locations and on the strange disappearing of the holy relic.
In the meantime, they’re competing with the other teams. GPS technology and mobile phones turn the city into a medieval playingfield. Teams can boobytrap eachother by placing bombs on the medieval streets: With a click on their gamephone the players can drop a virtual bomb at their current location that will go off in the face of a passing opponent, temporarily killing communication facilities with HQ. Running into other teams starts a confrontation between the Pilgrims – their Order determines who wins, taking away hard-earned experience points, co called Days of Poorterschap (medieval Days of Citizenship).
Tags: learning technology, Location Based Services, maps, mobile learning, new technology, pedagogy, politics, psychogeography, urban exploration
Russell Hunt wrote an essay on this theme, pointing out four different reasons why plagiarism should not be seen as evil in all cases and how education should be reconsidered in the light of technological advancements.
1. The institutional rhetorical writing environment (the “research paper,” the “literary essay,” the “term paper”) is challenged by this.
The assumption that a student’s learning is accurately and readily tested by her ability to produce, in a completely arhetorical situation, an artificial form that she’ll never have to write again once she’s survived formal education (the essay examination, the formal research paper), is questionable on the face of it, and is increasingly untenable.
2. The institutional structures around grades and certification are challenged by this.
University itself, as our profession has structured it, is the most effective possible situation for encouraging plagiarism and cheating. If I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, or improve my golf swing, or write HTML, “cheating” would be the last thing that would ever occur to me. It would be utterly irrelevant to the situation.
3. The model of knowledge held by almost all students, and by many faculty — the tacit assumption that knowledge is stored information and that skills are isolated, asocial faculties — is challenged by this.
Partisans of active learning, of problem- and project-based learning, of cooperative learning, and of many other “radical” educational initiatives, all contend that information and ideas are not inert masses to be shifted and copied in much the way two computers exchange packages of information, but rather need to be continuously reformatted, reconstituted, restructured, reshaped and reinvented and exchanged in new forms — not only as learning processes but as the social basis of the intellectual enterprise.
4. by facing this challenge we will be forced to help our students learn what I believe to be the most important thing they can learn at university: just how the intellectual enterprise of scholarship and research really works.
The clearest difference between the way undergraduate students, writing essays, cite and quote and the way scholars do it in public is this: typically, the scholars are achieving something positive; the students are avoiding something negative.
This is a nice Google map hack to display international bloggers that are interested in education and/or facilitating education based blogging.
In a recent conversation with Lorenzo Viscanti, I was raising the following points:
1. Using a supervised method for clustering can bias the results you get. As far as I know, every supervised method is based on a training set that has been prepared by an expert or that is taken from a specific and known context. This may yield some conflict witht the datasets because: a- the training set is epistemologically different from the dataset; b- the expert is not generalizable.
2. The definition of what a good cluster is cannot be mathematically determined. I partially agree on this. It is known that in Information Retrieval exists a bounch of methods for proofing the efficiency and efficacy of the retrieval functionalities.
However, the definition of what is a good cluster is based partially on human perception, which does not follow a proper logic. A couple of technique are therefore possible to apply, namely from cognitive psychology, to translate the variability of human cognition into quantitative data that is possible to comment on.
Tags: clustering, information retrieval, Latent Semantic Analysis
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