SELF-Platform—A Teacher-Centric Collaborative Authoring System

HBCSE – Gnowledge Lab has developed the SELF Platform as part of the European Commission funded SELF Project # 034595 (2006-2008). A paper on SELF Platform as a teacher centric collaborative authoring system has been published at the NCOSS conference organized by CDAC, Kharghar, Navi Mumbai, May 2009.

The SELF Platform caters to a teacher to create learning materials.

The full paper is available from the publications page of my blog.

visit to somaiya college for depmap workshop

Today I planned a visit to K.J.Somaiya college of science, vidyavihar with regard to plan for organizing depmap workshop for teachers. I met the faculty from physics, chemistry, biology, botany, microbiology, education departments of junior as well as senior college.

I explained about the objectives of the depmap workshop and since it is to build a teaching sequence, it would be useful if teachers themselves create their dependency maps using the web based portal in the hands-on workshop to be conducted in gnowledge lab, hbcse.  Teacher have got a fair understanding as I also showed them some featured maps picked out from the portal.

Overall, all the teachers whom i met are interested to participate in the depmap workshop. Teachers from each department will be participating in the workshop in april, may, june.

Initially the visit was planned for about an hour, but my visit got extended for more than 2 hours. Actually I have studied for H.S.C., B.Sc. & M.Sc. from Somaiya college. When i was meeting the teachers, i too got nostalgic and to my surprise, most of the teachers could remember me as their student. So my visit got extended as I met my teachers in the corridor, labs, and was talking about my work and research. A few teachers also were keen to know about my Ph.D. work in the area of biology education. My teachers were glad to know about my progress, i being an alumni of somaiya.

I was thrilled to go back to my college, to my teachers and convey my contribution to science education.

depmap on activity—who got the food

i was mapping the topic who got the food from chapter 4- looking at
animals from the small science curriculum for class III. and this is
the route that i followed to map.

depmap on food eating habits

an interesting depmap to build a thread as :
inorder to understand the concept of animals, one need to first
observe some animals, their food eating habits. the latter can be
understood in the context of an activity. once these activities are
performed one can categorize and classify which animals eat what kind
of food and then may be understand the concept of a dog, cat, and then progressively the concept of an animal.

Small Science Curriculum is an activity based curriculum developed by
HBCSE. It focusses on teaching science through activities.

promising strands for future episteme conferences

Today, on the last day of the episteme-3 conference, we had a round table discussion on two issues: promising strands for episteme conferences; to build a community  of STME research in India. I was involved in the first round table. We reviewed the last episteme -1, episteme-2, and the current epistme-3 for the strands (or themes) of the conferences, and the outcomes. The main strands that episteme conferences will always be based on are: History and philsophy of science: its implications for science education; Cognitive basis of learning, pedagogy and curricular issues. From the discussion, atleast four strands have emerged which the participants are interested in the future epistemes. These have been: classroom based practices; affective factors in learning, science technology studies issues, integrating STME, assessment (to bring into focus), universalization of education.

The other topic also got a good involvement from the participants to building a community for science, technology, and mathematics education in India. Some of the suggestions are: to build research standards, develop knowledge portals, create summer programs, evaluate projects with collaborators, engaging with scientific institutes, universities, etc. etc.

These two topics of the round table discussion would enable us to concretize the strands of our future episteme conferences of HBCSE.

Khoj 2008 – Gurgaon

Like last year, I was invited to be a judge for the International School Competition on Science Projects in DAV Public School at Gurgaon. The projects dealt on issues of Global warming, Future Energy Sources, IT, Clean and Green City, etc. Overall the students were very enthusiastic about their models but when it came to conceptual understanding the students were found to be not so competent.

Later on the second day, I was one of the panel members for the discussion on the topic of Science Education – A Challenge. This was held for the teachers. The other members of the panel were from IITD, NCL, BARC. The panel discussed on how the teachers can help the students to generate an interest towards science, about classroom learning, conceptual understanding, relating their learning with their daily experiences, etc.

FKFT pre-conference SELF workshop, Barcelona Spain

The SELF consortium has organized a one day SELF workshop as part of the FKFT pre-conference. We are at the Universitat de Oberta Catalunya. The participants are getting hands-on sessions on creating, organizing, editing courses using the SELF Platform and Gnowledge Portal.

Workshop on collaborative building of online e-learning courses @ HBCSE

——————————————————————————————
Announcing a workshop on
“Collaborative building of online e-learning courses”

June 25, 26, 27, 2008
Gnowledge Lab, HBCSE
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The Gnowledge Lab (computer lab) of HBCSE has developed a
web-based e-learning platform for creating courses. The platform is
mainly focused on authors, content generators, translators,
instructors who wants to create course materials for dissemination of
knowledge. A glimpse of a few prototype course materials that are
being developed can be viewed from http://courses.gnowledge.org/collectionview/
The Gnowledge Lab is pleased to announce a workshop on Collaborative
building of online e-learning courses using SELF Platform, in all
languages particularly in english, marathi, or hindi.

We invite all of the staff members from HBCSE—academic, scientific,
research scholars, project, administration, technical—to participate
in this workshop.

Features of the workshop:

* Creating on-line courses in any subject using any language
* Adding & organizing lessons, glossary, faqs, test questions
* Creating personal bookshelf
* Inserting images using filemanager
* Exchanging course materials using import and export modules
* Creating versions of courses and comparing changes
* Using electronic conference room for online collaboration of courses
* The participants who will be developing content will be credited as
authors of courses automatically by the system
* The content developed will be published under GNU-FDL licence
(same as wikipedia license)

Our team will provide a demonstration on using the SELF Platform. A
training on how to type in Indian languages and publish on the
Internet will also be provided as part of the workshop.

Registration:

Interested participants can register for the workshop by sending an
email to —– self [at] hbcse.tifr.res.in —— before 20th June. The
number of participants is limited upto about 10 participants on each
day. The same workshop will be repeated on each day. So please specify
the date on which you would like to join the workshop in your email
registration. After the one day workshop you can continue to build the
courses from anywhere and collaborate using the electronic conference
room.

Venue: Gnowledge Lab ( Computer Lab – 108 )

Timings: 10:00 to 17:00

Tentative Schedule:

10:00 – 10:30 Introduction to the Gnowledge Portal & SELF Platform

10:30 – 10: 45 Quick demonstration on building on-line courses

10:45 — 11:00 Tea break (Tea and Snacks will be provided)

11:00 — 13:00 Hands-on session on building courses

13:00 — 14:00 Lunch break

14:00 — 16:00 Hands-on session on building courses

16:00 — 16:15 Tea break (Tea and Snacks will be provided)

16:15 – 17:00 Discussion on courses & Feedback

All are welcome ! Please register through —– self [at] hbcse.tifr.res.in —— for the workshop.

SELF Team & Gnowledge Team
HBCSE

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BE SELFish
Share your Knowledge
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FKFT Conference

SELF Project is organizing an international conference on “Free Knowledge, Free Technology: Education for a Free Information Society” in Barcelona, Spain from July 15-17, 2008. For detailed information about the conference please visit http://fkft.eu.

Participation is also open for “Open Documentary Contest”. Please visit here for more information.

pilot study on collaborative concept mapping

collaborative concept mapping

As part of a research study, I have begun a pilot study on students’ understanding of cell structure and function using collaborative concept mapping method. The sample is from std. IX (age 15 years) of AECS-4 school, Anushakti Nagar, Mumbai. The methodology comprises of : (i) administering a questionnaire (ii) teaching of concept mapping technique (iii) practise session on concept mapping (iv) constructing individual concept maps on the domain of cell structure and function (v) constructing collaborative concept maps on the same domain. The mode of analysis is to extract the number of concepts and number of valid relations from each task and compare it with an expert’s list of concepts and valid relations.