SELF Platform—A Teacher-Centric Collaborative Authoring System

I am glad to share that an article on SELF Platform has been published in the Journal of Applied Collaborative Systems.

Meena Kharatmal & Nagarjuna G. (2009).  SELF Platform—A Teacher-Centric  Collaborative  Authoring System. Journal of Applied Collaborative Systems, 1(2), pp. 67-82.

The full article can be downloaded from the journals website or from the publications page of my blog.

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.

what is so different about GNOWSYS

Gnowsys can be used to represent structural knowledge, process modelling, as far as scientific knowledge is concerned. But then there also exists several other modelling tools such as—OBO-edit, Protege, OPM, KEGG, Virtual Cel, Cell Designer, Reactome, GO, etc. which can as well represent knowledge. So then, an obvious query that comes to my mind is  what is so different about Gnowsys? Isn’t it just an addition to the existing modelling tools. Nagarjuna explained that the differences are in the form mentioned below:

One of them is the architecture of Gnowsys itself being different with the other tools. As per the gnowsys architecture, everything that goes in is a node for e.g. concept, concept type, instance, relation, relation type, attributes, attribute type, are all stored as nodes, but in the form of networked nodes. A node cannot have meaning on its own. Its meaning is established only by its neighborhood. For instance, X is related to Y, and it can have many such simple relations.  This is in accordance, with the theory that knowledge exists in a network. If we want to understand what is force, then its understanding can be acquired depending on what relations does the concept force shares with other concepts like, mass, inertia, acceleration, etc.

Gnowsys can create versions even if there is a single (simple) change to a node. This change can be in the form of either adding a node, editing a node, adding a relation, editing a relation, deleting a relation. From this list even if there is change in just one kind, then also it can create versions and record the history. This kind of change is accordance with the degrees of conceptual change that Paul Thagard explains in his book Conceptual Revolutions. According to Thagard,  conceptual change can occure when there is addition of concepts, addition of relations. With this model of versioning, gnowsys can record the changes that ocurs in people’s conceptual framework, thus enabling to trace the conceptual changes.

Another difference is that gnowsys does not store knowledge in any kind of file system. It is on the web, in another way to put it, gnowsys does not ask in which file format should it save the knowledge created. But at the same time, it can possibly exchange to various formats that of OWL.

The other difference is that gnowsys can store multiple ontologies. Using just one application of Gnowsys, it would be possible to store structural knowledge, process, metabolic pathways, etc. It will be interesting to see the multiple ontologies by importing a few of the existing ontologies (can be cell division, gene ontology, metabolic pathways, environment ontology,  etc.)  from the public domain and from several different places and allow these ontologies to store in gnowsys.

It would be useful to know, if there are other differences.

This excerpt is based on discussion over tea.

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.

“what the learner already knows” & depmap

I have been reading Ausubel’s classroom assimilation theory (1978) from time to time as his theory has form the basis of the prevailing science education research especially in the area of concept maps.

Ausubel’s principle, “what the learner already knows” means that students come to the classroom with a prior understanding of science through their everyday experience, commom sense knowledge, etc. He further goes ahead and suggests that we as science educators need to ascertain this fact first and “teach the learner accordingly”.

Now that we are creating a network of pre-requisite concepts or a dependency network for a teaching sequence, we are claiming that there are certain concepts which the learner should understand first and then progressively learn the further depending concepts.

I am just trying to make connections with the depmap work and Ausubel’s principle.

People are welcome to create dependency network (depmap) atwww.gnowledge.org.

One can view some featured maps. A few sample of depmaps from physics, chemistry and biology are featured for providing a glimpse of the depmaps.

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.

pathway modelling of glycolysis in gnowsys

As final year project of B.Tech in Bioinformatics, Pradnya, Lakshmi, Thara students from D. Y . Patil  Institute of Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, Navi Mumbai, worked on a project on representing pathway modelling of glycolysis in gnowsys. The project involved to create dictionaries, store into gnowsys and then represent using graphviz. The project report can be viewed from the trac site.

The glycolysis pathway is represented using the transformations that each molecule undergoes. For e.g. the glucose 6 phosphate gets transformed into fructose 6 phosphate as a result of phosphorylation. Such processes in glycolysis have been mapped to represent the pathway.

process modelling of mitosis in gnowsys

As final year project of B.Tech in Bioinformatics, Ruchi student from D.Y . Patil from D. Y . Patil Institute of Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, Navi Mumbai, worked on a project on representing processes modelling of mitosis in gnowsys. The project involved to create dictionaries, store into gnowsys and then represent using graphviz. The project report can be viewed from the trac site.

The mitotic process has been represented in the form of prior-state and post-state. For e.g. in prophase, the chromatin’s prior state is thin, fibre-like and its post state is thick, condensed form. In this case, the chromatin’s properties are getting changed. In this way, we have modelled each change in the structural objects by representing the changes in the states of the object.

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
——————————————————————————————

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

—————————————–
BE SELFish
Share your Knowledge
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SELF Launch News in Media

SELF Launch got a good coverage in Media. There were reporters from Loksatta, DNA, and TV News Channel from DD News. The images are the clippings from the articles.

 Article from DNA

 Article from Indian Express

Article from Loksatta