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.

we, the power of people

Today April 30, 2009 was the voting day for Mumbai, Maharashtra, India for the 15th Loksabha Elections.

Yes, as a responsible citizen I did Vote !!

It was really a very easy affair. It took just 10-15 min. of time to vote. But before voting day, it was worth to know about the registration procedures, voters list, about the constituenciences, to know the candidates with their detail profiles, and other related information. I think this election mostly used the internet technology to spread the awareness and share the information. The websites and organizations such as jaagore.com, myobv.com, ceomaharashtra.gov.in have been very useful to have the information.

The results of the Loksabha elections will be up on the 16th May 2009. Let us see..

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.

focus group meeting

During the episteme3, our presentations on Refined Concept Maps, gnowledge.org generated interest among few participants. A focus group meeting for more interaction, collaboration was planned after today’s lunch. The members included Dr. Vrunda Prabhu, Dr. Brian, Prof. H.C.Pradhan, Dr. Nagarjuna, Ms. Meena. The group from City University, New York have  a repository of concept maps on mathematics based on their research work, students’ essays, etc. Prof. Pradhan shared his research on concept maps on physics and ways to analyze the concepts based on the links, distance. Our research group (Nagarjuna and Meena) shared our  research work on refined concept maps on biology  domain, and how the gnowledge.org can help build a  roadmap of knowledge from any given domain. The group also discussed on how to use the cognitive distance, semantic proximity for analyzing the concepts in a network.

This seems a useful outcome of the episteme-3 conference for our research group. Let us see how it proceeds.

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.

episteme-3

Our research study on Refined Concept Maps for Science Education: A Feasibility Study got presented today in the Episteme-3 conference in HBCSE, Mumbai, India. The main highlights of the paper presentation have been on demonstrating the students’ ease of using the refined concept maps i.e. to apply a minimal set of relation names (linking words), without any loss of knowledge. The RCM method was compared with other two methods: description and traditional concept maps. We applied ANOVA and T-Test for statistical analysis. The study indicated an increase in the number of correct relations for the domain of nucleus and mitochondria. The relation names served as facilitator or an anchoring device for representing knowledge.

Episteme 3 is part of Episteme series of biennial conferences that is organized by HBCSE.

conceptual dependency map

As part of the Structure and Dynamics of Knowledge project, our lab at HBCSE has developed  a web-based community portal for creating a repository of conceptual dependencies or pre-requisites that are required for creating a learning path in science education. A node is mapped with another node using the depends-on and required-for relations. These maps would aid in understanding how to create a sequence for teaching a particular topic.

One can join and create depmap at http://www.gnowledge.org and can also subscribe to the community mailing list.

Farewell to our Director

Today, our Centre Director, HBCSE, Prof. Arvind Kumar retired. We had a small farewell. He served as Director of HBCSE for 14 years.

CMC2008

Hmm. While i am writing this post, our paper on Exploring the roots of rigor is being presented in the CMC2008 conference at Tallinn and Helsinki. I am not physically attending the conference. But I am doing the best I can do by sitting in my office here in Mumbai, India. Since the time the detailed program was announced, I have been going through the papers which might be of my interest and relevant to my research work. I am interacting with those researchers and informing them to attend our session on thursday. Even before the conference began, I have been already getting emails from researchers and our discussions have begun. Some are keen to continue the discussion after the conference, as they are busy in this conference week. That is really a good sign and a good outcome of the conference.

Hmm so I am virtually in the conference