introducing rigor in concept maps

i have been working in the area of refined concept maps for science education. so far we have communicated our research in conferences on science education, concept mapping, etc.

recently, our work got published in Springer’s LNAI  book.  the paper ‘introducing rigor in concept maps’ was presented in the 18th international conference on conceptual structures 2010 at kuching, malaysia. the paper talks about applying rigor by focusing on relation names, the re-representation of sentences to propositions in RDF triples format, and how the refined concept mapping methodology can act as a bridge between informal and formal models of knowledge bases.

Meena Kharatmal & Nagarjuna G.: Introducing rigor in concept maps. In M. Croitoru, S. Ferre, and D. Lukose (Eds.), ICCS 2010, LNAI 6208, pp. 199-202, Springer Verlag 2010.

I acknowledge:

• HBCSE for providing with funding support for the conference

• ICCS 2010 for providing sponsorship for tutorials and workshops

epiSTEME 4 poster and brochure

the epiSTEME 4 poster and brochure are ready and uploaded on the conference website:

http://www.hbcse.tifr.res.in/episteme4

both print version and web version are ready for circulation.

http://episteme4.hbcse.tifr.res.in/uploads/episteme-4-poster

http://episteme4.hbcse.tifr.res.in/uploads/episteme-4-brochure-outside

http://episteme4.hbcse.tifr.res.in/uploads/episteme-4-brochure-inside

just to add that both the poster and brochure have been designed using inkscape by me and sugra.

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.

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.