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.

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.

SELF Board Meeting

SELF Project Board Meeting in Mumbai from 26th Jan to 1st Feb 2007.

The Board meeting was organized with the international partners from Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Bulgaria, Argentina, India to discuss the issues related to budget, progress, of the project. The Board discussed on several issues pertanining to the SELF project related to the SELF Platform, Legal Standards, Communication strategies, Learning Standards, Quality Assurance Strategies, Technology.

Collection of Photos of the Board Meeting

SELF Board Members in Mumbai