last weekend (7-8 nov.2009) i visited the experimental school – shastralay located in vai (satara district). a visit which i was looking forward to (see my earlier post). i clubbed my trip with prof. h.c.pradhan who was visiting the school in connection with a meeting. he is on the academic advisory board of the school. we started at 6:00 am from hbcse and reached vai at about 10:30 am. the school is called shastralay.

the shastralay, funded by the kirloskars, is being run by ramesh panse, who has also been involved in setting up the gram mangal in aine. there were other people from various organisations, teachers of shastralay gathered for the meeting. before the meeting could begin, prachi natu took all of us on a tour of each subject lab to show and explain about the setup, teaching methods, students’ activities, etc. at this stage the school is upto 5th std.

after about an hour long tour of each labs, the meeting commenced. panse explained the working principles behind the school, their approach towards learning by doing science, reflection on the initial stages of setup, and planning for further developments. h.c.pradhan gave very valuable suggestions towards shaping up and enhancing the experimental school from pedagogical point of view.

then we had a fantastic lunch break. the lunch was typical of the region–bajara bhakri topped with loni, gajarachi koshimbir, thecha, karlyachi chatni, bhaji, dahi. although the bhaji was spicy, we all enjoyed and were content with the lunch.

the post lunch session was continuation of the meeting, where the teachers shared their experiences and was more of an interactive sessions. i also shared my inputs which have been received positively.

my experiences — personally it was very exciting visit about getting to know about shastralay. i wanted to get a glimpse about what happens at the grassroot level when it comes to education and how it is being practically implemented.

overall it was a very enriching experience for me and travelling on a field trip was fun.

it began with a discussion over the breakfast table. prerna walimbe and myself were just sharing about our work and interests. prerna from gram mangal mentioned me about the shashtralay, an experimental school in vai, satara district, where they emphasize on learning by doing. infrastructure is developed and they are hunting for people with content expertise. the school is developing subject labs for learning sciences. i found it interesting, and i mentioned that a few years back i visited an experimental school in aine – gram mangal, which is also developed on similar principles. prerna mentioned that they are following on it, and she insisted that i should pay a visit to know more. i was very much interested and was curious to observe such school.

looking forward to visit vai on 7th nov. 2009.

Today, discussion over lunch made me curious to find out who decides the changes in the scientific terms that are used in the textbook.

We were discussing about the Marathi Vishwakosh Project that HBCSE is involved in. In the early years of HBCSE, V G Kulkarni (Founder Director, HBCSE)  instigated the project on language in science. Since then, there are a few members who are working in this area.

Deshmukh explained the volumes of work that the project is coming up with. It has been decided to bring a separate volume for biology subject and produce it in three parts. Related to the scientific terminology, he mentioned that a few scientific terminology in marathi textbook has been changed and hence the members have to pay heed to the latest usage of the term. He gave two instances of such change: the marathi term for auricle has been changed from karnika to alind; for ventricle it has been changed from javanika to nilay;  the other instance of marathi term for skull has been changed from kavati to karkara. I was anxious to know why the name of the terms got changed, who decides that such change is required in textbook, what is the rationale behind it. May be the textbook bureau decides about these changes. Jayashree too agreed, and she added that it could be that they want to give a more specific word for a very specialized part.

But i am not yet convinced. Can a name of a scientific term change over a period of time. Well of course, if the meaning that is implied to it changes. But in this case, atleast the meanings of auricle, ventricle, skull  are not yet changed, and their english names of terms are still the same. So what makes the marathi language textbook bureau to change it. Then we thought we should check the bodies/organizations who possibly could be involved in this work. We all headed to the library, and referred a few books related to Vishwakosh, Paribhasha Granth, etc. We could find atleast two bodies who have been involved in this work since the 1970s: Bhasha Sanchalanalay (Directorate of Language); and Maharashtra Rajya Sahitya-Sanskriti Mandal (Maharashtra State Board of Literature and Culture). Perhaps one can write/meet these people and find out more.

As i am also interested in the language of science, all this discussion has made me more curious, and i am into finding out as to who decides the changes in the scientific terms and what is the rationale behind it.

Prof. Yash Pal spoke on ” Wondering, Exploring and Meandering in Education ” on account of the eight VGK memorial lecture on September 5, 2009 @ HBCSE.

At first he began with what does one mean by “understanding”. There were a few responses from the audience. What I liked most was that understanding is what makes us feel happy about something. His talk was mostly around the children’s wanderings for the quest of understanding. He cited lots of children’s questions, and opened the forum for discussion from the audience.  One could see the way he was amazed with simple yet important questions that children ask. On this note, he commented that our curriculum should be based on children’s questions. Acknowledging the old gurukul tradition, he even emphasized that each child should have an individual curriculum which can be decided based on each child’s mental faculties.

All along his talk, he was emphasizing on the interdisciplinary nature of  learning that should happen during education.  He criticized the compartmentalization of subjects in departments in universities.

Upon asking what answers does he given to children’s questions, he in a lighter note said, “I am not into realization of truth, I can only try to think and reason”.

From his talk, I could relate to two points that we practice. One was making connections with our prior knowledge. The other was cross-fertilization for new ideas.

“i link, therefore i exist”

— inspired from cogito ergosum

as part of my ph.d. work in the area of refined concept map (RCM) in biology education, i am working on analyzing the school textbooks of 8, 9, 11 standards on the domain of cell biology. i mapped the domain of each 3 standards using the RCM method i.e. using a fixed and a minimal set of relation names for mapping the concepts.  the hypothesis of the study was that even if the complexity in the domain increases with an increase in the number of concepts, but the relation names that provide meaning to these concepts would be a fixed and a minimal set. the following is a brief summary of the results:

std.          no. of concepts             no. of relation names

8                             75                                        11

9                           195                                        16

11                         500                                        15

the most widely used relation names are: consists of, includes, comprised of, surrounded by, located in, has function, has attribute.

i am also analyzing the other components involved, such as the frequency of relation names, the no. of concepts connected to specific relation names, etc.  across all the 3 standards.

it is really an interesting and exciting exercise which i enjoy working on.

it is a pleasant sunday evening. i am back from home. the weather was perfect for an evening walk. we are lucky to be so close to a beautiful place in anushakti nagar. it was still bright and i got tempted to walk, stroll inside the barc campus. i followed the ususal route from anushaktinagar gate -ellora-everest-shantiniketan-akashdeep-north gate-training hostel-anushaktinagar gate. i took a halt near akashdeep after a 20 minutes brisk walk. the view from here is fabulous, imagine how greener it gets after the first few rains, the mountain,  children playing cricket, teenagers playing football, middle aged people walking. it gives me joy to see kids playing and enjoying their childhood. after 10-15 mins of break, i began my brisk walk from the northgate and it took another 15 mins. it was quite relaxing and refreshing.

In the relations ontology we express:
eukaryotes consists of nucleus  ==> consists_of(eukaryotes, nucleus)
eurkaryotic cell enveloped by cell membrane ==> enveloped_by(cell, cell membrane)

as I am representing the school textbook, I find a few sentences to be of the form of negation. These are:

prokaryotes does not consist of nucleus ==> ~consists_of(prokaryotes, nucleus)
prokaryotes not enveloped by membrane  ==> ~enveloped_by(prokaryotes, membrane)

Such negations are useful for students to understand the difference between eukaryotes and prokaryotes and cannot be avoided during representation.

so my query is: can we include the negations of relation names in the relations ontology. how can we represent such negation relation names.

since ~consists_of, ~enveloped_by are negation of consists_of, enveloped_by respectively, does the relation names ~consists_of, ~enveloped_by still fall under the meronymic inclusion and spatial inclusion  respectively.

I think so.  In the above assertions, we know in reality that prokaryotes donot consists of nucleus, but this is equally important for representation. In cases such as something may cease to exist at a particular time t then we still have to represent such assertions even though these would be in negation forms.

But the question that is grappling my mind is the following:

ontology is the representation of types. it represents what exists in reality. now something that does not exist in reality, and yet if we want to represent it then would we still be creating ontology of non-existent entities. and if yes, then would it still be  ontology.

Perhaps, philosophers can  provide a convincing argument for my question.

As we know that functions (1 to 1) are different from relations (1 to many). All functions are relations, but not all relations are functions. In the case of creating an ontology for biology, we use relations. But, in biology, is it possible to apply the functions as well. Can there be any such relation which is a function in the case of biomedical ontology. For example, part-of, composed-of, located-in, surrounded-by, etc. are all relations in the context of biomedical ontology. Or do we have to always understand biology ontology in terms of relations only and not functions.

Prof. Barry Smith (University of Buffalo) clarifies the distinction between ontology of relations and the way relations and functions are treated in a set theory. Further he emphasizes on the functional associations (in mathematical sense) can occur in process relations. For example, process-a regulates process-b.

Now this sounds interesting. In this case, I think, some of the process relations can be functional. Such process relations are : regulates, transforms into, derives from, develops into, preceded by, results into, etc.

Let me illustrate with a few assertions:
Larva transforms into pupa
zygote develops into foetus
blastula transforms into gastrula

What I am trying to point out is that the domain and range for these process relations will always be of  1 to 1 mapping. So, these process relations can be of functional type.

But the structural relations such as part of, surrounded by can not be of functional type as a domain can have many ranges in such relations.

P.S. This post is based on my discussion on relations and functions in biology on the OBO mailing list.

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.