THE "POWER" OF TEXT PRODUCTION ACTIVITY IN COLLABORATIVE MODELING : NINE RECOMMENDATIONS TO MAKE A COMPUTER SUPPORTED SITUATION WORK

Language is not a direct translation of a speaker’s or writer’s knowledge or intentions. Various complex processes and strategies are involved in serving the needs of the audience: planning the message, describing some features of a model and not others, organizing an argument, adapting to the knowledge of the reader, meeting linguistic constraints, etc. As a consequence, when communicating about a model, or about knowledge, there is a complex interaction between knowledge and language. In this contribution, we address the question of the role of language in modeling, in the specific case of collaboration over a distance, via electronic exchange of written textual information. What are the problems/dimensions a language user has to deal with when communicating a (mental) model? What is the relationship between the nature of the knowledge to be communicated and linguistic production? What is the relationship between representations and produced text? In what sense can interactive learning systems serve as mediators or as obstacles to these processes

Research and Education in Computational Science and Engineering

Over the past two decades the field of computational science and engineering (CSE) has penetrated both basic and applied research in academia, industry, and laboratories to advance discovery, optimize systems, support decision-makers, and educate the scientific and engineering workforce. Informed by centuries of theory and experiment, CSE performs computational experiments to answer questions that neither theory nor experiment alone is equipped to answer. CSE provides scientists and engineers of all persuasions with algorithmic inventions and software systems that transcend disciplines and scales. Carried on a wave of digital technology, CSE brings the power of parallelism to bear on troves of data. Mathematics-based advanced computing has become a prevalent means of discovery and innovation in essentially all areas of science, engineering, technology, and society; and the CSE community is at the core of this transformation. However, a combination of disruptive developments---including the architectural complexity of extreme-scale computing, the data revolution that engulfs the planet, and the specialization required to follow the applications to new frontiers---is redefining the scope and reach of the CSE endeavor. This report describes the rapid expansion of CSE and the challenges to sustaining its bold advances. The report also presents strategies and directions for CSE research and education for the next decade.Comment: Major revision, to appear in SIAM Revie

Helping Teachers Create a Dynamic Learning Environment Using Pen-Based Technology

[EN] There is evidence that Pen-based Technologies (PBTs) can facilitate radical changes that would make it possible to address problems typically associated with lecture-based pedagogical models. In the context of universitylevel Computer Science studies, there is widespread consensus that PBTs—and tablet PCs, in particular—are tools that have great potential for encouraging interaction in the classroom and promoting a far more dynamic learning environment. In view off the complexity of these types of technology and their explosive evolution, it would be advisable to assist teachers who wish to utilize them by developing strategies based on a conceptualization of their educational capabilities. With this objective in mind, this article analyzes the use of concept maps as tools for modeling both the instructional domain and the PBTs domain. To validate the proposed approach, a number of workshops were conducted, in which professors of Engineering were given a presentation on the educational capabilities of these technologies and then had the opportunity to experiment with tablet PCs and other digital ink devices. Participants completed a prequestionnaire at the start of the workshop; its questions were generated from a generic concept map for the instructional domain, and its purpose was to list each professor’s instructional requirements. Next, recommendations for use were developed, based on the PBTs concept map, and converted to the questions on a post-questionnaire completed at the end of the workshop, on which the teachers indicated the degree to which they agreed with the recommendations. More than 70 professors from different departments participated in these workshops, and their overall evaluation was quite favorable.Benlloch-Dualde, JV.; Buendía García, F.; Cano Escribá, JC.; Blanc Clavero, S.; Lemus Zúñiga, LG. (2013). Helping Teachers Create a Dynamic Learning Environment Using Pen-Based Technology. International Journal of Technologies in Learning. 19(2):107-120. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/53173S10712019

Adaptation “in the Wild”: Ontology-Based Personalization of Open-Corpus Learning Material

Teacher and students can use WWW as a limitless source of learning material for nearly any subject. Yet, such abundance of content comes with the problem of finding the right piece at the right time. Conventional adaptive educational systems cannot support personalized access to open-corpus learning material as they rely on manually constructed content models. This paper presents an approach to this problem that does not require intervention from a human expert. The approach has been implemented in an adaptive system that recommends students supplementary reading material and adaptively annotates it. The results of the evaluation experiment have demonstrated several significant effects of using the system on students’ learning.\u

Adaptation “in the Wild”: Ontology-Based Personalization of Open-Corpus Learning Material

Abstract. Teacher and students can use WWW as a limitless source of learning material for nearly any subject. Yet, such abundance of content comes with the problem of finding the right piece at the right time. Conventional adaptive educational systems cannot support personalized access to open-corpus learning material as they rely on manually constructed content models. This paper presents an approach to this problem that does not require intervention from a human expert. The approach has been implemented in an adaptive system that recommends students supplementary reading material and adaptively annotates it. The results of the evaluation experiment have demonstrated several significant effects of using the system on students ’ learning

An Overview of the New ACM/IEEE Information Technology Curricular Framework

ACM and IEEE have developed a curricular report titled, “Information Technology Curricula 2017: Curriculum Guidelines for Baccalaureate Degree Programs in Information Technology,” known also as IT2017. The development of this report has received worldwide content contributions from industry and academia through surveys as well as many international conferences and workshops. An open online publication of the report was made available in December 2017. This paper presents a digest of the content of the report, the IT curricular framework, and suggestions for its use in developing new information technology programs or enhancing existing ones. The heart of the IT curricular framework is a set of competencies identified through knowledge, skills, and dispositions, as supported by pedagogical research. The paper also describes ways in which institutions could use the curricular framework not only to develop information technology degree programs, but also to improve and enhance related computing programs