Investigating the Effects of Exploratory Semantic Search on the Use of a Museum Archive

Recently, there has been a great deal of interest in how new technologies can support the more effective use of online museum content. Two particularly relevant developments are exploratory search and semantic web technologies. Exploratory search tools support a more undirected and serendipitous interaction with the content. Semantic web technology, when applied in this context, allows the exploitation of metadata and ontologies to provide more intelligent support for user interaction. Bletchley Park Text is a museum web application supporting a semantic driven, exploratory approach to the search and navigation of digital museum resources. Bletchley Park Text uses semantics to organise selected content (i.e. stories) into a number of composite pages that illustrate conceptual patterns in the content, and from which the content itself can be accessed. The use made of Bletchley Park Text over an eight month period was analysed in order to understand the kinds of trajectories across the available resources that users could make with such a system. The results identified two distinct strategies of exploratory search. A risky strategy was characterised as incorporating: conceptual jumps between successive queries, a larger number of shorter queries and the use of the stories themselves to acclimatise to a new set of search results. A cautious strategy was characterised as incorporating: small conceptual shifts between queries, a smaller number of longer queries and the use of composite pages to acclimatise to a set of new search results. These findings have implications for the intelligent scaffolding of exploratory search

Designing Open Educational Resources through Knowledge Maps to enhance Meaningful learning

This paper demonstrates some pedagogical strategies for developing Open Educational Resources (OERs) using the knowledge mapping tool Compendium. It also describes applications of Knowledge Maps to facilitate meaningful learning by focusing on specific OER examples. The study centres on the OpenLearn project, a large scale online environment that makes a selection of higher education learning resources freely available via the internet. OpenLearn, which is supportedby William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, was launched in October 2006 and in the two year period of its existence hasreleased over 8,100 learning hours of the OU's distance learning resources for free access and modification by learnersand educators under the Creative Commons license. OpenLearn also offers three knowledge media tools: Compendium(knowledge mapping software), MSG (instant messaging application with geolocation maps) and FM (web-based videoconferencing application). Compendium is a software tool for visual thinking, used to connect ideas, concepts, arguments, websites and documents. There are numerous examples of OERs that have been developed and delivered by institutions across the world, for example, MIT, Rice, Utah State, Core, Paris Tech, JOCW. They present a wide variety of learning materials in terms of styles as well as differing subject content. Many such offerings are based upon original lecture notes, hand-outs and other related papers used in face-to-face teaching. Openlearn OERs, however, are reconstructed from original self study distance learning materials developed at the Open University and from a vast academic catalogue of materials. Samples of these “units” comprise a variety of formats: text, images, audio and video. In this study, our findings illustratethe benefits of sharing some OER content through knowledge maps, the possibility of condensing high volumes of information,accessing resources in a more attractive way, visualising connections between diverse learning materials, connecting new ideas to familiar references, organising thinking and gaining new insights into subject specific content

Parallel and convergent processing in grid cell, head-direction cell, boundary cell, and place cell networks.

The brain is able to construct internal representations that correspond to external spatial coordinates. Such brain maps of the external spatial topography may support a number of cognitive functions, including navigation and memory. The neuronal building block of brain maps are place cells, which are found throughout the hippocampus of rodents and, in a lower proportion, primates. Place cells typically fire in one or few restricted areas of space, and each area where a cell fires can range, along the dorsoventral axis of the hippocampus, from 30 cm to at least several meters. The sensory processing streams that give rise to hippocampal place cells are not fully understood, but substantial progress has been made in characterizing the entorhinal cortex, which is the gateway between neocortical areas and the hippocampus. Entorhinal neurons have diverse spatial firing characteristics, and the different entorhinal cell types converge in the hippocampus to give rise to a single, spatially modulated cell type-the place cell. We therefore suggest that parallel information processing in different classes of cells-as is typically observed at lower levels of sensory processing-continues up into higher level association cortices, including those that provide the inputs to hippocampus. WIREs Cogn Sci 2014, 5:207-219. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1272 Conflict of interest: The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website

Integrating Spatial Working Memory and Remote Memory: Interactions between the Medial Prefrontal Cortex and Hippocampus

In recent years, two separate research streams have focused on information sharing between the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and hippocampus (HC). Research into spatial working memory has shown that successful execution of many types of behaviors requires synchronous activity in the theta range between the mPFC and HC, whereas studies of memory consolidation have shown that shifts in area dependency may be temporally modulated. While the nature of information that is being communicated is still unclear, spatial working memory and remote memory recall is reliant on interactions between these two areas. This review will present recent evidence that shows that these two processes are not as separate as they first appeared. We will also present a novel conceptualization of the nature of the medial prefrontal representation and how this might help explain this area’s role in spatial working memory and remote memory recall

SONIA: an immersive customizable virtual reality system for the education and exploration of brain networks

While mastery of neuroanatomy is important for the investigation of the brain, there is an increasing interest in exploring the neural pathways to better understand the roles of neural circuitry in brain functions. To tackle the limitations of traditional 2D-display-based neuronavigation software in intuitively visualizing complex 3D anatomies, several virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) solutions have been proposed to facilitate neuroanatomical education. However, with the increasing knowledge on brain connectivity and the functioning of the sub-systems, there is still a lack of similar software solutions for the education and exploration of these topics, which demand more elaborate visualization and interaction strategies. To address this gap, we designed the immerSive custOmizable Neuro learnIng plAform (SONIA), a novel user-friendly VR software system with a multi-scale interaction paradigm that allows flexible customization of learning materials. With both quantitative and qualitative evaluations through user studies, the proposed system is shown to have high usability, attractive visual design, and good educational value. As the first immersive system that integrates customizable design and detailed narratives of the brain sub-systems for the education of neuroanatomy and brain connectivity, SONIA showcases new potential directions and provides valuable insights regarding medical learning and exploration in VR

The role of active movement in fungal ecology and community assembly

Movement ecology aims to provide common terminology and an integrative framework of movement research across all groups of organisms. Yet such work has focused on unitary organisms so far, and thus the important group of filamentous fungi has not been considered in this context. With the exception of spore dispersal, movement in filamentous fungi has not been integrated into the movement ecology field. At the same time, the field of fungal ecology has been advancing research on topics like informed growth, mycelial translocations, or fungal highways using its own terminology and frameworks, overlooking the theoretical developments within movement ecology. We provide a conceptual and terminological framework for interdisciplinary collaboration between these two disciplines, and show how both can benefit from closer links: We show how placing the knowledge from fungal biology and ecology into the framework of movement ecology can inspire both theoretical and empirical developments, eventually leading towards a better understanding of fungal ecology and community assembly. Conversely, by a greater focus on movement specificities of filamentous fungi, movement ecology stands to benefit from the challenge to evolve its concepts and terminology towards even greater universality. We show how our concept can be applied for other modular organisms (such as clonal plants and slime molds), and how this can lead towards comparative studies with the relationship between organismal movement and ecosystems in the focus

Exploring pathways across stories

This paper describes a method for supporting the exploration of a collection of documents organized as a hypertext by investigating relations between documents along user-specified paths. The approach is demonstrated on a corpus of stories about the World War Two activities of the British Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. Each story is described by one or more events and annotated in terms of domain ontologies. A pathway in the document space is a sequence of events in which adjacent events share common binding concepts. The criteria for selecting the pathway include a measure of the adherence to the user-specified part of the document space and the mutual information between adjacent documents calculated from their annotations

The Evolution of Reaction-diffusion Controllers for Minimally Cognitive Agents

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