The Role of the New Technologies in the Italian Primary School: Historical and Educational Outlines

Education is a process which helps the growth of the students. Thanks to it students can grow, develop and become adult and qualified persons in different fields of the humans ’ activity. Hence, the school educates only when it supports the students in getting and developing their own skills and when it helps them to get new attitudes towards themselves as well as the human, natural and artificial world. In this perspective, the school cannot continue to be a mere teaching-learning environment, just making frontal lessons, even if with the support of advanced multimedia technologies, but it should, indeed, focus the attention on the learning processes. This is the deepest change that the school needs. The possibilities offered by the computers in the educational field are many, especially as support in special didactics. In this sense, the access to multimedia and telematics has caused the activation of an autonomous process to build knowledge. The interpersonal exchanges mediated by the computer can break the isolation of a disabled person. The introduction of multimedia in school can then enhance both the teacher and the student to help the cooperative dimension of the teaching / learning process. The school has to open itself to new technologies and help the students to select the necessary information for the construction of th

Determinants and outcomes of motivation in health professions education: a systematic review based on self-determination theory

Purpose: This study aimed at conducting a systematic review in health professions education of determinants, mediators and outcomes of students’ motivation to engage in academic activities based on the self-determination theory’s perspective. Methods: A search was conducted across databases (MEDLINE, CINHAL, EMBASE, PsycINFO, and ERIC databases), hand-search of relevant journals, grey literature, and published research profile of key authors. Quantitative and qualitative studies were included if they reported research in health professions education focused on determinants, mediators, and/or outcomes of motivation from the self-determination and if meeting the quality criteria. Results: A total of 17 studies met the inclusion and quality criteria. Articles retrieved came from diverse locations and mainly from medical education and to a lesser extent from psychology and dental education. Intrapersonal (gender and personality traits) and interpersonal determinants (academic conditions and lifestyle, qualitative method of selection, feedback, and an autonomy supportive learning climate) have been reported to have a positive influence on students’ motivation to engage in academic activities. No studies were found that tested mediation effects between determinants and students’ motivation. In turn, students’ self-determined motivation has been found to be positively associated with different cognitive, affective, and behavioural outcomes. Conclusion: This study has found that generally, motivation could be enhanced by changes in the educational environment and by an early detection of students’ characteristics. Doing so may support future health practitioners’ self-determined motivation and positively influence how they process information and their emotions and how they approach their learning activities

Towards a transdisciplinary approach in the training of teachers: Creating procedures in learning and teaching in higher education

[EN] For decades we have been immersed in a constant change in our society, registered together with an increase in its degree of complexity. This greatly affects the currently prevailing educational axioms, making them obsolete, which implies, according to our hypothesis, the need for a process of revision and innovation of existing models. Our proposal starts from a bibliographic review of some existing proposals in innovation, to create a new pedagogical model based on polyhedral and transdisciplinary methodologies. At the same time, we offer a case study in a core subject of the first teacher training course at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. After the practical application of our transdisciplinary methodological theories, it has been possible to successfully collect evidence of a balanced interaction between disciplinary areas by students. The application of the innovations can become a frame of reference for higher education institutions interested in following this very important process of adaptation to social reality.The present work was carried out thanks to the financing of ‘Ajuts de recerca per a la millora de la formació inicial de mestres’ (ARMIF) of the AGAUR - Catalan Government, and the support of the Faculty of Sciences Education, Autonomous University of Barcelona.Saura-Mas, S.; Blanco-Romero, A.; Barrera, J. (2021). Towards a transdisciplinary approach in the training of teachers: Creating procedures in learning and teaching in higher education. En 7th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd'21). Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 773-781. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAd21.2021.13037OCS77378

A half century of progress towards a unified neural theory of mind and brain with applications to autonomous adaptive agents and mental disorders

Invited article for the book Artificial Intelligence in the Age of Neural Networks and Brain Computing R. Kozma, C. Alippi, Y. Choe, and F. C. Morabito, Eds. Cambridge, MA: Academic PressThis article surveys some of the main design principles, mechanisms, circuits, and architectures that have been discovered during a half century of systematic research aimed at developing a unified theory that links mind and brain, and shows how psychological functions arise as emergent properties of brain mechanisms. The article describes a theoretical method that has enabled such a theory to be developed in stages by carrying out a kind of conceptual evolution. It also describes revolutionary computational paradigms like Complementary Computing and Laminar Computing that constrain the kind of unified theory that can describe the autonomous adaptive intelligence that emerges from advanced brains. Adaptive Resonance Theory, or ART, is one of the core models that has been discovered in this way. ART proposes how advanced brains learn to attend, recognize, and predict objects and events in a changing world that is filled with unexpected events. ART is not, however, a “theory of everything” if only because, due to Complementary Computing, different matching and learning laws tend to support perception and cognition on the one hand, and spatial representation and action on the other. The article mentions why a theory of this kind may be useful in the design of autonomous adaptive agents in engineering and technology. It also notes how the theory has led to new mechanistic insights about mental disorders such as autism, medial temporal amnesia, Alzheimer’s disease, and schizophrenia, along with mechanistically informed proposals about how their symptoms may be ameliorated

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Towards Identifying and closing Gaps in Assurance of autonomous Road vehicleS - a collection of Technical Notes Part 1

This report provides an introduction and overview of the Technical Topic Notes (TTNs) produced in the Towards Identifying and closing Gaps in Assurance of autonomous Road vehicleS (Tigars) project. These notes aim to support the development and evaluation of autonomous vehicles. Part 1 addresses: Assurance-overview and issues, Resilience and Safety Requirements, Open Systems Perspective and Formal Verification and Static Analysis of ML Systems. Part 2: Simulation and Dynamic Testing, Defence in Depth and Diversity, Security-Informed Safety Analysis, Standards and Guidelines