Design and Development of an Online Video Enhanced Case-Based Learning Environment for Teacher Education

People generally prefer to use stories in order to provide context when expressing a point. Spreading a message without context is unlikely to be meaningful. Like stories, cases have contextual meaning and allow learners to see a situation from multiple perspectives. The main purpose of the present study was to investigate how to design and develop an authentic, online case-based learning environment to provide preservice teachers with the opportunity to practice their skills in real-life situations.  The study employed an action research method, a form of qualitative approach.  32 pre-service teachers participated in an online, video-enhanced, case-based learning environment known as VOCABLE. Three action research cycles were conducted and at the end of each cycle, data were gathered through interviews and questionnaires. The qualitative data were analyzed using descriptive and content analysis techniques using Nvivo8 qualitative data analysis tool. The results indicated that six main factors contributed to the authenticity of the cases: commonness, providing different perspectives, filling emotion, holding experience, reflecting social facts and being multimedia. Almost all pre-service teachers (96%) agreed that getting experts’ solutions was very helpful. They also emphasized the value of peer evaluation and online discussion. Keywords: Online Learning, Action Research, Case-based Learning, Teacher Educatio

Artist-Programmers and Programming Languages for the Arts

We consider the artist-programmer, who creates work through its description as source code. The artist-programmer grandstands computer language, giving unique vantage over human-computer interaction in a creative context. We focus on the human in this relationship, noting that humans use an amalgam of language and gesture to express themselves. Accordingly we expose the deep relationship between computer languages and continuous expression, examining how these realms may support one another, and how the artist-programmer may fully engage with both. Our argument takes us up through layers of representation, starting with symbols, then words, language and notation, to consider the role that these representations may play in human creativity. We form a cross-disciplinary perspective from psychology, computer science, linguistics, human-computer interaction, computational creativity, music technology and the arts. We develop and demonstrate the potential of this view to inform arts practice, through the practical introduction of software prototypes, artworks, programming languages and improvised performances. In particular, we introduce works which demonstrate the role of perception in symbolic semantics, embed the representation of time in programming language, include visuospatial arrangement in syntax, and embed the activity of programming in the improvisation and experience of art

MotàMot project: conversion of a French-Khmer published dictionary for building a multilingual lexical system

8 pagesInternational audienceEconomic issues related to the information processing techniques are very important. The development of such technologies is a major asset for developing countries like Cambodia and Laos, and emerging ones like Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand. The MotAMot project aims to computerize an under-resourced language: Khmer, spoken mainly in Cambodia. The main goal of the project is the development of a multilingual lexical system targeted for Khmer. The macrostructure is a pivot one with each word sense of each language linked to a pivot axi. The microstructure comes from a simplification of the explanatory and combinatory dictionary. The lexical system has been initialized with data coming mainly from the conversion of the French-Khmer bilingual dictionary of Denis Richer from Word to XML format. The French part was completed with pronunciation and parts-of-speech coming from the FeM French-english-Malay dictionary. The Khmer headwords noted in IPA in the Richer dictionary were converted to Khmer writing with OpenFST, a finite state transducer tool. The resulting resource is available online for lookup, editing, download and remote programming via a REST API on a Jibiki platform

Towards an Updatable Strategy Logic

This article is about temporal multi-agent logics. Several of these formalisms have been already presented (ATL-ATL*, ATLsc, SL). They enable to express the capacities of agents in a system to ensure the satisfaction of temporal properties. Particularly, SL and ATLsc enable several agents to interact in a context mixing the different strategies they play in a semantical game. We generalize this possibility by proposing a new formalism, Updating Strategy Logic (USL). In USL, an agent can also refine its own strategy. The gain in expressive power rises the notion of "sustainable capacities" for agents. USL is built from SL. It mainly brings to SL the two following modifications: semantically, the successor of a given state is not uniquely determined by the data of one choice from each agent. Syntactically, we introduce in the language an operator, called an "unbinder", which explicitely deletes the binding of a strategy to an agent. We show that USL is strictly more expressive than SL.Comment: In Proceedings SR 2013, arXiv:1303.007

Vascular fibrosis in aging and hypertension: molecular mechanisms and clinical implications

Aging is the primary risk factor underlying hypertension and incident cardiovascular disease. With aging, the vasculature undergoes structural and functional changes characterized by endothelial dysfunction, wall thickening, reduced distensibility, and arterial stiffening. Vascular stiffness results from fibrosis and extracellular matrix (ECM) remodelling, processes that are associated with aging and are amplified by hypertension. Some recently characterized molecular mechanisms underlying these processes include increased expression and activation of matrix metalloproteinases, activation of transforming growth factor-β1/SMAD signalling, upregulation of galectin-3, and activation of proinflammatory and profibrotic signalling pathways. These events can be induced by vasoactive agents, such as angiotensin II, endothelin-1, and aldosterone, which are increased in the vasculature during aging and hypertension. Complex interplay between the “aging process” and prohypertensive factors results in accelerated vascular remodelling and fibrosis and increased arterial stiffness, which is typically observed in hypertension. Because the vascular phenotype in a young hypertensive individual resembles that of an elderly otherwise healthy individual, the notion of “early” or “premature” vascular aging is now often used to describe hypertension-associated vascular disease. We review the vascular phenotype in aging and hypertension, focusing on arterial stiffness and vascular remodelling. We also highlight the clinical implications of these processes and discuss some novel molecular mechanisms of fibrosis and ECM reorganization

Modeling the Complexity of Manual Annotation Tasks: a Grid of Analysis

International audienceManual corpus annotation is getting widely used in Natural Language Processing (NLP). While being recognized as a difficult task, no in-depth analysis of its complexity has been performed yet. We provide in this article a grid of analysis of the different complexity dimensions of an annotation task, which helps estimating beforehand the difficulties and cost of annotation campaigns. We observe the applicability of this grid on existing annotation campaigns and detail its application on a real-world example

Aesthetic Programming

Aesthetic Programming explores the technical as well as cultural imaginaries of programming from its insides. It follows the principle that the growing importance of software requires a new kind of cultural thinking — and curriculum — that can account for, and with which to better understand the politics and aesthetics of algorithmic procedures, data processing and abstraction. It takes a particular interest in power relations that are relatively under-acknowledged in technical subjects, concerning class and capitalism, gender and sexuality, as well as race and the legacies of colonialism. This is not only related to the politics of representation but also nonrepresentation: how power differentials are implicit in code in terms of binary logic, hierarchies, naming of the attributes, and how particular worldviews are reinforced and perpetuated through computation. Using p5.js, it introduces and demonstrates the reflexive practice of aesthetic programming, engaging with learning to program as a way to understand and question existing technological objects and paradigms, and to explore the potential for reprogramming wider eco-socio-technical systems. The book itself follows this approach, and is offered as a computational object open to modification and reversioning