H. de Lubac: el misterio del hombre en el misterio de Dios

This article explains how Henri de Lubac contributed during the 20th century to the renewal of contemporary theology. It also defends the thesis that Lubac played a decisive role in the area of interreligious dialogue

Portafolios digitales para el desarrollo de competencias transversales. Aportaciones principales de los estudios con Carpeta Digital en el marco del grupo de investigación. Ensenyament i Aprenentatge Virtual

El artículo presenta un resumen de las innovaciones docentes e investigaciones realizadas por el Grupo de Investigación Ensenyament i Aprenentatge Virtual (GREAV) de la Universitat de Barcelona acerca de los portafolios digitales. En el artículo se abordan de forma general las características, potencialidades y marcos pedagógicos que suelen acompañar a los portafolios digitales, y se centra de forma especial en la plataforma orientada al desarrollo de competencias: Carpeta Digital. La plataforma se ha implementado en diferentes contextos universitarios y ha sido objeto de diferentes evaluaciones e investigaciones, cuyos resultados más destacables se muestran para diferentes aspectos: la valoración de la herramienta por parte de los usuarios, el desarrollo de competencias transversales en el estudiantado, el uso específico del portafolios por los estudiantes y el tratamiento didáctico por parte de los docentes

Digital portfolio for the development of cross-disciplinary skills. Major contributions of studies with Carpeta Digital within the framework of the research group Virtual Teaching and Learning

El artículo presenta un resumen de las innovaciones docentes e investigaciones realizadas por el Grupo de Investigación Ensenyament i Aprenentatge Virtual (GREAV) de la Universitat de Barcelona acerca de los portafolios digitales. En el artículo se abordan de forma general las características, potencialidades y marcos pedagógicos que suelen acompañar a los portafolios digitales, y se centra de forma especial en la plataforma orientada al desarrollo de competencias: Carpeta Digital. La plataforma se ha implementado en diferentes contextos universitarios y ha sido objeto de diferentes evaluaciones e investigaciones, cuyos resultados más destacables se muestran para diferentes aspectos: la valoración de la herramienta por parte de los usuarios, el desarrollo de competencias transversales en el estudiantado, el uso específico del portafolios por los estudiantes y el tratamiento didáctico por parte de los docentes.The article presents a summary of teaching innovations and research conducted by the research group Virtual Teaching and Learning (GREAV) of the Universitat de Barcelona about digital portfolios. The article addresses in general features, potentialities and pedagogical frameworks that often accompany the digital portfolios, and focuses particularly on skills development-oriented platform: Carpeta Digital. The platform has been implemented in several university contexts and has been the subject of various innovations and investigations, whose most noteworthy results are shown for different aspects: the valuation of the tool users, the development of skills in the student body, the specific use of the portfolio by the students and didactic treatment by teachers

Grammars and cellular automata for evolving neural networks architectures

IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. Nashville, TN, 8-11 October 2000The class of feedforward neural networks trained with back-propagation admits a large variety of specific architectures applicable to approximation pattern tasks. Unfortunately, the architecture design is still a human expert job. In recent years, the interest to develop automatic methods to determine the architecture of the feedforward neural network has increased, most of them based on the evolutionary computation paradigm. From this approach, some perspectives can be considered: at one extreme, every connection and node of architecture can be specified in the chromosome representation using binary bits. This kind of representation scheme is called the direct encoding scheme. In order to reduce the length of the genotype and the search space, and to make the problem more scalable, indirect encoding schemes have been introduced. An indirect scheme under a constructive algorithm, on the other hand, starts with a minimal architecture and new levels, neurons and connections are added, step by step, via some sets of rules. The rules and/or some initial conditions are codified into a chromosome of a genetic algorithm. In this work, two indirect constructive encoding schemes based on grammars and cellular automata, respectively, are proposed to find the optimal architecture of a feedforward neural network

Studying the capacity of cellular encoding to generate feedforward neural network topologies

Proceeding of: IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, IJCNN 2004, Budapest, 25-29 July 2004Many methods to codify artificial neural networks have been developed to avoid the disadvantages of direct encoding schema, improving the search into the solution's space. A method to analyse how the search space is covered and how are the movements along search process applying genetic operators is needed in order to evaluate the different encoding strategies for multilayer perceptrons (MLP). In this paper, the generative capacity, this is how the search space is covered for a indirect scheme based on cellular systems, is studied. The capacity of the methods to cover the search space (topologies of MLP space) is compared with the direct encoding scheme.Publicad

Neural Network architectures design by Cellular Automata evolution

4th Conference of Systemics Cybernetics and Informatics. Orlando, 23-26 July 2000The design of the architecture is a crucial step in the successful application of a neural network. However, the architecture design is basically, in most cases, a human experts job. The design depends heavily on both, the expert experience and on a tedious trial-and-error process. Therefore, the development of automatic methods to determine the architecture of feedforward neural networks is a field of interest in the neural network community. These methods are generally based on search techniques, as genetic algorithms, simulated annealing or evolutionary strategies. Most of the designed methods are based on direct representation of the parameters of the network. This representation does not allow scalability, so to represent large architectures very large structures are required. In this work, an indirect constructive encoding scheme is proposed to find optimal architectures of feed-forward neural networks. This scheme is based on cellular automata representations in order to increase the scalability of the method.Publicad

Personal characteristics and teaching practice of university professors and their relation with the performance evaluation

Este artículo presenta los resultados de una investigación realizada en una institución de educación superior, con el propósito de conocer las características de un profesor inspirador y aquellos factores y prácticas docentes que resultan más significativos para los alumnos cuando evalúan a sus profesores, a fin de generar estrategias para mejorar el desempeño docente. Se utilizaron métodos de investigación mixtos (cuantitativo y cualitativo). Se aplicaron entrevistas y cuestionarios a profesores, estudiantes y administrativos; también se hicieron observaciones de actividades y reuniones. Los factores analizados fueron la práctica docente, la formación académica, experiencia en el ámbito profesional, edad, género y otros. Los resultados indicaron que existe relación entre las características personales y de práctica docente con los resultados de la evaluación del desempeño de los profesores. Se logró, además, identificar las características y prácticas de mayor significancia para esta relación. Se concluyó, asimismo, que las generaciones actuales son exigentes con el desempeño de sus profesores y cuestionan el porqué de cada actividad y la utilidad de la misma para su futuro profesionalThis article presents the results of an investigation carried out in a higher education institution, with the objective of finding the characteristics of an inspiring teacher and those factors and teaching practices that are more significant for the students when they evaluate their professors, and thus, generate strategies to improve teaching performance. Mixed research methods were used (quantitative and qualitative). Interviews and questionnaires were applied to professors, students and administrators; observations of activities and meetings were also made. The analyzed factors on the professors were the teaching practice, the academic formation, experience in the professional field, age, gender and others. The results indicated that there is a relationship between personal characteristics and teaching practice with the results of the evaluation of teachers' performance. It was also possible to identify the most significant characteristics and practices for this relationship. Also, it was concluded, that current generations are demanding with the performance of their professors and question the reason of each activity and the utility of it for their professional futur