Teacher education for effective technology integration

About a decade ago, several researchers used Shulman's (1986) framework about Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) - a body of knowledge that constitutes a special amalgam of content, pedagogy, learners, and context - as a theoretical basis for developing TPCK or TPACK: a framework for guiding teachers' cognition about technology integration in teaching and learning (Angeli, Valanides, & Christodoulou, 2016). Different models of TPCK/TPACK are proposed in the literature, each with a different focus (on practice, instructional design, context, etc.) and with a different theoretical interpretation about the nature and development of the knowledge that teachers need to have to be able to teach with technology (e.g., Angeli & Valanides, 2005, 2009, 2013; Koehler & Mishra, 2008; Niess, 2005).In this direction, research is being carried out to identify TPCK design procedures for initial teacher education. In teaching, when transferring TPCK to design and methodological practices, there is a need to consider a number of factors, especially: the different modes of adopting technologies; the integration of tool affordances, content and pedagogy; the implementation of learning environments; the operationalization of knowledge; and detailed analysis of teaching models and approache

Statistical Study of the Blue Straggler Properties in Galactic Globular Clusters

In this paper we report on the most significant results from a statistical analysis of the main properties of globular cluster blue straggler stars (BSS) extracted from the HST snapshot database of photometrically homogeneous CMDs (Piotto et al. 2002). The BSS relative frequency presents a significant anticorrelation with the collisional rate and with the cluster total absolute luminosity.Comment: 2 pages, 1 figure, A.S.P. Conf. Ser., in press in Vol. 296, 200

"Sintesi di allil epossidi derivati da imminoglicali e studio della regio- e stereoselettivita in reazioni di addizione di O-, N-, S-, C-Nucleofili"

Nel presente lavoro di tesi sono stati sintetizzati in maniera stereoselettiva gli allil epossidi di tipo imminoglicale 4.2α-Me e 4.2β-Me. Lo studio della loro reattività in reazioni di addizione di Onucleofili ha portato all’ottenimento di O-glicosidi e disaccaridi secondo un processo 1,4 regio- e stereoselettivo substrato dipendente con l’ottenimento di α-O-glicosidi dall’epossido 4.2α-Me e β- O-glicosidi dall’epossido 4.2β-Me, guidato da un efficace processo di coordinazione tra l’ossigeno ossiranico e il nucleofilo. La sovrapponibilità di questi risultati con quelli ottenuti nelle stesse reazioni con gli allil epossidi CH2OBn sostituiti, 4.2α e 4.2β, ha permesso di escludere ogni ruolo della catena laterale nel dirigere la regio- e stereoselettività del processo di addizione nucleofila. Le reazioni di 4.2α-Me e 4.2β-Me con C-,N- ed S-nucleofili a diversa capacità coordinante hanno portato all’ottenimento di addotti 1,2 anti derivati da un attacco non coordinato e/o addotti 1,4 che in seguito ad un riarrangiamento [3,3] sigmatropico forniscono completamente o in parte i corrispondenti prodotti di isomerizzazione 1,2 sin

Chapter Lodovico Nocentini: A Rereader of Modern Italian Travellers to China

In 1882, Nocentini published Il primo sinologo: P. Matteo Ricci. The first secular biography of the famous Italian Jesuit to China, it posed important questions about the origins of sinology and the role of Matteo Ricci as an early modern Italian traveller in Sino-western relations. Nocentini’s rereading of Matteo Ricci and travel literature in Italy in the late nineteenth century is examined through theories proposed by Derrida, Barthes and Nabokov. These theories provide an interpretative approach to understand the rereading carried out in Nocentini’s work, as they are intended as a process of interpretation and reinterpretation, as well as appropriation of the original meaning

Co-designing for common values:creating hybrid spaces to nurture autonomous cooperation

This paper concerns the development of digitally-mediated technologies that value social cooperation as a common good rather than as a source of revenue and accumulation. The paper discusses the activities that shaped a European participatory design project which aims to develop a digital space that promotes and facilitates the ‘Commonfare’, a complementary approach to social welfare. The paper provides and discusses concrete examples of design artifacts to address a key question about the role of co- and participatory design in developing hybrid spaces that nurture sharing and autonomous cooperation: how can co-design practices promote alternatives to the commodification of digitally-mediated cooperation? The paper argues for a need to focus on relational, social, political and ethical values, and highlights the potential power of co- and participatory design processes to achieve this. In summary, the paper proposes that only by re-asserting the centrality of shared values and capacities, rather than individual needs or problems, co-design can reposition itself thereby encouraging autonomous cooperation

Enhancing the Performance of the MtCNN for the Classification of Cancer Pathology Reports: From Data Annotation to Model Deployment

Information contained in electronic health records (EHR) combined with the latest advances in machine learning (ML) have the potential to revolutionize the medical sciences. In particular, information contained in cancer pathology reports is essential to investigate cancer trends across the country. Unfortunately, large parts of information in EHRs are stored in the form of unstructured, free-text which limit their usability and research potential. To overcome this accessibility barrier, cancer registries depend on expert personnel who read, interpret, and extract relevant information. Naturally, as the number of stored pathology reports increases every day, depending on human experts presents scalability challenges. Recently, researchers have attempted to automate the information extraction process from cancer pathology reports using ML techniques commonly found in natural language processing (NLP). However, clinical text is inherently different than other common forms of text, and state-of-the-art NLP approaches often exhibit mediocre performance. In this study, we narrow the literature gap by investigating methods to tackle overfitting and improve the performance of ML models for the classification of cancer pathology reports so that we can reduce the dependency on human expert annotators. We (1) show that using active learning can mitigate extreme class imbalance by increasing the representation of documents belonging to rare cancer types, (2) investigated the feasibility of ensemble learning and a mixture-of-expert variant to boost minority class performance, and (3) demonstrated that ensemble model distillation provides a strategy for quantifying the uncertainty inherent in labeled data, offering an effective low-resource solution that can be easily deployed by cancer registries

Cava di Caldaccoli - Ipotesi di riuso e processi generativi

"Ipotesi di riuso e processi generativi". Secondo quanto suggerito dalla prima parte del titolo, la tesi affronta il tema del recupero funzionale di un'area estrattiva dismessa che, nella fattispecie, è sita nel comune di San Giuliano Terme, in provincia di Pisa. In questa parte saranno esposte le metodologie di indagine - dal rilievo all’analisi urbanistica e sociale - indispensabili per affrontare un tema di progettazione. La seconda parte del titolo attiene non già, o non solo, a quei processi mentali che si attivano all'atto della progettazione, ma, più in dettaglio, a quegli strumenti tecnici attraverso i quali è possibile collegare in maniera visuale i processi mentali alla costruzione finale

Focal points for a more user-centred agile development

The integration of user-centred design and Agile development is becoming increasingly common in companies and appears promising. However it may also present some critical points, or communication breakdowns, such as a variable interpretation of user involvement, a mismatch in the value of documentation and a misalignment in iterations. We refine these themes, emerging from both literature and previous fieldwork, by analysing a case study performed in an IT company that adopts both software engineering approaches, and we further extend the framework with a new theme related to task ownership. We argue that communication breakdowns can become focal points to drive action and decision for establishing an organisational context acknowledging the value of user involvement: to this end, we suggest the adoption of design thinking and the active engagement of the customer in embracing its values