Unknown unknowns: knowledge elicitation for multimedia in craft learning

Craft skills were originally taught through apprenticeship, a time consuming process both for teacher and learner in a situation which discouraged innovation and development. New technologies offer the opportunity for learners to draw upon the skills of experienced craft practitioners whilst still directing their own learning at a pace and style that suits their craft practice. In my previous research (Wood 2003) I considered the design of multimedia to support learning of tacit knowledge; working with experienced practitioners who have some experience of teaching and have adopted strategies to overcome the problems. Skilled craftspeople are often not skilled teachers and my current research concentrates on eliciting knowledge from such people, who are unfamiliar with expressing what they know, and testing the veracity of the findings with learners.</p

Discourse through making: eliciting knowledge to support craft skills learning

In this paper I describe the development of techniques for eliciting craft knowledge for use in an interactive learning resource, illustrated with examples from two practical research projects. In each I explored the skills of both expert and novice craft practitioners, firstly in the field of traditional bowl turning and secondly in the field of traditional clog making. The result of this work was to highlight the personal, context-specific and highly tacit nature of such craft knowledge which is explained through a review of the writings of Michael Polanyi and Donald Schön. I conclude by redefining the concept of knowledge elicitation and transmission in this context. I describe the role of the designer-researcher as helping the expert to articulate their tacit knowledge through stimulating reciprocal reflection between the expert and a novice, and designing interpretation to help bridge the knowledge gap between the two.</p

Unknown knowns; uncovering tacit knowledge for the design of interactive media

In my research I am exploring the potential role as a mediator between cultural heritage, as represented by traditional craftmakers, and people today who are interested in employing and understanding these skills. In this paper I shall discuss design strategies for using multimedia to record traditional craft skills in the form of a learning resource which would offer the opportunity for new makers to draw upon the skills of experienced craft practitioners whilst directing their own learning at a pace and style that suits their craft practice</p

Just Another Gibbs Additive Modeller: Interfacing JAGS and mgcv

The BUGS language offers a very flexible way of specifying complex statistical models for the purposes of Gibbs sampling, while its JAGS variant offers very convenient R integration via the rjags package. However, including smoothers in JAGS models can involve some quite tedious coding, especially for multivariate or adaptive smoothers. Further, if an additive smooth structure is required then some care is needed, in order to centre smooths appropriately, and to find appropriate starting values. R package mgcv implements a wide range of smoothers, all in a manner appropriate for inclusion in JAGS code, and automates centring and other smooth setup tasks. The purpose of this note is to describe an interface between mgcv and JAGS, based around an R function, `jagam', which takes a generalized additive model (GAM) as specified in mgcv and automatically generates the JAGS model code and data required for inference about the model via Gibbs sampling. Although the auto-generated JAGS code can be run as is, the expectation is that the user would wish to modify it in order to add complex stochastic model components readily specified in JAGS. A simple interface is also provided for visualisation and further inference about the estimated smooth components using standard mgcv functionality. The methods described here will be un-necessarily inefficient if all that is required is fully Bayesian inference about a standard GAM, rather than the full flexibility of JAGS. In that case the BayesX package would be more efficient.Comment: Submitted to the Journal of Statistical Softwar

Designing for tacit learning: an investigation of design strategies for multimedia supported learning in the crafts

There is an increasing interest and activity in the design of interactive multimedia to support learning in all fields of education and training. However, most of the theory to support such developments is concerned with learning explicit knowledge and there is little guidance available to designers of material for learning in areas with an element of tacit knowledge such as craft skills. This paper describes the foundation work for a long-term project concerned with learning in traditional rural crafts but with the intention to provide a methodological framework for the design of multimedia-based learning in all areas of craft knowledge. A review of established theory of learning and the use of multimedia for learning in areas of explicit knowledge indicates some important basic principles, for example the need to understand the interaction between the teacher and learner in the context of the subject being taught and the need for clear narrative structures to avoid students becoming "lost" in the multiple pathways of interactive media. Observational studies of learning using educational video in a craft context and a study of an experienced craftsman/teacher teaching a group of learners, complemented by study of learning in related contexts, have allowed problems and issues to be identified and design strategies to be developed. While these are provisional they provide an overview of the design problems and have been used to plan a programme of experimental design and evaluation to test and develop principles of effective multimedia design for craft learning. </p

The further development of circulation control airfoils

The performance trends of circulation control airfoils are reviewed and observations are made as to where improvements in performance and expansion of the flight envelope may be feasible. A new analytically defined family of airfoils is suggested, all of which maintain the fore and aft symmetry required for stopped rotor application. It is important to recognize that any improvements in section capabilities may not be totally applicable to the present vehicle operation. It remains for the designers of the rotor system to reappraise the three dimensional operating environment in view of the different airfoil operating characteristics and for the airfoil definitions to be flexible while maintaining satisfactory levels of performance

Hands on - hands off: on hitting your thumb with a virtual hammer

In a wired world even the most physically embodied craft skills are affected by computer facilitated communication. To consider how different sorts of space – both real and virtual – influence the learning of craft skills this paper presents three types of space – the ‘real’ space of a jewellery workshop, an online ‘wiki’ space for learning how to make a folding knife mediated by face to face interaction and an online discussion group about French Horn making. Some features common to the learning of any craft skill are discussed as well as some current ideas about the influence of networked communication on the way people relate to each other. Conclusions are drawn about the relationships between different types of learner, different types of skill and different types of learning space which demonstrate that while there may be no substitute for face to face contact in learning the most embodied craft skills, even in real-world settings a significant proportion of learning depends on social interaction which may be reproduced online. Keywords: Craft learning; Apprenticeship; Communities of Practice; Online Networks</p

The Java system dependence graph

The Program Dependence Graph was introduced by Ottenstein and Ottenstein in 1984 [14]. It was suggested to be a suitable internal program representation for monolithic programs, for the purpose of carrying out certain software engineering operations such as slicing and the computation of program metrics. Since then, Horwitz et al. have introduced the multi-procedural equivalent System Dependence Graph [9]. Many authors have proposed object-oriented dependence graph construction approaches [11, 10, 20, 12]. Every approach provides its own benefits, some of which are language specific. This paper is based on Java and combines the most important benefits from a range of approaches. The result is a Java System Dependence Graph, which summarises the key benefits offered by different approaches and adapts them (if necessary) to the Java language