Integrating Virtual Worlds with Tangible User Interfaces for Teaching Mathematics: A Pilot Study.

PubMed

Guerrero, Graciela; Ayala, Andrés; Mateu, Juan; Casades, Laura; Alamán, Xavier

2016-10-25

This article presents a pilot study of the use of two new tangible interfaces and virtual worlds for teaching geometry in a secondary school. The first tangible device allows the user to control a virtual object in six degrees of freedom. The second tangible device is used to modify virtual objects, changing attributes such as position, size, rotation and color. A pilot study on using these devices was carried out at the "Florida Secundaria" high school. A virtual world was built where students used the tangible interfaces to manipulate geometrical figures in order to learn different geometrical concepts. The pilot experiment results suggest that the use of tangible interfaces and virtual worlds allowed a more meaningful learning (concepts learnt were more durable).

Constructivism, Socioculturalism, and Popper's World 3.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bereiter, Carl

1994-01-01

Examines the concept of learning from both constructivist and sociocultural perspectives and introduces a third perspective based on K. R. Popper's philosophy of science. It is argued that constructivism cannot adequately account for the immaterial objects that Popper located in his World 3--abstract mathematical and scientific objects. (GLR)

Common world model for unmanned systems

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Dean, Robert Michael S.

2013-05-01

The Robotic Collaborative Technology Alliance (RCTA) seeks to provide adaptive robot capabilities which move beyond traditional metric algorithms to include cognitive capabilities. Key to this effort is the Common World Model, which moves beyond the state-of-the-art by representing the world using metric, semantic, and symbolic information. It joins these layers of information to define objects in the world. These objects may be reasoned upon jointly using traditional geometric, symbolic cognitive algorithms and new computational nodes formed by the combination of these disciplines. The Common World Model must understand how these objects relate to each other. Our world model includes the concept of Self-Information about the robot. By encoding current capability, component status, task execution state, and histories we track information which enables the robot to reason and adapt its performance using Meta-Cognition and Machine Learning principles. The world model includes models of how aspects of the environment behave, which enable prediction of future world states. To manage complexity, we adopted a phased implementation approach to the world model. We discuss the design of "Phase 1" of this world model, and interfaces by tracing perception data through the system from the source to the meta-cognitive layers provided by ACT-R and SS-RICS. We close with lessons learned from implementation and how the design relates to Open Architecture.

Creating Online Content with Real World Application by Designing and Implementing Online Practicums for Virtual and Physical Environments

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Barrett, Bob

2012-01-01

Universities need to assess student learning in order to determine if they are reaching the needs of the students, linking learning to course objectives, and determining if their courses have academic rigor. While many courses focus on the immediate course learning objectives, the use of final program projects and program assessments are becoming…

Learning Object Names at Different Hierarchical Levels Using Cross-Situational Statistics.

PubMed

Chen, Chi-Hsin; Zhang, Yayun; Yu, Chen

2018-05-01

Objects in the world usually have names at different hierarchical levels (e.g., beagle, dog, animal). This research investigates adults' ability to use cross-situational statistics to simultaneously learn object labels at individual and category levels. The results revealed that adults were able to use co-occurrence information to learn hierarchical labels in contexts where the labels for individual objects and labels for categories were presented in completely separated blocks, in interleaved blocks, or mixed in the same trial. Temporal presentation schedules significantly affected the learning of individual object labels, but not the learning of category labels. Learners' subsequent generalization of category labels indicated sensitivity to the structure of statistical input. Copyright © 2017 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Integrating Virtual Worlds with Tangible User Interfaces for Teaching Mathematics: A Pilot Study

PubMed Central

Guerrero, Graciela; Ayala, Andrés; Mateu, Juan; Casades, Laura; Alamán, Xavier

2016-01-01

This article presents a pilot study of the use of two new tangible interfaces and virtual worlds for teaching geometry in a secondary school. The first tangible device allows the user to control a virtual object in six degrees of freedom. The second tangible device is used to modify virtual objects, changing attributes such as position, size, rotation and color. A pilot study on using these devices was carried out at the “Florida Secundaria” high school. A virtual world was built where students used the tangible interfaces to manipulate geometrical figures in order to learn different geometrical concepts. The pilot experiment results suggest that the use of tangible interfaces and virtual worlds allowed a more meaningful learning (concepts learnt were more durable). PMID:27792132

Designing the Internet of Things for Learning Environmentally Responsible Behaviour

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hu, Jun; van der Vlist, Bram; Niezen, Gerrit; Willemsen, Willem; Willems, Don; Feijs, Loe

2013-01-01

We present two designs in the area of the Internet of Things, utilizing the ontology-driven Smart Objects For Intelligent Applications (SOFIA) Interoperability Platform (IOP). The IOP connects domestic objects in the physical world to the information world, allowing for coaching the behaviour of, or raising awareness in, domestic energy…

The company objects keep: Linking referents together during cross-situational word learning.

PubMed

Zettersten, Martin; Wojcik, Erica; Benitez, Viridiana L; Saffran, Jenny

2018-04-01

Learning the meanings of words involves not only linking individual words to referents but also building a network of connections among entities in the world, concepts, and words. Previous studies reveal that infants and adults track the statistical co-occurrence of labels and objects across multiple ambiguous training instances to learn words. However, it is less clear whether, given distributional or attentional cues, learners also encode associations amongst the novel objects. We investigated the consequences of two types of cues that highlighted object-object links in a cross-situational word learning task: distributional structure - how frequently the referents of novel words occurred together - and visual context - whether the referents were seen on matching backgrounds. Across three experiments, we found that in addition to learning novel words, adults formed connections between frequently co-occurring objects. These findings indicate that learners exploit statistical regularities to form multiple types of associations during word learning.

Leveraging Cognitive Context for Object Recognition

DTIC Science & Technology

2014-06-01

learned from large image databases. We build upon this concept by exploring cognitive context, demonstrating how rich dynamic context provided by...context that people rely upon as they perceive the world. Context in ACT-R/E takes the form of associations between related concepts that are learned ...and accuracy of object recognition. Context is most often viewed as a static concept, learned from large image databases. We build upon this concept by

Our (Represented) World: A Quantum-Like Object

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lambert-Mogiliansky, Ariane; Dubois, François

It has been suggested that observed cognitive limitations may be an expression of the quantum-like structure of the mind. In this chapter we explore some implications of this hypothesis for learning i.e., for the construction of a representation of the world. For a quantum-like individual, there exists a multiplicity of mentally incompatible (Bohr complementary) but equally valid and complete representations (mental pictures) of the world. The process of learning i.e., of constructing a representation, involves two kinds of operations on the mental picture. The acquisition of new data which is modelled as a preparation procedure and the processing of data which is modelled as an introspective measurement operation. This process is shown not to converge to a single mental picture. Rather, it can evolve forever. We define a concept of entropy to capture relative intrinsic uncertainty. The analysis suggests a new perspective on learning. First, it implies that we must turn to double objectification as in Quantum Mechanics: the cognitive process is the primary object of learning. Second, it suggests that a representation of the world arises as the result of creative interplay between the mind and the environment.

Learning viewpoint invariant perceptual representations from cluttered images.

PubMed

Spratling, Michael W

2005-05-01

In order to perform object recognition, it is necessary to form perceptual representations that are sufficiently specific to distinguish between objects, but that are also sufficiently flexible to generalize across changes in location, rotation, and scale. A standard method for learning perceptual representations that are invariant to viewpoint is to form temporal associations across image sequences showing object transformations. However, this method requires that individual stimuli be presented in isolation and is therefore unlikely to succeed in real-world applications where multiple objects can co-occur in the visual input. This paper proposes a simple modification to the learning method that can overcome this limitation and results in more robust learning of invariant representations.

Learning from picture books: Infants’ use of naming information

PubMed Central

Khu, Melanie; Graham, Susan A.; Ganea, Patricia A.

2014-01-01

The present study investigated whether naming would facilitate infants’ transfer of information from picture books to the real world. Eighteen- and 21-month-olds learned a novel label for a novel object depicted in a picture book. Infants then saw a second picture book in which an adult demonstrated how to elicit the object’s non-obvious property. Accompanying narration described the pictures using the object’s newly learnt label. Infants were subsequently tested with the real-world object depicted in the book, as well as a different-color exemplar. Infants’ performance on the test trials was compared with that of infants in a no label condition. When presented with the exact object depicted in the picture book, 21-month-olds were significantly more likely to attempt to elicit the object’s non-obvious property than were 18-month-olds. Learning the object’s label before learning about the object’s hidden property did not improve 18-month-olds’ performance. At 21-months, the number of infants in the label condition who attempted to elicit the real-world object’s non-obvious property was greater than would be predicted by chance, but the number of infants in the no label condition was not. Neither age group nor label condition predicted test performance for the different-color exemplar. The findings are discussed in relation to infants’ learning and transfer from picture books. PMID:24611058

A Model for the Design of Puzzle-Based Games Including Virtual and Physical Objects

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Melero, Javier; Hernandez-Leo, Davinia

2014-01-01

Multiple evidences in the Technology-Enhanced Learning domain indicate that Game-Based Learning can lead to positive effects in students' performance and motivation. Educational games can be completely virtual or can combine the use of physical objects or spaces in the real world. However, the potential effectiveness of these approaches…

#gottacatchemall: Exploring Pokemon Go in Search of Learning Enhancement Objects

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cacchione, Annamaria; Procter-Legg, Emma; Petersen, Sobah Abbas

2017-01-01

The Augmented Reality Game, Pokemon Go, took the world by storm in the summer of 2016. City landscapes were decorated with amusing, colourful objects called Pokemon, and the holiday activities were enhanced by catching these wonderful creatures. In light of this, it is inevitable for mobile language learning researchers to reflect on the impact of…

Striatal and Hippocampal Entropy and Recognition Signals in Category Learning: Simultaneous Processes Revealed by Model-Based fMRI

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Davis, Tyler; Love, Bradley C.; Preston, Alison R.

2012-01-01

Category learning is a complex phenomenon that engages multiple cognitive processes, many of which occur simultaneously and unfold dynamically over time. For example, as people encounter objects in the world, they simultaneously engage processes to determine their fit with current knowledge structures, gather new information about the objects, and…

Learning Protein Structure with Peers in an AR-Enhanced Learning Environment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chen, Yu-Chien

2013-01-01

Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive system that allows users to interact with virtual objects and the real world at the same time. The purpose of this dissertation was to explore how AR, as a new visualization tool, that can demonstrate spatial relationships by representing three dimensional objects and animations, facilitates students to…

Learning About Causes From People: Observational Causal Learning in 24-Month-Old Infants

PubMed Central

Meltzoff, Andrew N.; Waismeyer, Anna; Gopnik, Alison

2013-01-01

How do infants and young children learn about the causal structure of the world around them? In 4 experiments we investigate whether young children initially give special weight to the outcomes of goal-directed interventions they see others perform and use this to distinguish correlations from genuine causal relations—observational causal learning. In a new 2-choice procedure, 2- to 4-year-old children saw 2 identical objects (potential causes). Activation of 1 but not the other triggered a spatially remote effect. Children systematically intervened on the causal object and predictively looked to the effect. Results fell to chance when the cause and effect were temporally reversed, so that the events were merely associated but not causally related. The youngest children (24- to 36-month-olds) were more likely to make causal inferences when covariations were the outcome of human interventions than when they were not. Observational causal learning may be a fundamental learning mechanism that enables infants to abstract the causal structure of the world. PMID:22369335

Increasing Student Learning through Multimedia Projects.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Simkins, Michael; Cole, Karen; Tavalin, Fern; Means, Barbara

This book discusses enhancing student achievement through project-based learning with multimedia. Chapter 1 describes project-based multimedia learning. Chapter 2 presents a multimedia primer, including the five basic types of media objects (i.e., images, text, sound, motion, and interactivity). Chapter 3 addresses making a real-world connection,…

Expanding Evidence Approaches for Learning in a Digital World

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Means, Barbara; Anderson, Kea

2013-01-01

This report describes how big data and an evidence framework can align across five contexts of educational improvement. It explains that before working with big data, there is an important prerequisite: the proposed innovation should align with deeper learning objectives and should incorporate sound learning sciences principles. New curriculum…

Learning Engines - A Functional Object Model for Developing Learning Resources for the WWW.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fritze, Paul; Ip, Albert

The Learning Engines (LE) model, developed at the University of Melbourne (Australia), supports the integration of rich learning activities into the World Wide Web. The model is concerned with the practical design, educational value, and reusability of software components. The model is focused on the academic teacher who is in the best position to…

Learning in a World of Change: Methods and Approaches in the Classroom.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Richardson, Robin

1979-01-01

Recommends that teachers use a curriculum development project (the World Studies Project) to help students increase their understanding of global affairs such as human rights, economic order, disarmament, the world environment, and the law of the sea. Activities and objectives of the project are presented and ordering information for additional…

Exploring the story, science, and adventure of small worlds

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Swann, J. L.; Elkins-Tanton, L. T.; Anbar, A. D.; Klug Boonstra, S.; Tamer, A. J.; Mead, C.; Hunsley, D.

2017-12-01

Small worlds are a strategic focus at NASA, reflected by missions such as Osiris Rex and Psyche among others. The Infiniscope project, with funding from NASA SMD, is building on this scientific and public interest to teach formal and informal learners about asteroids and other small worlds. The digital learning experience, "Where are the small worlds?", and future Infiniscope experiences, incorporate a design theory that we describe as "education through exploration" (ETX) which is provided through an adaptive e-learning platform. This design ensures that learners actively engage in exploration and discovery, while receiving targeted feedback to push through challenges. To ensure that this and future experiences reach and meet the needs of as many educators as possible, Infiniscope includes a digital teaching network to host the experiences and support the reuse and adaptation of digital resources in new lessons. "Where are the small worlds?" puts learners in an interactive simulation of the solar system and provides a mission structure in which they hunt for "astrocaches" on near earth objects, main belt asteroids, and Kuiper-belt objects. These activities allow the learner to discover the locations of the small worlds in the solar system and develop an intuitive understanding for the relative motion of objects at various distances from the Sun. The experience is NGSS-aligned and accompanied by a lesson plan for integration into the classroom. In testing with more than 500 middle-school students, 83% of participants said they wanted to do more experiences like "Where are the small worlds?" They also found the experience both "fun" and "interesting" while being moderately difficult. "Where are the small worlds?" is one of many visualizations and lessons that is available within the Infiniscope teaching network. The network already has hundreds of members and is expected to grow in both numbers and engagement over time. Currently, educators can search and use pre-existing experiences, but as the visualization library expands and educators learn more about exploration-learning design, they may modify existing experiences and even build entirely new experiences to meet specific needs. In parallel, we are also developing a professional development program that builds understanding of the principles of ETX design.

Learning User Preferences for Sets of Objects

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

desJardins, Marie; Eaton, Eric; Wagstaff, Kiri L.

2006-01-01

Most work on preference learning has focused on pairwise preferences or rankings over individual items. In this paper, we present a method for learning preferences over sets of items. Our learning method takes as input a collection of positive examples--that is, one or more sets that have been identified by a user as desirable. Kernel density estimation is used to estimate the value function for individual items, and the desired set diversity is estimated from the average set diversity observed in the collection. Since this is a new learning problem, we introduce a new evaluation methodology and evaluate the learning method on two data collections: synthetic blocks-world data and a new real-world music data collection that we have gathered.

Real-world visual statistics and infants' first-learned object names

PubMed Central

Clerkin, Elizabeth M.; Hart, Elizabeth; Rehg, James M.; Yu, Chen

2017-01-01

We offer a new solution to the unsolved problem of how infants break into word learning based on the visual statistics of everyday infant-perspective scenes. Images from head camera video captured by 8 1/2 to 10 1/2 month-old infants at 147 at-home mealtime events were analysed for the objects in view. The images were found to be highly cluttered with many different objects in view. However, the frequency distribution of object categories was extremely right skewed such that a very small set of objects was pervasively present—a fact that may substantially reduce the problem of referential ambiguity. The statistical structure of objects in these infant egocentric scenes differs markedly from that in the training sets used in computational models and in experiments on statistical word-referent learning. Therefore, the results also indicate a need to re-examine current explanations of how infants break into word learning. This article is part of the themed issue ‘New frontiers for statistical learning in the cognitive sciences’. PMID:27872373

Models, Matter and Truth in Doing and Learning Science

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hardman, Mark

2017-01-01

Doing science involves the development and evaluation of models. These models are not objective truths but can be understood as explanations, which scientists use to explore and reason about an aspect of the world. Learning science involves students expressing and engaging with models in the classroom. However, this learning should not be seen as…

Enhancing and Transforming Global Learning Communities with Augmented Reality

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Frydenberg, Mark; Andone, Diana

2018-01-01

Augmented and virtual reality applications bring new insights to real world objects and scenarios. This paper shares research results of the TalkTech project, an ongoing study investigating the impact of learning about new technologies as members of global communities. This study shares results of a collaborative learning project about augmented…

"Notice of Violation of IEEE Publication Principles" Multiobjective Reinforcement Learning: A Comprehensive Overview.

PubMed

Liu, Chunming; Xu, Xin; Hu, Dewen

2013-04-29

Reinforcement learning is a powerful mechanism for enabling agents to learn in an unknown environment, and most reinforcement learning algorithms aim to maximize some numerical value, which represents only one long-term objective. However, multiple long-term objectives are exhibited in many real-world decision and control problems; therefore, recently, there has been growing interest in solving multiobjective reinforcement learning (MORL) problems with multiple conflicting objectives. The aim of this paper is to present a comprehensive overview of MORL. In this paper, the basic architecture, research topics, and naive solutions of MORL are introduced at first. Then, several representative MORL approaches and some important directions of recent research are reviewed. The relationships between MORL and other related research are also discussed, which include multiobjective optimization, hierarchical reinforcement learning, and multi-agent reinforcement learning. Finally, research challenges and open problems of MORL techniques are highlighted.

A Context-Aware Knowledge Map to Support Ubiquitous Learning Activities for a u-Botanical Museum

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wang, Shu-Lin; Chen, Chia-Chen; Zhang, Zhe George

2015-01-01

Recent developments in mobile and wireless communication technologies have played a vital role in building the u-learning environment that now combines both real-world and digital learning resources. However, learners still require assistance to control real objects and manage the abundance of available materials; otherwise, their mental workload…

Bridging the Divide--Seeing Mathematics in the World through Dynamic Geometry

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Aydin, Hatice; Monaghan, John

2011-01-01

In TMA, Oldknow (2009, "TEAMAT", 28, 180-195) called for ways to unlock students' skills so that they increase learning about the world of mathematics and the objects in the world around them. This article examines one way in which we may unlock the student skills. We are currently exploring the potential for students to "see" mathematics in the…

Online Conferencing: Lessons Learned.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Green, Lyndsay

This guide summarizes lessons learned from the author's experience of organizing and moderating five non-pedagogical online conferences that use World Wide Web-based conferencing software, whether synchronous or asynchronous. Seven sections cover the following topics: (1) the pros and cons of online conferencing; (2) setting objectives; (3)…

Learning and Construction in Engineering Jobs.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Buch, Anders

Knowledge production and learning in engineering is a local, situated, negotiated, and thoroughly social process. Although engineering work entails the construal, production, and application of artifacts and technical devices belonging to the "object world," the process of designing is a process of achieving consensus among real or…

On the potential for using immersive virtual environments to support laboratory experiment contextualisation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Machet, Tania; Lowe, David; Gütl, Christian

2012-12-01

This paper explores the hypothesis that embedding a laboratory activity into a virtual environment can provide a richer experimental context and hence improve the understanding of the relationship between a theoretical model and the real world, particularly in terms of the model's strengths and weaknesses. While an identified learning objective of laboratories is to support the understanding of the relationship between models and reality, the paper illustrates that this understanding is hindered by inherently limited experiments and that there is scope for improvement. Despite the contextualisation of learning activities having been shown to support learning objectives in many fields, there is traditionally little contextual information presented during laboratory experimentation. The paper argues that the enhancing laboratory activity with contextual information affords an opportunity to improve students' understanding of the relationship between the theoretical model and the experiment (which is effectively a proxy for the complex real world), thereby improving their understanding of the relationship between the model and reality. The authors propose that these improvements can be achieved by setting remote laboratories within context-rich virtual worlds.

Learning Gene Expression Through Modelling and Argumentation. A Case Study Exploring the Connections Between the Worlds of Knowledge

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Puig, Blanca; Ageitos, Noa; Jiménez-Aleixandre, María Pilar

2017-12-01

There is emerging interest on the interactions between modelling and argumentation in specific contexts, such as genetics learning. It has been suggested that modelling might help students understand and argue on genetics. We propose modelling gene expression as a way to learn molecular genetics and diseases with a genetic component. The study is framed in Tiberghien's (2000) two worlds of knowledge, the world of "theories & models" and the world of "objects & events", adding a third component, the world of representations. We seek to examine how modelling and argumentation interact and connect the three worlds of knowledge while modelling gene expression. It is a case study of 10th graders learning about diseases with a genetic component. The research questions are as follows: (1) What argumentative and modelling operations do students enact in the process of modelling gene expression? Specifically, which operations allow connecting the three worlds of knowledge? (2) What are the interactions between modelling and argumentation in modelling gene expression? To what extent do these interactions help students connect the three worlds of knowledge and modelling gene expression? The argumentative operation of using evidence helps students to relate the three worlds of knowledge, enacted in all the connections. It seems to be a relationship among the number of interactions between modelling and argumentation, the connections between world of knowledge and students' capacity to develop a more sophisticated representation. Despite this is a case study, this approach of analysis reveals potentialities for a deeper understanding of learning genetics though scientific practices.

Eye-tracking the time-course of novel word learning and lexical competition in adults and children.

PubMed

Weighall, A R; Henderson, L M; Barr, D J; Cairney, S A; Gaskell, M G

2017-04-01

Lexical competition is a hallmark of proficient, automatic word recognition. Previous research suggests that there is a delay before a new spoken word becomes engaged in this process, with sleep playing an important role. However, data from one method - the visual world paradigm - consistently show competition without a delay. We trained 42 adults and 40 children (aged 7-8) on novel word-object pairings, and employed this paradigm to measure the time-course of lexical competition. Fixations to novel objects upon hearing existing words (e.g., looks to the novel object biscal upon hearing "click on the biscuit") were compared to fixations on untrained objects. Novel word-object pairings learned immediately before testing and those learned the previous day exhibited significant competition effects, with stronger competition for the previous day pairings for children but not adults. Crucially, this competition effect was significantly smaller for novel than existing competitors (e.g., looks to candy upon hearing "click on the candle"), suggesting that novel items may not compete for recognition like fully-fledged lexical items, even after 24h. Explicit memory (cued recall) was superior for words learned the day before testing, particularly for children; this effect (but not the lexical competition effects) correlated with sleep-spindle density. Together, the results suggest that different aspects of new word learning follow different time courses: visual world competition effects can emerge swiftly, but are qualitatively different from those observed with established words, and are less reliant upon sleep. Furthermore, the findings fit with the view that word learning earlier in development is boosted by sleep to a greater degree. Copyright © 2016. Published by Elsevier Inc.

Third-Graders Learn about Fractions Using Virtual Manipulatives: A Classroom Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Reimer, Kelly; Moyer, Patricia S.

2005-01-01

With recent advances in computer technology, it is no surprise that the manipulation of objects in mathematics classrooms now includes the manipulation of objects on the computer screen. These objects, referred to as "virtual manipulatives," are essentially replicas of physical manipulatives placed on the World Wide Web in the form of computer…

The Westminster Eighth Grade World Problems Course (Pilot Project).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Barth, James P.; And Others

The rationale, objectives, and social studies units are provided in this curriculum guide for grade 8. Focus is upon students' assessing, hypothesizing, and synthesizing the world's critical problems. Teaching techniques are process education oriented emphasizing inquiry training, problem solving, and inductive learning in an attempt to prepare…

Infant Statistical Learning

PubMed Central

Saffran, Jenny R.; Kirkham, Natasha Z.

2017-01-01

Perception involves making sense of a dynamic, multimodal environment. In the absence of mechanisms capable of exploiting the statistical patterns in the natural world, infants would face an insurmountable computational problem. Infant statistical learning mechanisms facilitate the detection of structure. These abilities allow the infant to compute across elements in their environmental input, extracting patterns for further processing and subsequent learning. In this selective review, we summarize findings that show that statistical learning is both a broad and flexible mechanism (supporting learning from different modalities across many different content areas) and input specific (shifting computations depending on the type of input and goal of learning). We suggest that statistical learning not only provides a framework for studying language development and object knowledge in constrained laboratory settings, but also allows researchers to tackle real-world problems, such as multilingualism, the role of ever-changing learning environments, and differential developmental trajectories. PMID:28793812

Real-world visual statistics and infants' first-learned object names.

PubMed

Clerkin, Elizabeth M; Hart, Elizabeth; Rehg, James M; Yu, Chen; Smith, Linda B

2017-01-05

We offer a new solution to the unsolved problem of how infants break into word learning based on the visual statistics of everyday infant-perspective scenes. Images from head camera video captured by 8 1/2 to 10 1/2 month-old infants at 147 at-home mealtime events were analysed for the objects in view. The images were found to be highly cluttered with many different objects in view. However, the frequency distribution of object categories was extremely right skewed such that a very small set of objects was pervasively present-a fact that may substantially reduce the problem of referential ambiguity. The statistical structure of objects in these infant egocentric scenes differs markedly from that in the training sets used in computational models and in experiments on statistical word-referent learning. Therefore, the results also indicate a need to re-examine current explanations of how infants break into word learning.This article is part of the themed issue 'New frontiers for statistical learning in the cognitive sciences'. © 2016 The Author(s).

Quality indicators for learner-centered postgraduate medical e-learning

PubMed Central

Westerman, Michiel; Scheele, Fedde

2017-01-01

Objectives The objectives of this study were to identify the needs and expectations of learners and educational experts in postgraduate medical e-learning, and to contribute to the current literature. Methods We performed four focus-group discussions with e-learning end-users (learners) and didactic experts. The participants were postgraduate learners with varying levels of experience, educational experts from a Dutch e-learning task group, and commercial experts from a Dutch e-learning company. Verbatim transcribed interview recordings were analyzed using King’s template analysis. The initial template was created with reference to recent literature on postgraduate medical e-learning quality indicators. The transcripts were coded, after which the emerging differences in template interpretation were discussed until a consensus was reached within the team. Results The final template consisted of three domains of positive e-learning influencers (motivators, learning enhancers, and real-world translation) and three domains of negatively influential parameters (barriers, learning discouragers, and poor preparation). The interpretation of the final template showed three subjects which form the basis of e-learning, namely, Motivate, Learn and Apply. Conclusions This study forms a basis for learning in general and could be applied to many educational instruments. Individual characteristics should be adapted to the target audience. Three subjects form the basis of, and six themes cover all items needed for, good (enough) postgraduate e-learning. Further research should be carried out with learners and real-world e-learning to validate this template. PMID:28456781

15-Month-Olds’ Transfer of Learning between Touch Screen and Real-World Displays: Language Cues and Cognitive Loads

PubMed Central

Zack, Elizabeth; Gerhardstein, Peter; Meltzoff, Andrew N.; Barr, Rachel

2012-01-01

Infants have difficulty transferring information between 2D and 3D sources. The current study extends Zack et al.’s (2009) touch screen imitation task to examine whether the addition of specific language cues significantly facilitates 15-month-olds’ transfer of learning between touch screens and real-world 3D objects. The addition of two kinds of linguistic cues (object label plus verb or nonsense name) did not elevate action imitation significantly above levels observed when such language cues were not used. Language cues hindered infants’ performance in the 3D→2D direction of transfer, but only for the object label plus verb condition. The lack of a facilitative effect of language is discussed in terms of competing cognitive loads imposed by conjointly transferring information across dimensions and processing linguistic cues in an action imitation task at this age. PMID:23121508

Abstraction in Mathematics and Mathematics Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mitchelmore, Michael; White, Paul

2004-01-01

It is claimed that, since mathematics is essentially a self-contained system, mathematical objects may best be described as "abstract-apart." On the other hand, fundamental mathematical ideas are closely related to the real world and their learning involves empirical concepts. These concepts may be called "abstract-general" because they embody…

The Smoking Milkshake

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thomas, Jennifer; Luebbers, Paul E.

2009-01-01

Objectives: This teaching idea is designed for students to learn about the ingredients in cigarettes and the potential short-term health consequences of these ingredients, as well as to learn about the general effects of smoking. Students will complete an activity to use this information in a hypothetical, but potentially, real-world situation.…

"CanCore": In Canada and around the World

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Friesen, Norm

2005-01-01

In this article, the author discusses "CanCore," a learning resource metadata initiative funded by Industry Canada and supported by Athabasca University, Alberta, and TeleUniversite du Quebec, and describes the increasing range of international uses of the "CanCore" metadata for the indexing of learning objects.…

Learning spatially coherent properties of the visual world in connectionist networks

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Becker, Suzanna; Hinton, Geoffrey E.

1991-10-01

In the unsupervised learning paradigm, a network of neuron-like units is presented with an ensemble of input patterns from a structured environment, such as the visual world, and learns to represent the regularities in that input. The major goal in developing unsupervised learning algorithms is to find objective functions that characterize the quality of the network's representation without explicitly specifying the desired outputs of any of the units. The sort of objective functions considered cause a unit to become tuned to spatially coherent features of visual images (such as texture, depth, shading, and surface orientation), by learning to predict the outputs of other units which have spatially adjacent receptive fields. Simulations show that using an information-theoretic algorithm called IMAX, a network can be trained to represent depth by observing random dot stereograms of surfaces with continuously varying disparities. Once a layer of depth-tuned units has developed, subsequent layers are trained to perform surface interpolation of curved surfaces, by learning to predict the depth of one image region based on depth measurements in surrounding regions. An extension of the basic model allows a population of competing neurons to learn a distributed code for disparity, which naturally gives rise to a representation of discontinuities.

Paint the World with Light

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gran, David

2010-01-01

Two classrooms on opposite sides of the world happened to be working on a very similar project at the same time. In both Shanghai, China, and Palm Springs, California, students were learning how to turn their flashlights and other light-emitting objects into paintbrushes. Light painting is a form of long-exposure photography in which the shutter…

Reaching Experience Increases Face Preference in 3-Month-Old Infants

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Libertus, Klaus; Needham, Amy

2011-01-01

The developing infant learns about the physical and the social world by engaging with objects and with people. In the study reported here, we investigated the relationship between infants' interactions with the physical and the social world. Three-month-old infants were trained for 2 weeks and experienced either actively manipulating objects…

Early Representations of Ownership

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Blake, Peter R.; Harris, Paul L.

2011-01-01

To navigate a world filled with private property, children must be able to assign ownership information to objects and update that information when appropriate. In this chapter, the authors propose that children include ownership as an attribute of their object representations. Children can learn about ownership attributes either by witnessing…

Assessing Online Learning Objects: Student Evaluation of a Guide on the Side Interactive Learning Tutorial Designed by SRJC Libraries

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Virtue, Alicia; Dean, Ellen; Matheson, Molly

2014-01-01

More and more of today's scholars conduct their research in a digital realm rather than using a print collection. The University of Arizona Libraries Guide on the Side tutorial software offers an opportunity to apply the principles of active learning with real world research scenarios. This paper reports on the design and introduction of…

Cooperative inference: Features, objects, and collections.

PubMed

Searcy, Sophia Ray; Shafto, Patrick

2016-10-01

Cooperation plays a central role in theories of development, learning, cultural evolution, and education. We argue that existing models of learning from cooperative informants have fundamental limitations that prevent them from explaining how cooperation benefits learning. First, existing models are shown to be computationally intractable, suggesting that they cannot apply to realistic learning problems. Second, existing models assume a priori agreement about which concepts are favored in learning, which leads to a conundrum: Learning fails without precise agreement on bias yet there is no single rational choice. We introduce cooperative inference, a novel framework for cooperation in concept learning, which resolves these limitations. Cooperative inference generalizes the notion of cooperation used in previous models from omission of labeled objects to the omission values of features, labels for objects, and labels for collections of objects. The result is an approach that is computationally tractable, does not require a priori agreement about biases, applies to both Boolean and first-order concepts, and begins to approximate the richness of real-world concept learning problems. We conclude by discussing relations to and implications for existing theories of cognition, cognitive development, and cultural evolution. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

20 CFR 416.926a - Functional equivalence for children.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-04-01

....” (See § 416.924(c).) When we assess your functional limitations, we will consider all the relevant... illustrate the typical functioning of children in different age groups. For all of the domains, we also... learning about the world around you. When you play, you should learn how objects go together in different...

Teaching Psychosomatic Medicine Using Problem-Based Learning and Role-Playing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Heru, Alison M.

2011-01-01

Objective: Problem-based learning (PBL) has been implemented in medical education world-wide. Despite its popularity, it has not been generally considered useful for residency programs. The author presents a model for the implementation of PBL in residency programs. Method: The author presents a description of a PBL curriculum for teaching…

Active Learning through the Use of Virtual Environments

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mayrose, James

2012-01-01

Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) has seen explosive growth over the last decade. Immersive VR attempts to give users the sensation of being fully immersed in a synthetic environment by providing them with 3D hardware, and allowing them to interact with objects in virtual worlds. The technology is extremely effective for learning and exploration, and…

Education and Sustainability: Reinvigorating Adult Education's Role in Transformation, Justice and Development

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Casey, Catherine; Asamoah, Lily

2016-01-01

Distinctively economic objectives for lifelong education, especially adult learning and education, feature prominently in policy-making agendas and educators' practice in much of the world. Critics contend that humanistic and holistic visions of lifelong learning for all have been marginalised and neglected. The current turn of political attention…

Attitudes of Students towards Learning Objects in Web-Based Language Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Basal, Ahmet; Gurol, Mehmet; Sevindik, Tuncay

2012-01-01

Language education is important in the rapidly changing world. Every year much effort has spent on preparing teaching materials for language education. Since positive attitudes of learners towards a teaching material enhance the effectiveness of that material, it is important to determine the attitudes of learners towards the material used.…

Virtual Learning Worlds as a Bridge between Arts and Humanities and Science and Technology

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dunning, Jeremy; Bhattacharya, Sunand; Daniels, David; Dunning, Katherine

2007-01-01

Science and technology, when applied to educational excellence, have become part of the arts and humanities of tomorrow. The interactive multimedia technology tools available to educators today provide an opportunity to build into the distance or traditional course through learning objects, highly interactive experiential exercises that allow the…

Learning to Think Critically.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA. Social Studies Project.

Having a twofold purpose, this booklet serves as an instructional guide for teachers and as a text for junior high students. Emphasis is upon students learning to think reflectively about major issues facing a Democratic society and to analyze various claims that they read and hear everyday in the world around them. An objective of the study is to…

The Role of Guidance in Computer-Based Problem Solving for the Development of Concepts of Logic.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Eysink, Tessa H. S.; Dijkstra, Sanne; Kuper, Jan

2002-01-01

Describes a study at the University of Twente (Netherlands) that investigated the effect of two instructional variables, manipulation of objects and guidance, in learning to use the logical connective, conditional with a computer-based learning environment, Tarski's World, designed to teach first-order logic. Discusses results of…

[Community immersion program at Geneva medical school: a fifteen-year experience].

PubMed

Chastonay, Philippe; Klohn, Axel Max; Zesiger, Véronique; Soguel, Ludivine; Kabengele, Emmanuel; Vu, Nu Viet; Bernheim, Laurent

2013-02-20

Over the past decades there have been many new developments in medical education due to new public health challenges and to new learning theories. Medical schools throughout the world have adapted to these challenges in adopting community-based learning activities, an approach that the World Health Organization has promoted. The aim of the present article is to describe the characteristics, as well as the evolution, of such a community-based training program which has been implemented over 15 years at the Faculty of medicine of the University of Geneva and to present some evaluation data addressing students' perception, achievement of learning objectives as well as interactions between students and the community.

Multisensory Self-Motion Compensation During Object Trajectory Judgments

PubMed Central

Dokka, Kalpana; MacNeilage, Paul R.; DeAngelis, Gregory C.; Angelaki, Dora E.

2015-01-01

Judging object trajectory during self-motion is a fundamental ability for mobile organisms interacting with their environment. This fundamental ability requires the nervous system to compensate for the visual consequences of self-motion in order to make accurate judgments, but the mechanisms of this compensation are poorly understood. We comprehensively examined both the accuracy and precision of observers' ability to judge object trajectory in the world when self-motion was defined by vestibular, visual, or combined visual–vestibular cues. Without decision feedback, subjects demonstrated no compensation for self-motion that was defined solely by vestibular cues, partial compensation (47%) for visually defined self-motion, and significantly greater compensation (58%) during combined visual–vestibular self-motion. With decision feedback, subjects learned to accurately judge object trajectory in the world, and this generalized to novel self-motion speeds. Across conditions, greater compensation for self-motion was associated with decreased precision of object trajectory judgments, indicating that self-motion compensation comes at the cost of reduced discriminability. Our findings suggest that the brain can flexibly represent object trajectory relative to either the observer or the world, but a world-centered representation comes at the cost of decreased precision due to the inclusion of noisy self-motion signals. PMID:24062317

Teaching to Reason

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Riveros Rotge, Hector G.

2014-01-01

The objective of Physics courses is that the students learn how to use what they know to solve problems in the real world (competencies), but no one learns to do that seeing as the professor think in the blackboard. The program of a course uses topics as examples of reasoning. Reasoning involves the ability to use their knowledge. If we precisely…

Learning Anatomy via Mobile Augmented Reality: Effects on Achievement and Cognitive Load

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Küçük, Sevda; Kapakin, Samet; Göktas, Yüksel

2016-01-01

Augmented reality (AR), a new generation of technology, has attracted the attention of educators in recent years. In this study, a MagicBook was developed for a neuroanatomy topic by using mobile augmented reality (mAR) technology. This technology integrates virtual learning objects into the real world and allow users to interact with the…

Computer-Assisted Culture Learning in an Online Augmented Reality Environment Based on Free-Hand Gesture Interaction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yang, Mau-Tsuen; Liao, Wan-Che

2014-01-01

The physical-virtual immersion and real-time interaction play an essential role in cultural and language learning. Augmented reality (AR) technology can be used to seamlessly merge virtual objects with real-world images to realize immersions. Additionally, computer vision (CV) technology can recognize free-hand gestures from live images to enable…

Recent Contributions to a Generic Architecture Design that Supports Learning Objects Interoperability

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Botsios, Sotirios; Georgiou, Dimitrios A.

2009-01-01

Adaptation and personalization services in e-learning environments are considered the turning point of recent research efforts, as the "one-size-fits-all" approach has some important drawbacks, from the educational point of view. Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Systems in World Wide Web became a very active research field and the need of…

Abraham Lincoln--His Words and His World: a Unit Plan.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Diamond, Ronald L.; Diamond, Linda W.

Planned for an eighth-grade classroom, this unit plan, consisting of 19 lesson plans on the topic of Abraham Lincoln, is based upon the fulfillment of 17 unit objectives. Each daily lesson plan specifies the following: lesson theme, learner objective, needed prerequisites, new vocabulary or terms, learning set/motivation, presentation of new…

Learning Application of Astronomy Based Augmented Reality using Android Platform

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Maleke, B.; Paseru, D.; Padang, R.

2018-02-01

Astronomy is a branch of science involving observations of celestial bodies such as stars, planets, nebular comets, star clusters, and galaxies as well as natural phenomena occurring outside the Earth’s atmosphere. The way of learning of Astronomy is quite varied, such as by using a book or observe directly with a telescope. But both ways of learning have shortcomings, for example learning through books is only presented in the form of interesting 2D drawings. While learning with a telescope requires a fairly expensive cost to buy the equipment. This study will present a more interesting way of learning from the previous one, namely through Augmented Reality (AR) application using Android platform. Augmented Reality is a combination of virtual world (virtual) and real world (real) made by computer. Virtual objects can be text, animation, 3D models or videos that are combined with the actual environment so that the user feels the virtual object is in his environment. With the use of the Android platform, this application makes the learning method more interesting because it can be used on various Android smartphones so that learning can be done anytime and anywhere. The methodology used in making applications is Multimedia Lifecycle, along with C # language for AR programming and flowchart as a modelling tool. The results of research on some users stated that this application can run well and can be used as an alternative way of learning Astronomy with more interesting.

15-month-olds' transfer of learning between touch screen and real-world displays: language cues and cognitive loads.

PubMed

Zack, Elizabeth; Gerhardstein, Peter; Meltzoff, Andrew N; Barr, Rachel

2013-02-01

Infants have difficulty transferring information between 2D and 3D sources. The current study extends Zack, Barr, Gerhardstein, Dickerson & Meltzoff's (2009) touch screen imitation task to examine whether the addition of specific language cues significantly facilitates 15-month-olds' transfer of learning between touch screens and real-world 3D objects. The addition of two kinds of linguistic cues (object label plus verb or nonsense name) did not elevate action imitation significantly above levels observed when such language cues were not used. Language cues hindered infants' performance in the 3D→2D direction of transfer, but only for the object label plus verb condition. The lack of a facilitative effect of language is discussed in terms of competing cognitive loads imposed by conjointly transferring information across dimensions and processing linguistic cues in an action imitation task at this age. © 2012 The Authors. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology © 2012 The Scandinavian Psychological Associations.

Intuitive experimentation in the physical world.

PubMed

Bramley, Neil R; Gerstenberg, Tobias; Tenenbaum, Joshua B; Gureckis, Todd M

2018-06-06

Many aspects of our physical environment are hidden. For example, it is hard to estimate how heavy an object is from visual observation alone. In this paper we examine how people actively "experiment" within the physical world to discover such latent properties. In the first part of the paper, we develop a novel framework for the quantitative analysis of the information produced by physical interactions. We then describe two experiments that present participants with moving objects in "microworlds" that operate according to continuous spatiotemporal dynamics similar to everyday physics (i.e., forces of gravity, friction, etc.). Participants were asked to interact with objects in the microworlds in order to identify their masses, or the forces of attraction/repulsion that governed their movement. Using our modeling framework, we find that learners who freely interacted with the physical system selectively produced evidence that revealed the physical property consistent with their inquiry goal. As a result, their inferences were more accurate than for passive observers and, in some contexts, for yoked participants who watched video replays of an active learner's interactions. We characterize active learners' actions into a range of micro-experiment strategies and discuss how these might be learned or generalized from past experience. The technical contribution of this work is the development of a novel analytic framework and methodology for the study of interactively learning about the physical world. Its empirical contribution is the demonstration of sophisticated goal directed human active learning in a naturalistic context. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Amelia Bedelia effect: world knowledge and the goal bias in language acquisition.

PubMed

Srinivasan, Mahesh; Barner, David

2013-09-01

How does world knowledge interact with syntax to constrain linguistic interpretation? We explored this question by testing children's acquisition of verbs like weed and water, which have opposite meanings despite occurring in the same syntactic frames. Whereas "weed the garden" treats "the garden" as a source, "water the garden" treats it as a goal. In five experiments, we asked how children learn these verbs. Previous theories predict that verbs which describe the transfer of an object with respect to its natural origin (e.g., "weed the garden") should receive source interpretations, whereas verbs that describe the transfer of an object with respect to something it is functionally related to (e.g., "water the garden") should receive goal interpretations. Therefore, acquiring world knowledge - about the natural origins and functional uses of objects - should be sufficient for differentiating between source and goal meanings. Experiments 1 and 2 casted doubt on this hypothesis, as 4- and 5-year-olds failed to use their world knowledge when interpreting these verbs and instead overextended goal interpretations. For example, children interpreted "weed the garden" to mean "put weeds onto a garden", even when they knew the natural origin of weeds. Experiment 3 tested children's interpretation of novel verbs and directly manipulated their access to relevant world knowledge. While younger children continued to exhibit a goal bias and failed to use world knowledge, older children generalized goal and source interpretations to novel verbs according to world knowledge. In Experiments 4 and 5, we confirmed that adults use world knowledge to guide their interpretation of novel verbs, but also showed that even adults prefer goal interpretations when they are made contextually plausible. We argue that children ultimately overcome a goal bias by learning to use their world knowledge to weigh the plausibility of events (e.g., of putting weeds into a garden). Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Virtual Labs and Virtual Worlds

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Boehler, Ted

2006-12-01

Virtual Labs and Virtual Worlds Coastline Community College has under development several virtual lab simulations and activities that range from biology, to language labs, to virtual discussion environments. Imagine a virtual world that students enter online, by logging onto their computer from home or anywhere they have web access. Upon entering this world they select a personalized identity represented by a digitized character (avatar) that can freely move about, interact with the environment, and communicate with other characters. In these virtual worlds, buildings, gathering places, conference rooms, labs, science rooms, and a variety of other “real world” elements are evident. When characters move about and encounter other people (players) they may freely communicate. They can examine things, manipulate objects, read signs, watch video clips, hear sounds, and jump to other locations. Goals of critical thinking, social interaction, peer collaboration, group support, and enhanced learning can be achieved in surprising new ways with this innovative approach to peer-to-peer communication in a virtual discussion world. In this presentation, short demos will be given of several online learning environments including a virtual biology lab, a marine science module, a Spanish lab, and a virtual discussion world. Coastline College has been a leader in the development of distance learning and media-based education for nearly 30 years and currently offers courses through PDA, Internet, DVD, CD-ROM, TV, and Videoconferencing technologies. Its distance learning program serves over 20,000 students every year. sponsor Jerry Meisner

UNESCO World Conference on Education for Sustainable Development: Learning Today for a Sustainable Future

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Journal of Education for Sustainable Development, 2012

2012-01-01

The UNESCO World Conference on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) will be co-organised in 2014 by UNESCO and the Government of Japan on the occasion of the end of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. It has the following objectives: (1) Celebrating a decade of action; (2) Reorienting education to build a better future…

Everyday Thoughts about Nature: An Interpretive Study of 16 Ninth Graders' Conceptualizations of Nature.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cobern, William W.; And Others

This study investigates student world views in an effort to provide information that will improve the learning environment of the science classroom. The research focuses on furthering knowledge of students as people in the context of investigating what students think about nature or the natural world. The objective of the descriptive case study is…

Category Learning Research in the Interactive Online Environment Second Life

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Andrews, Jan; Livingston, Ken; Sturm, Joshua; Bliss, Daniel; Hawthorne, Daniel

2011-01-01

The interactive online environment Second Life allows users to create novel three-dimensional stimuli that can be manipulated in a meaningful yet controlled environment. These features suggest Second Life's utility as a powerful tool for investigating how people learn concepts for unfamiliar objects. The first of two studies was designed to establish that cognitive processes elicited in this virtual world are comparable to those tapped in conventional settings by attempting to replicate the established finding that category learning systematically influences perceived similarity . From the perspective of an avatar, participants navigated a course of unfamiliar three-dimensional stimuli and were trained to classify them into two labeled categories based on two visual features. Participants then gave similarity ratings for pairs of stimuli and their responses were compared to those of control participants who did not learn the categories. Results indicated significant compression, whereby objects classified together were judged to be more similar by learning than control participants, thus supporting the validity of using Second Life as a laboratory for studying human cognition. A second study used Second Life to test the novel hypothesis that effects of learning on perceived similarity do not depend on the presence of verbal labels for categories. We presented the same stimuli but participants classified them by selecting between two complex visual patterns designed to be extremely difficult to label. While learning was more challenging in this condition , those who did learn without labels showed a compression effect identical to that found in the first study using verbal labels. Together these studies establish that at least some forms of human learning in Second Life parallel learning in the actual world and thus open the door to future studies that will make greater use of the enriched variety of objects and interactions possible in simulated environments compared to traditional experimental situations.

The Effects of the Cultural Portfolio Project on Cultural and EFL Learning in Taiwan's EFL College Classes

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Su, Ya-Chen

2011-01-01

Learning about foreign language (FL) cultures is becoming an important objective in the FL curricula and national standards of different countries throughout the world. The purposes of the study were to examine the effects of the cultural portfolio project on (1) students' specific aspects of development of cultural knowledge and change in…

Level of Abstraction and Feelings of Presence in Virtual Space: Business English Negotiation in Open Wonderland

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chen, Judy F.; Warden, Clyde A.; Tai, David Wen-Shung; Chen, Farn-Shing; Chao, Chich-Yang

2011-01-01

Virtual spaces allow abstract representations of reality that not only encourage student self-directed learning but also reinforce core content of the learning objective through visual metaphors not reproducible in the physical world. One of the advantages of such a space is the ability to escape the restrictions of the physical classroom, yet…

Trust in Testimony about Strangers: Young Children Prefer Reliable Informants Who Make Positive Attributions

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Boseovski, Janet J.

2012-01-01

Young children have been described as critical consumers of information, particularly in the domain of language learning. Indeed, children are more likely to learn novel words from people with accurate histories of object labeling than with inaccurate ones. But what happens when informant testimony conflicts with a tendency to see the world in a…

An Investigation of Difficulties Experienced by Students Developing Unified Modelling Language (UML) Class and Sequence Diagrams

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sien, Ven Yu

2011-01-01

Object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD) is not an easy subject to learn. There are many challenges confronting students when studying OOAD. Students have particular difficulty abstracting real-world problems within the context of OOAD. They are unable to effectively build object-oriented (OO) models from the problem domain because they…

Evidence for Kind Representations in the Absence of Language: Experiments with Rhesus Monkeys ("Macaca Mulatta")

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Phillips, Webb; Santos, Laurie R.

2007-01-01

How do we come to recognize and represent different kinds of objects in the world? Some developmental psychologists have hypothesized that learning language plays a crucial role in this capacity. If this hypothesis were correct, then non-linguistic animals should lack the capacity to represent objects as kinds. Previous research with rhesus…

Artifactual Literacies: Every Object Tells a Story. Language & Literacy Series

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pahl, Kate; Rowsell, Jennifer

2010-01-01

To re-engage students with literacy, teachers need an entry point that recognizes and honors students' out-of-school identities. This book looks at how artifacts (everyday objects) access the daily, sensory world in which students live. Exploring how artifacts can generate literacy learning, the book shows teachers how to use a family photo,…

Learning viewpoint invariant object representations using a temporal coherence principle.

PubMed

Einhäuser, Wolfgang; Hipp, Jörg; Eggert, Julian; Körner, Edgar; König, Peter

2005-07-01

Invariant object recognition is arguably one of the major challenges for contemporary machine vision systems. In contrast, the mammalian visual system performs this task virtually effortlessly. How can we exploit our knowledge on the biological system to improve artificial systems? Our understanding of the mammalian early visual system has been augmented by the discovery that general coding principles could explain many aspects of neuronal response properties. How can such schemes be transferred to system level performance? In the present study we train cells on a particular variant of the general principle of temporal coherence, the "stability" objective. These cells are trained on unlabeled real-world images without a teaching signal. We show that after training, the cells form a representation that is largely independent of the viewpoint from which the stimulus is looked at. This finding includes generalization to previously unseen viewpoints. The achieved representation is better suited for view-point invariant object classification than the cells' input patterns. This property to facilitate view-point invariant classification is maintained even if training and classification take place in the presence of an--also unlabeled--distractor object. In summary, here we show that unsupervised learning using a general coding principle facilitates the classification of real-world objects, that are not segmented from the background and undergo complex, non-isomorphic, transformations.

Expectancy violations promote learning in young children

PubMed Central

Stahl, Aimee E.; Feigenson, Lisa

2018-01-01

Children, including infants, have expectations about the world around them, and produce reliable responses when these expectations are violated. However, little is known about how such expectancy violations affect subsequent cognition. Here we tested the hypothesis that violations of expectation enhance children’s learning. In four experiments we compared 3- to 6-year-old children’s ability to learn novel words in situations that defied versus accorded with their core knowledge of object behavior. In Experiments 1 and 2 we taught children novel words following one of two types of events. One event violated expectations about the spatiotemporal or featural properties of objects (e.g., an object appeared to magically change locations). The other event was almost identical, but did not violate expectations (e.g., an object was visibly moved from one location to another). In both experiments we found that children robustly learned when taught after the surprising event, but not following the expected event. In Experiment 3 we ruled out two alternative explanations for our results. Finally, in Experiment 4, we asked whether surprise affects children’s learning in a targeted or a diffuse way. We found that surprise only enhanced children’s learning about the entity that had behaved surprisingly, and not about unrelated objects. Together, these experiments show that core knowledge – and violations of expectations generated by core knowledge – shapes new learning. PMID:28254617

Visual recognition and inference using dynamic overcomplete sparse learning.

PubMed

Murray, Joseph F; Kreutz-Delgado, Kenneth

2007-09-01

We present a hierarchical architecture and learning algorithm for visual recognition and other visual inference tasks such as imagination, reconstruction of occluded images, and expectation-driven segmentation. Using properties of biological vision for guidance, we posit a stochastic generative world model and from it develop a simplified world model (SWM) based on a tractable variational approximation that is designed to enforce sparse coding. Recent developments in computational methods for learning overcomplete representations (Lewicki & Sejnowski, 2000; Teh, Welling, Osindero, & Hinton, 2003) suggest that overcompleteness can be useful for visual tasks, and we use an overcomplete dictionary learning algorithm (Kreutz-Delgado, et al., 2003) as a preprocessing stage to produce accurate, sparse codings of images. Inference is performed by constructing a dynamic multilayer network with feedforward, feedback, and lateral connections, which is trained to approximate the SWM. Learning is done with a variant of the back-propagation-through-time algorithm, which encourages convergence to desired states within a fixed number of iterations. Vision tasks require large networks, and to make learning efficient, we take advantage of the sparsity of each layer to update only a small subset of elements in a large weight matrix at each iteration. Experiments on a set of rotated objects demonstrate various types of visual inference and show that increasing the degree of overcompleteness improves recognition performance in difficult scenes with occluded objects in clutter.

Global History. A Curriculum Guide. Second Semester. Theme IV: Developing Democratic and Nationalist Movements Have Had an Effect around the World. Teacher Strategies. Experimental Edition.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

New York City Board of Education, Brooklyn, NY. Div. of Curriculum and Instruction.

Designed to assist teachers and supervisors in the implementation of the global history course, this bulletin presents learning activities which include the rationale, performance objectives, and teaching strategies related to Theme IV entitled, "Developing Democratic and Nationalist Movements Have Had an Effect around the World." There are four…

Globalization and Student Learning: A Literature Review and Call for Greater Conceptual Rigor and Cross-Institutional Studies. Research & Occasional Paper Series: CSHE.6.14

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Edelstein, Richard

2014-01-01

University learning objectives and the curriculum have evolved to include more knowledge, skills and aptitudes related to the increasingly international nature of a broad range of professions and occupations. More broadly, graduates are expected to know more about the world outside their home country in order to be informed and responsible…

Can Children and Young People "Learn from" Atheism for Spiritual Development? A Response to the National Framework for Religious Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Watson, Jacqueline

2008-01-01

The new National Framework for Religious Education (RE) suggests, for the first time in national advice on agreed syllabuses, that atheism can be included in the curriculum alongside world religions. This article counters objections to the inclusion of atheism in RE and argues that children and young people can learn from atheistic beliefs and…

A Theory of How Columns in the Neocortex Enable Learning the Structure of the World

PubMed Central

Hawkins, Jeff; Ahmad, Subutai; Cui, Yuwei

2017-01-01

Neocortical regions are organized into columns and layers. Connections between layers run mostly perpendicular to the surface suggesting a columnar functional organization. Some layers have long-range excitatory lateral connections suggesting interactions between columns. Similar patterns of connectivity exist in all regions but their exact role remain a mystery. In this paper, we propose a network model composed of columns and layers that performs robust object learning and recognition. Each column integrates its changing input over time to learn complete predictive models of observed objects. Excitatory lateral connections across columns allow the network to more rapidly infer objects based on the partial knowledge of adjacent columns. Because columns integrate input over time and space, the network learns models of complex objects that extend well beyond the receptive field of individual cells. Our network model introduces a new feature to cortical columns. We propose that a representation of location relative to the object being sensed is calculated within the sub-granular layers of each column. The location signal is provided as an input to the network, where it is combined with sensory data. Our model contains two layers and one or more columns. Simulations show that using Hebbian-like learning rules small single-column networks can learn to recognize hundreds of objects, with each object containing tens of features. Multi-column networks recognize objects with significantly fewer movements of the sensory receptors. Given the ubiquity of columnar and laminar connectivity patterns throughout the neocortex, we propose that columns and regions have more powerful recognition and modeling capabilities than previously assumed. PMID:29118696

Cortical and subcortical predictive dynamics and learning during perception, cognition, emotion and action

PubMed Central

Grossberg, Stephen

2009-01-01

An intimate link exists between the predictive and learning processes in the brain. Perceptual/cognitive and spatial/motor processes use complementary predictive mechanisms to learn, recognize, attend and plan about objects in the world, determine their current value, and act upon them. Recent neural models clarify these mechanisms and how they interact in cortical and subcortical brain regions. The present paper reviews and synthesizes data and models of these processes, and outlines a unified theory of predictive brain processing. PMID:19528003

Generalization of Learning from Picture Books to Novel Test Conditions by 18- and 24-Month-Old Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Simcock, Gabrielle; Dooley, Megan

2007-01-01

Researchers know little about whether very young children can recognize objects originally introduced to them in a picture book when they encounter similar looking objects in various real-world contexts. The present studies used an imitation procedure to explore young children's ability to generalize a novel action sequence from a picture book to…

Hands in the Air: Using Ungrounded Iconic Gestures to Teach Children Conservation of Quantity

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ping, Raedy M.; Goldin-Meadow, Susan

2008-01-01

Including gesture in instruction facilitates learning. Why? One possibility is that gesture points out objects in the immediate context and thus helps ground the words learners hear in the world they see. Previous work on gesture's role in instruction has used gestures that either point to or trace paths on objects, thus providing support for this…

Ship detection leveraging deep neural networks in WorldView-2 images

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yamamoto, T.; Kazama, Y.

2017-10-01

Interpretation of high-resolution satellite images has been so difficult that skilled interpreters must have checked the satellite images manually because of the following issues. One is the requirement of the high detection accuracy rate. The other is the variety of the target, taking ships for example, there are many kinds of ships, such as boat, cruise ship, cargo ship, aircraft carrier, and so on. Furthermore, there are similar appearance objects throughout the image; therefore, it is often difficult even for the skilled interpreters to distinguish what object the pixels really compose. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of object extraction leveraging deep learning with high-resolution satellite images, especially focusing on ship detection. We calculated the detection accuracy using the WorldView-2 images. First, we collected the training images labelled as "ship" and "not ship". After preparing the training data, we defined the deep neural network model to judge whether ships are existing or not, and trained them with about 50,000 training images for each label. Subsequently, we scanned the evaluation image with different resolution windows and extracted the "ship" images. Experimental result shows the effectiveness of the deep learning based object detection.

Frequency-specific hippocampal-prefrontal interactions during associative learning

PubMed Central

Brincat, Scott L.; Miller, Earl K.

2015-01-01

Much of our knowledge of the world depends on learning associations (e.g., face-name), for which the hippocampus (HPC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC) are critical. HPC-PFC interactions have rarely been studied in monkeys, whose cognitive/mnemonic abilities are akin to humans. Here, we show functional differences and frequency-specific interactions between HPC and PFC of monkeys learning object-pair associations, an animal model of human explicit memory. PFC spiking activity reflected learning in parallel with behavioral performance, while HPC neurons reflected feedback about whether trial-and-error guesses were correct or incorrect. Theta-band HPC-PFC synchrony was stronger after errors, was driven primarily by PFC to HPC directional influences, and decreased with learning. In contrast, alpha/beta-band synchrony was stronger after correct trials, was driven more by HPC, and increased with learning. Rapid object associative learning may occur in PFC, while HPC may guide neocortical plasticity by signaling success or failure via oscillatory synchrony in different frequency bands. PMID:25706471

Internal attention to features in visual short-term memory guides object learning

PubMed Central

Fan, Judith E.; Turk-Browne, Nicholas B.

2013-01-01

Attending to objects in the world affects how we perceive and remember them. What are the consequences of attending to an object in mind? In particular, how does reporting the features of a recently seen object guide visual learning? In three experiments, observers were presented with abstract shapes in a particular color, orientation, and location. After viewing each object, observers were cued to report one feature from visual short-term memory (VSTM). In a subsequent test, observers were cued to report features of the same objects from visual long-term memory (VLTM). We tested whether reporting a feature from VSTM: (1) enhances VLTM for just that feature (practice-benefit hypothesis), (2) enhances VLTM for all features (object-based hypothesis), or (3) simultaneously enhances VLTM for that feature and suppresses VLTM for unreported features (feature-competition hypothesis). The results provided support for the feature-competition hypothesis, whereby the representation of an object in VLTM was biased towards features reported from VSTM and away from unreported features (Experiment 1). This bias could not be explained by the amount of sensory exposure or response learning (Experiment 2) and was amplified by the reporting of multiple features (Experiment 3). Taken together, these results suggest that selective internal attention induces competitive dynamics among features during visual learning, flexibly tuning object representations to align with prior mnemonic goals. PMID:23954925

Internal attention to features in visual short-term memory guides object learning.

PubMed

Fan, Judith E; Turk-Browne, Nicholas B

2013-11-01

Attending to objects in the world affects how we perceive and remember them. What are the consequences of attending to an object in mind? In particular, how does reporting the features of a recently seen object guide visual learning? In three experiments, observers were presented with abstract shapes in a particular color, orientation, and location. After viewing each object, observers were cued to report one feature from visual short-term memory (VSTM). In a subsequent test, observers were cued to report features of the same objects from visual long-term memory (VLTM). We tested whether reporting a feature from VSTM: (1) enhances VLTM for just that feature (practice-benefit hypothesis), (2) enhances VLTM for all features (object-based hypothesis), or (3) simultaneously enhances VLTM for that feature and suppresses VLTM for unreported features (feature-competition hypothesis). The results provided support for the feature-competition hypothesis, whereby the representation of an object in VLTM was biased towards features reported from VSTM and away from unreported features (Experiment 1). This bias could not be explained by the amount of sensory exposure or response learning (Experiment 2) and was amplified by the reporting of multiple features (Experiment 3). Taken together, these results suggest that selective internal attention induces competitive dynamics among features during visual learning, flexibly tuning object representations to align with prior mnemonic goals. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Aversive Learning Modulates Cortical Representations of Object Categories

PubMed Central

Dunsmoor, Joseph E.; Kragel, Philip A.; Martin, Alex; LaBar, Kevin S.

2014-01-01

Experimental studies of conditioned learning reveal activity changes in the amygdala and unimodal sensory cortex underlying fear acquisition to simple stimuli. However, real-world fears typically involve complex stimuli represented at the category level. A consequence of category-level representations of threat is that aversive experiences with particular category members may lead one to infer that related exemplars likewise pose a threat, despite variations in physical form. Here, we examined the effect of category-level representations of threat on human brain activation using 2 superordinate categories (animals and tools) as conditioned stimuli. Hemodynamic activity in the amygdala and category-selective cortex was modulated by the reinforcement contingency, leading to widespread fear of different exemplars from the reinforced category. Multivariate representational similarity analyses revealed that activity patterns in the amygdala and object-selective cortex were more similar among exemplars from the threat versus safe category. Learning to fear animate objects was additionally characterized by enhanced functional coupling between the amygdala and fusiform gyrus. Finally, hippocampal activity co-varied with object typicality and amygdala activation early during training. These findings provide novel evidence that aversive learning can modulate category-level representations of object concepts, thereby enabling individuals to express fear to a range of related stimuli. PMID:23709642

Nonlinear Motion Tracking by Deep Learning Architecture

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Verma, Arnav; Samaiya, Devesh; Gupta, Karunesh K.

2018-03-01

In the world of Artificial Intelligence, object motion tracking is one of the major problems. The extensive research is being carried out to track people in crowd. This paper presents a unique technique for nonlinear motion tracking in the absence of prior knowledge of nature of nonlinear path that the object being tracked may follow. We achieve this by first obtaining the centroid of the object and then using the centroid as the current example for a recurrent neural network trained using real-time recurrent learning. We have tweaked the standard algorithm slightly and have accumulated the gradient for few previous iterations instead of using just the current iteration as is the norm. We show that for a single object, such a recurrent neural network is highly capable of approximating the nonlinearity of its path.

E-Learning Application of Tarsier with Virtual Reality using Android Platform

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Oroh, H. N.; Munir, R.; Paseru, D.

2017-01-01

Spectral Tarsier is a primitive primate that can only be found in the province of North Sulawesi. To study these primates can be used an e-learning application with Augmented Reality technology that uses a marker to confronted the camera computer to interact with three dimensions Tarsier object. But that application only shows tarsier object in three dimensions without habitat and requires a lot of resources because it runs on a Personal Computer. The same technology can be shown three dimensions’ objects is Virtual Reality to excess can make the user like venturing into the virtual world with Android platform that requires fewer resources. So, put on Virtual Reality technology using the Android platform that can make users not only to view and interact with the tarsiers but also the habitat. The results of this research indicate that the user can learn the Tarsier and habitat with good. Thus, the use of Virtual Reality technology in the e-learning application of tarsiers can help people to see, know, and learn about Spectral Tarsier.

In-Factory Learning - Qualification For The Factory Of The Future

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Quint, Fabian; Mura, Katharina; Gorecky, Dominic

2015-07-01

The Industry 4.0 vision anticipates that internet technologies will find their way into future factories replacing traditional components by dynamic and intelligent cyber-physical systems (CPS) that combine the physical objects with their digital representation. Reducing the gap between the real and digital world makes the factory environment more flexible, more adaptive, but also more complex for the human workers. Future workers require interdisciplinary competencies from engineering, information technology, and computer science in order to understand and manage the diverse interrelations between physical objects and their digital counterpart. This paper proposes a mixed-reality based learning environment, which combines physical objects and visualisation of digital content via Augmented Reality. It uses reality-based interaction in order to make the dynamic interrelations between real and digital factory visible and tangible. We argue that our learning system does not work as a stand-alone solution, but should fit into existing academic and advanced training curricula.

The Web-based Module of Changes in Objects

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Triayomi, R.

2017-09-01

To understand the changes of substances contained in such a kind of substance and substance characteristics then need a deep study of the concept. In this concept is expected to understand the changes of objects such as substance type and substance characteristics. Types of substances and characteristics of substances through physical changes and chemical changes and means of separation consisting of two or more substances. The principle of separation of the mixture is based on differences in physical properties of its constituents, such as substances, particle size, melting point, boiling point, magnetic properties, solubility, and so forth. This study aims to produce a web-based module of changes in objects that are valid, practical, and have effectiveness of student learning outcomes and activities on natural science learning. The experiment was conducted on 30 children in South Sumatera. The case of the development of the learning module of change of the object is influenced by the child’s understanding of the concept. Expected to be adapted by world teachers.

A developmental roadmap for learning by imitation in robots.

PubMed

Lopes, Manuel; Santos-Victor, José

2007-04-01

In this paper, we present a strategy whereby a robot acquires the capability to learn by imitation following a developmental pathway consisting on three levels: 1) sensory-motor coordination; 2) world interaction; and 3) imitation. With these stages, the system is able to learn tasks by imitating human demonstrators. We describe results of the different developmental stages, involving perceptual and motor skills, implemented in our humanoid robot, Baltazar. At each stage, the system's attention is drawn toward different entities: its own body and, later on, objects and people. Our main contributions are the general architecture and the implementation of all the necessary modules until imitation capabilities are eventually acquired by the robot. Also, several other contributions are made at each level: learning of sensory-motor maps for redundant robots, a novel method for learning how to grasp objects, and a framework for learning task description from observation for program-level imitation. Finally, vision is used extensively as the sole sensing modality (sometimes in a simplified setting) avoiding the need for special data-acquisition hardware.

A Study on Markerless AR-Based Infant Education System Using CBIR

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lim, Ji-Hoon; Kim, Seoksoo

Block play is widely known to be effective to help a child develop emotionally and physically based on learning by a sense of sight and touch. But block play can not expect to have learning effects through a sense of hearing. Therefore, in this study, such limitations are overcome by a method that recognizes an object made up of blocks, not a marker-based method generally used for an AR environment, a matching technology enabling an object to be perceived in every direction, and a technology combining images of the real world with 2D/3D images/pictures/sounds of a similar object. Also, an education system for children aged 3~5 is designed to implement markerless AR with the CBIR method.

Common world model for unmanned systems: Phase 2

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Dean, Robert M. S.; Oh, Jean; Vinokurov, Jerry

2014-06-01

The Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance (RCTA) seeks to provide adaptive robot capabilities which move beyond traditional metric algorithms to include cognitive capabilities. Key to this effort is the Common World Model, which moves beyond the state-of-the-art by representing the world using semantic and symbolic as well as metric information. It joins these layers of information to define objects in the world. These objects may be reasoned upon jointly using traditional geometric, symbolic cognitive algorithms and new computational nodes formed by the combination of these disciplines to address Symbol Grounding and Uncertainty. The Common World Model must understand how these objects relate to each other. It includes the concept of Self-Information about the robot. By encoding current capability, component status, task execution state, and their histories we track information which enables the robot to reason and adapt its performance using Meta-Cognition and Machine Learning principles. The world model also includes models of how entities in the environment behave which enable prediction of future world states. To manage complexity, we have adopted a phased implementation approach. Phase 1, published in these proceedings in 2013 [1], presented the approach for linking metric with symbolic information and interfaces for traditional planners and cognitive reasoning. Here we discuss the design of "Phase 2" of this world model, which extends the Phase 1 design API, data structures, and reviews the use of the Common World Model as part of a semantic navigation use case.

Quality indicators for learner-centered postgraduate medical e-learning.

PubMed

de Leeuw, Robert A; Westerman, Michiel; Scheele, Fedde

2017-04-27

The objectives of this study were to identify the needs and expectations of learners and educational experts in postgraduate medical e-learning, and to contribute to the current literature. We performed four focus-group discussions with e-learning end-users (learners) and didactic experts. The participants were postgraduate learners with varying levels of experience, educational experts from a Dutch e-learning task group, and commercial experts from a Dutch e-learning company. Verbatim transcribed interview recordings were analyzed using King's template analysis. The initial template was created with reference to recent literature on postgraduate medical e-learning quality indicators. The transcripts were coded, after which the emerging differences in template interpretation were discussed until a consensus was reached within the team. The final template consisted of three domains of positive e-learning influencers (motivators, learning enhancers, and real-world translation) and three domains of negatively influential parameters (barriers, learning discouragers, and poor preparation). The interpretation of the final template showed three subjects which form the basis of e-learning, namely, Motivate, Learn and Apply. This study forms a basis for learning in general and could be applied to many educational instruments. Individual characteristics should be adapted to the target audience. Three subjects form the basis of, and six themes cover all items needed for, good (enough) postgraduate e-learning. Further research should be carried out with learners and real-world e-learning to validate this template.

Explanation-based learning in infancy.

PubMed

Baillargeon, Renée; DeJong, Gerald F

2017-10-01

In explanation-based learning (EBL), domain knowledge is leveraged in order to learn general rules from few examples. An explanation is constructed for initial exemplars and is then generalized into a candidate rule that uses only the relevant features specified in the explanation; if the rule proves accurate for a few additional exemplars, it is adopted. EBL is thus highly efficient because it combines both analytic and empirical evidence. EBL has been proposed as one of the mechanisms that help infants acquire and revise their physical rules. To evaluate this proposal, 11- and 12-month-olds (n = 260) were taught to replace their current support rule (that an object is stable when half or more of its bottom surface is supported) with a more sophisticated rule (that an object is stable when half or more of the entire object is supported). Infants saw teaching events in which asymmetrical objects were placed on a base, followed by static test displays involving a novel asymmetrical object and a novel base. When the teaching events were designed to facilitate EBL, infants learned the new rule with as few as two (12-month-olds) or three (11-month-olds) exemplars. When the teaching events were designed to impede EBL, however, infants failed to learn the rule. Together, these results demonstrate that even infants, with their limited knowledge about the world, benefit from the knowledge-based approach of EBL.

What is the impact of professional learning on physical activity interventions among preschool children? A systematic review.

PubMed

Peden, M E; Okely, A D; Eady, M J; Jones, R A

2018-05-31

The purpose of this systematic review was to investigate professional learning models (length, mode, content) offered as part of objectively measured physical childcare-based interventions. A systematic review of eight electronic databases was conducted to June 2017. Only English, peer-reviewed studies that evaluated childcare-based physical activity interventions, incorporated professional learning and reported objectively measured physical activity were included. Study designs included randomized controlled trails, cluster randomized trials, experimental or pilot studies. The search identified 11 studies. Ten studies objectively measured physical activity using accelerometers; five studies used both accelerometer and direct observation tools and one study measured physical activity using direct observation only. Seven of these studies reported statistically significant intervention effects. Only six studies described all components of professional learning, but only two studies reported specific professional learning outcomes and physical activity outcomes. No patterns were identified between the length, mode and content of professional learning and children's physical activity outcomes in childcare settings. Educators play a critical role in modifying children's levels of physical activity in childcare settings. The findings of this review suggest that professional learning offered as part of a physical activity intervention that potentially impacts on children's physical activity outcomes remains under-reported. © 2018 World Obesity Federation.

Learning Sequences of Actions in Collectives of Autonomous Agents

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Turner, Kagan; Agogino, Adrian K.; Wolpert, David H.; Clancy, Daniel (Technical Monitor)

2001-01-01

In this paper we focus on the problem of designing a collective of autonomous agents that individually learn sequences of actions such that the resultant sequence of joint actions achieves a predetermined global objective. We are particularly interested in instances of this problem where centralized control is either impossible or impractical. For single agent systems in similar domains, machine learning methods (e.g., reinforcement learners) have been successfully used. However, applying such solutions directly to multi-agent systems often proves problematic, as agents may work at cross-purposes, or have difficulty in evaluating their contribution to achievement of the global objective, or both. Accordingly, the crucial design step in multiagent systems centers on determining the private objectives of each agent so that as the agents strive for those objectives, the system reaches a good global solution. In this work we consider a version of this problem involving multiple autonomous agents in a grid world. We use concepts from collective intelligence to design goals for the agents that are 'aligned' with the global goal, and are 'learnable' in that agents can readily see how their behavior affects their utility. We show that reinforcement learning agents using those goals outperform both 'natural' extensions of single agent algorithms and global reinforcement, learning solutions based on 'team games'.

American Chemical Society Student Affiliates Chapters: More Than Just Chemistry Clubs

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Montes, Ingrid; Collazo, Carmen

2003-10-01

Chemistry educators often examine and implement various instructional techniques, such as mentoring programs, to advance learning objectives and to equip students with analytical and technical skills, as well as the skills required of chemical science professionals. Student organizations, such as an American Chemical Society Student Affiliates (SA) chapter, can create a learning environment for undergraduates by engaging them in activities that develop communication, teamwork and inquiry, analysis, and problem-solving skills within a real-world setting. The environment is student-based, has personal meaning for the learner, emphasizes a process-and-product orientation, and emphasizes evaluation. Participation in SAs enhance the traditional chemistry curriculum, complementing the learning goals and meeting learning objectives that might not otherwise be addressed in the curriculum. In this article we discuss how SA chapters enhance the educational experience of undergraduate chemical science students, help develop new chemistry professionals, and shape enthusiastic and committed future chemical science leaders.

A Web-Enabled Graduate Course: Two Perspectives.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Penrod, James; Perry, Barbara A.

This paper describes a World Wide Web-enhanced graduate course at the University of Memphis (Tennessee) called "IT [Information Technology] Trends and Issues in Higher and Adult Education." Topics covered include the course objectives, technology used, course activities, and assignments. Four prevalent learning styles are summarized…

A Bootstrapping Model of Frequency and Context Effects in Word Learning.

PubMed

Kachergis, George; Yu, Chen; Shiffrin, Richard M

2017-04-01

Prior research has shown that people can learn many nouns (i.e., word-object mappings) from a short series of ambiguous situations containing multiple words and objects. For successful cross-situational learning, people must approximately track which words and referents co-occur most frequently. This study investigates the effects of allowing some word-referent pairs to appear more frequently than others, as is true in real-world learning environments. Surprisingly, high-frequency pairs are not always learned better, but can also boost learning of other pairs. Using a recent associative model (Kachergis, Yu, & Shiffrin, 2012), we explain how mixing pairs of different frequencies can bootstrap late learning of the low-frequency pairs based on early learning of higher frequency pairs. We also manipulate contextual diversity, the number of pairs a given pair appears with across training, since it is naturalistically confounded with frequency. The associative model has competing familiarity and uncertainty biases, and their interaction is able to capture the individual and combined effects of frequency and contextual diversity on human learning. Two other recent word-learning models do not account for the behavioral findings. Copyright © 2016 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Soft systems thinking and social learning for adaptive management.

PubMed

Cundill, G; Cumming, G S; Biggs, D; Fabricius, C

2012-02-01

The success of adaptive management in conservation has been questioned and the objective-based management paradigm on which it is based has been heavily criticized. Soft systems thinking and social-learning theory expose errors in the assumption that complex systems can be dispassionately managed by objective observers and highlight the fact that conservation is a social process in which objectives are contested and learning is context dependent. We used these insights to rethink adaptive management in a way that focuses on the social processes involved in management and decision making. Our approach to adaptive management is based on the following assumptions: action toward a common goal is an emergent property of complex social relationships; the introduction of new knowledge, alternative values, and new ways of understanding the world can become a stimulating force for learning, creativity, and change; learning is contextual and is fundamentally about practice; and defining the goal to be addressed is continuous and in principle never ends. We believe five key activities are crucial to defining the goal that is to be addressed in an adaptive-management context and to determining the objectives that are desirable and feasible to the participants: situate the problem in its social and ecological context; raise awareness about alternative views of a problem and encourage enquiry and deconstruction of frames of reference; undertake collaborative actions; and reflect on learning. ©2011 Society for Conservation Biology.

Webly-Supervised Fine-Grained Visual Categorization via Deep Domain Adaptation.

PubMed

Xu, Zhe; Huang, Shaoli; Zhang, Ya; Tao, Dacheng

2018-05-01

Learning visual representations from web data has recently attracted attention for object recognition. Previous studies have mainly focused on overcoming label noise and data bias and have shown promising results by learning directly from web data. However, we argue that it might be better to transfer knowledge from existing human labeling resources to improve performance at nearly no additional cost. In this paper, we propose a new semi-supervised method for learning via web data. Our method has the unique design of exploiting strong supervision, i.e., in addition to standard image-level labels, our method also utilizes detailed annotations including object bounding boxes and part landmarks. By transferring as much knowledge as possible from existing strongly supervised datasets to weakly supervised web images, our method can benefit from sophisticated object recognition algorithms and overcome several typical problems found in webly-supervised learning. We consider the problem of fine-grained visual categorization, in which existing training resources are scarce, as our main research objective. Comprehensive experimentation and extensive analysis demonstrate encouraging performance of the proposed approach, which, at the same time, delivers a new pipeline for fine-grained visual categorization that is likely to be highly effective for real-world applications.

Treasure hunt of mineral resources: a serious game in a virtual world

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Boniello, Annalisa

2015-04-01

This posterdescribes a geoscience activities on mineral resources for students of 14-18 years old. The activities are created as a treasure hunt of mineral resources, students must pass test and solve questions, search mineral in different environments: near a volcanos, in the river, in a lake, in a cave, under the sea and on a mountain. The activity is created using a virtual environment a virtual world built with a software, Opensim, a opensource software. In this virtual world every student as avatar, a virtual rapresentation of himself, search information, objects, mineral as in a serious game, a digital serious game. In the serious game buit as a treasure hunt, students interact with environment in a learning by doing, and they interact with other students in a cooperative learning and a collaborative environment. In the hunt there is a challenge that student must overcome: understanding what is a mineral resource collecting data on mineral analyzing environments where they are created so the students can improve motivation and learn, and improve scientific skills.

From action to abstraction: Gesture as a mechanism of change

PubMed Central

Goldin-Meadow, Susan

2015-01-01

Piaget was a master at observing the routine behaviors children produce as they go from knowing less to knowing more about at a task, and making inferences not only about how the children understood the task at each point, but also about how they progressed from one point to the next. In this paper, I examine a routine behavior that Piaget overlooked—the spontaneous gestures speakers produce as they explain their solutions to a problem. These gestures are not mere hand waving. They reflect ideas that the speaker has about the problem, often ideas that are not found in that speaker’s talk. But gesture can do more than reflect ideas—it can also change them. In this sense, gesture behaves like any other action; both gesture and action on objects facilitate learning problems on which training was given. However, only gesture promotes transferring the knowledge gained to problems that require generalization. Gesture is, in fact, a special kind of action in that it represents the world rather than directly manipulating the world (gesture does not move objects around). The mechanisms by which gesture and action promote learning may therefore differ—gesture is able to highlight components of an action that promote abstract learning while leaving out details that could tie learning to a specific context. Because it is both an action and a representation, gesture can serve as a bridge between the two and thus be a powerful tool for learning abstract ideas. PMID:26692629

From action to abstraction: Gesture as a mechanism of change.

PubMed

Goldin-Meadow, Susan

2015-12-01

Piaget was a master at observing the routine behaviors children produce as they go from knowing less to knowing more about at a task, and making inferences not only about how the children understood the task at each point, but also about how they progressed from one point to the next. In this paper, I examine a routine behavior that Piaget overlooked-the spontaneous gestures speakers produce as they explain their solutions to a problem. These gestures are not mere hand waving. They reflect ideas that the speaker has about the problem, often ideas that are not found in that speaker's talk. But gesture can do more than reflect ideas-it can also change them. In this sense, gesture behaves like any other action; both gesture and action on objects facilitate learning problems on which training was given. However, only gesture promotes transferring the knowledge gained to problems that require generalization. Gesture is, in fact, a special kind of action in that it represents the world rather than directly manipulating the world (gesture does not move objects around). The mechanisms by which gesture and action promote learning may therefore differ-gesture is able to highlight components of an action that promote abstract learning while leaving out details that could tie learning to a specific context. Because it is both an action and a representation, gesture can serve as a bridge between the two and thus be a powerful tool for learning abstract ideas.

"More Alike than Different": Learning about Diversity from People with Disabilities

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Anderson, Jenn; Westwick, Joshua; Anderson, Justin

2016-01-01

Courses: Interpersonal Communication, Health Communication, Intercultural Communication. Objectives: After completing this semester-long activity students, should be able to (1) apply course concepts (i.e., stereotypes, identity, listening, language, and conflict) to diverse real-world scenarios; (2) explain the utility of intergroup contact…

CyberEconomics.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schenk, Robert

2003-01-01

Describes CyberEconomics, a complete, free, two-semester principles of economics textbook available on the World Wide Web. Contains chapters, sections, a table of contents, a set of learning objectives, and links to chapter introductions and sections. Offers a CD-ROM version available for a fee that contains interactive review questions. (JEH)

A Wittgenstein Approach to the Learning of OO-Modeling

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Holmboe, Christian

2004-01-01

The paper uses Ludwig Wittgenstein's theories about the relationship between thought, language, and objects of the world to explore the assumption that OO-thinking resembles natural thinking. The paper imports from research in linguistic philosophy to computer science education research. I show how UML class diagrams (i.e., an artificial…

From Web 2.0 to Teacher 2.0

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thomas, David A.; Li, Qing

2008-01-01

The World Wide Web is evolving in response to users who demand faster and more efficient access to information, portability, and reusability of digital objects between Web-based and computer-based applications and powerful communication, publication, collaboration, and teaching and learning tools. This article reviews current uses of Web-based…

The Middle East: Birthplace of Three Religions. A Resource Unit.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ediger, Marlow

This teaching outline for studying the significance of the Middle East to religious history and world history provides lesson suggestions for the study of geography, political science, philosophy, religion, anthropology, economics, archaeology, and history. Twenty-seven learning objectives focus on the students' acquisition of critical thinking,…

EduMOOs: Virtual Learning Centers.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Woods, Judy C.

1998-01-01

Multi-user Object Oriented Internet activities (MOOs) permit real time interaction in a text-based virtual reality via the Internet. This article explains EduMOOs (educational MOOs) and provides brief descriptions, World Wide Web addresses, and telnet addresses for selected EduMOOs. Instructions for connecting to a MOO and a list of related Web…

Indiana in the World.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Erickson, Robert; Lowrie, Jane

This handbook for secondary teachers contains activities, exercises, and strategies designed to make more obvious and concrete the opportunities local communities and states provide for students to learn about and to participate in global affairs. A major objective is to help high school students develop the competencies needed to identify and to…

3D interactive augmented reality-enhanced digital learning systems for mobile devices

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Feng, Kai-Ten; Tseng, Po-Hsuan; Chiu, Pei-Shuan; Yang, Jia-Lin; Chiu, Chun-Jie

2013-03-01

With enhanced processing capability of mobile platforms, augmented reality (AR) has been considered a promising technology for achieving enhanced user experiences (UX). Augmented reality is to impose virtual information, e.g., videos and images, onto a live-view digital display. UX on real-world environment via the display can be e ectively enhanced with the adoption of interactive AR technology. Enhancement on UX can be bene cial for digital learning systems. There are existing research works based on AR targeting for the design of e-learning systems. However, none of these work focuses on providing three-dimensional (3-D) object modeling for en- hanced UX based on interactive AR techniques. In this paper, the 3-D interactive augmented reality-enhanced learning (IARL) systems will be proposed to provide enhanced UX for digital learning. The proposed IARL systems consist of two major components, including the markerless pattern recognition (MPR) for 3-D models and velocity-based object tracking (VOT) algorithms. Realistic implementation of proposed IARL system is conducted on Android-based mobile platforms. UX on digital learning can be greatly improved with the adoption of proposed IARL systems.

Infants Encode Phonetic Detail during Cross-Situational Word Learning

PubMed Central

Escudero, Paola; Mulak, Karen E.; Vlach, Haley A.

2016-01-01

Infants often hear new words in the context of more than one candidate referent. In cross-situational word learning (XSWL), word-object mappings are determined by tracking co-occurrences of words and candidate referents across multiple learning events. Research demonstrates that infants can learn words in XSWL paradigms, suggesting that it is a viable model of real-world word learning. However, these studies have all presented infants with words that have no or minimal phonological overlap (e.g., BLICKET and GAX). Words often contain some degree of phonological overlap, and it is unknown whether infants can simultaneously encode fine phonological detail while learning words via XSWL. We tested 12-, 15-, 17-, and 20-month-olds’ XSWL of eight words that, when paired, formed non-minimal pairs (MPs; e.g., BON–DEET) or MPs (e.g., BON–TON, DEET–DIT). The results demonstrated that infants are able to learn word-object mappings and encode them with sufficient phonetic detail as to identify words in both non-minimal and MP contexts. Thus, this work suggests that infants are able to simultaneously discriminate phonetic differences between words and map words to referents in an implicit learning paradigm such as XSWL. PMID:27708605

Adding Another Dimension to Learning: Application of Real World Globes to Undergraduate Geoscience Teaching

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

McLeod, C. L.; Kugler, A.

2016-12-01

The Geological Globe of the World (www.realworldglobes.com) promotes hands-on, in-class activities and allows students to engage with a physical 3-D model of Earth's characteristic, planet-forming geological features. The effectiveness of this concept in student learning has been demonstrated by two pilot studies presented as posters by Weeraratne et al. (2011) and Stoddard and Rogers (2013) at previous AGU meetings. The impact of the Geological Globe of the World on undergraduate teaching at Miami University, OH during Fall semester 2016 will be presented. It is anticipated that this teaching tool will have the biggest impact on the teaching of our 100-level lab course, GLG 155L, which engages 900 students per academic year. A Learning Assessment based on the learning objectives of GLG 115L has been written in order to demonstrate and evaluate the role of the Geological Globe in student learning. This Learning Assessment will be issued through www.salgsite.org (SALG: Student Assessment of Learning Gains) and will ask students to assess their own knowledge and understanding of key concepts before and after specific lab exercises which implement the globe. From research discussed in Bamford (2013), it has been demonstrated that "students learning with 3D teaching aids had better ordering of concepts and had enhanced skills in describing their learning, including writing more, saying more and being more likely to use models to demonstrate their (own) learning". It is anticipated that through use of the Geological Globe of the World students will be able to interpret Earth's geological features on a 3-D projection including topography, active volcanism, crustal movements and the location of seismic events. The incorporation of the Geological Globe of the World in undergraduate geoscience teaching in GLG 115L, and other departmental courses, aims to encourage students to make observations and collect data in order to interpret and evaluate relevant geological information. Bamford, A., (2013) The 3D in Education, White Paper. Stoddard, P. R and Rogers, D., (2013). Using Dry Erasable Globes in Earth and Space Science Classes. AGU Fall Meeting, #ED53G-0689 Weeraratne, D. S., Rogers, D. B., and Liedtke, J (2011). Teaching Seismic Methods Using Interactive 3-D Earth Globe, AGU Fall Meeting, #ED51B-0751

The development of newborn object recognition in fast and slow visual worlds

PubMed Central

Wood, Justin N.; Wood, Samantha M. W.

2016-01-01

Object recognition is central to perception and cognition. Yet relatively little is known about the environmental factors that cause invariant object recognition to emerge in the newborn brain. Is this ability a hardwired property of vision? Or does the development of invariant object recognition require experience with a particular kind of visual environment? Here, we used a high-throughput controlled-rearing method to examine whether newborn chicks (Gallus gallus) require visual experience with slowly changing objects to develop invariant object recognition abilities. When newborn chicks were raised with a slowly rotating virtual object, the chicks built invariant object representations that generalized across novel viewpoints and rotation speeds. In contrast, when newborn chicks were raised with a virtual object that rotated more quickly, the chicks built viewpoint-specific object representations that failed to generalize to novel viewpoints and rotation speeds. Moreover, there was a direct relationship between the speed of the object and the amount of invariance in the chick's object representation. Thus, visual experience with slowly changing objects plays a critical role in the development of invariant object recognition. These results indicate that invariant object recognition is not a hardwired property of vision, but is learned rapidly when newborns encounter a slowly changing visual world. PMID:27097925

Resting-State fMRI Activity Predicts Unsupervised Learning and Memory in an Immersive Virtual Reality Environment

PubMed Central

Wong, Chi Wah; Olafsson, Valur; Plank, Markus; Snider, Joseph; Halgren, Eric; Poizner, Howard; Liu, Thomas T.

2014-01-01

In the real world, learning often proceeds in an unsupervised manner without explicit instructions or feedback. In this study, we employed an experimental paradigm in which subjects explored an immersive virtual reality environment on each of two days. On day 1, subjects implicitly learned the location of 39 objects in an unsupervised fashion. On day 2, the locations of some of the objects were changed, and object location recall performance was assessed and found to vary across subjects. As prior work had shown that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measures of resting-state brain activity can predict various measures of brain performance across individuals, we examined whether resting-state fMRI measures could be used to predict object location recall performance. We found a significant correlation between performance and the variability of the resting-state fMRI signal in the basal ganglia, hippocampus, amygdala, thalamus, insula, and regions in the frontal and temporal lobes, regions important for spatial exploration, learning, memory, and decision making. In addition, performance was significantly correlated with resting-state fMRI connectivity between the left caudate and the right fusiform gyrus, lateral occipital complex, and superior temporal gyrus. Given the basal ganglia's role in exploration, these findings suggest that tighter integration of the brain systems responsible for exploration and visuospatial processing may be critical for learning in a complex environment. PMID:25286145

Motivational Interviewing Workshop in a Virtual World: Learning as Avatars

PubMed Central

Shershneva, Marianna; Kim, Ji-Hye; Kear, Cynthia; Heyden, Robin; Heyden, Neil; Lee, Jay; Mitchell, Suzanne

2015-01-01

Background Limited research has been done to understand outcomes of continuing medical education offered in three-dimensional, immersive virtual worlds. Objectives We studied a case of a virtual world workshop on motivational interviewing (MI) applied to smoking cessation counseling and its educational impact. Methods To facilitate content development and evaluation, we specified desired MI competencies. The workshop consisted of three sessions, which included lectures, practice with standardized patients, and chat interactions. Data were collected from 13 primary care physicians and residents through workshop observation, and pre- and three-month post-workshop telephone/Skype interviews and interactions with standardized patients. Interactions with standardized patients were assessed by an expert using a validated MI tool, and by standardized patients using a tool developed for this study. For 11 participants who attended two or three sessions, we conducted paired-samples t-tests comparing mean differences between the competency scores pre- and post-event. Results Expert assessment showed significant improvement on six of seven MI competencies (p< .05). All participants reported learning new knowledge and skills, and nine described incorporating new learning into their clinical practice. Practicing MI with standardized patients and/or observing others' practice appeared to be the most helpful workshop component. Conclusions The evaluated workshop had positive impact on participants' competencies and practice as related to MI applied to smoking cessation counseling. Our findings support further exploration of three-dimensional virtual worlds as learning environments for continuing medical education. PMID:24788420

Generating Contextual Descriptions of Virtual Reality (VR) Spaces

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Olson, D. M.; Zaman, C. H.; Sutherland, A.

2017-12-01

Virtual reality holds great potential for science communication, education, and research. However, interfaces for manipulating data and environments in virtual worlds are limited and idiosyncratic. Furthermore, speech and vision are the primary modalities by which humans collect information about the world, but the linking of visual and natural language domains is a relatively new pursuit in computer vision. Machine learning techniques have been shown to be effective at image and speech classification, as well as at describing images with language (Karpathy 2016), but have not yet been used to describe potential actions. We propose a technique for creating a library of possible context-specific actions associated with 3D objects in immersive virtual worlds based on a novel dataset generated natively in virtual reality containing speech, image, gaze, and acceleration data. We will discuss the design and execution of a user study in virtual reality that enabled the collection and the development of this dataset. We will also discuss the development of a hybrid machine learning algorithm linking vision data with environmental affordances in natural language. Our findings demonstrate that it is possible to develop a model which can generate interpretable verbal descriptions of possible actions associated with recognized 3D objects within immersive VR environments. This suggests promising applications for more intuitive user interfaces through voice interaction within 3D environments. It also demonstrates the potential to apply vast bodies of embodied and semantic knowledge to enrich user interaction within VR environments. This technology would allow for applications such as expert knowledge annotation of 3D environments, complex verbal data querying and object manipulation in virtual spaces, and computer-generated, dynamic 3D object affordances and functionality during simulations.

Lessons learned and their application to program development and cultural issues

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Roth, Gilbert L.

1991-01-01

The main objectives of space product assurance are, in effect, the same as those of Total Quality Management (TQM) or its many variants. The most significant ingredients are the lessons learned and their application to ongoing and future programs as they are affected by changes in the cultural environment. The cultural issues which affect almost everything done in technical programs and projects are considered. Understanding the lessons learned and the synergism which results from this combination of knowledge, culture, and lessons learned is identified as crucial. A brief discussion of the closed loop linkage that should exist between the world of hands on activities and that of educational institutions is presented.

The Role of Interactional Quality in Learning from Touch Screens during Infancy: Context Matters.

PubMed

Zack, Elizabeth; Barr, Rachel

2016-01-01

Interactional quality has been shown to enhance learning during book reading and play, but has not been examined during touch screen use. Learning to apply knowledge from a touch screen is complex for infants because it involves transfer of learning between a two-dimensional (2D) screen and three-dimensional (3D) object in the physical world. This study uses a touch screen procedure to examine interactional quality measured via maternal structuring, diversity of maternal language, and dyadic emotional responsiveness and infant outcomes during a transfer of learning task. Fifty 15-month-old infants and their mothers participated in this semi-naturalistic teaching task. Mothers were given a 3D object, and a static image of the object presented on a touch screen. Mothers had 5 min to teach their infant that a button on the real toy works in the same way as a virtual button on the touch screen (or vice versa). Overall, 64% of infants learned how to make the button work, transferring learning from the touch screen to the 3D object or vice versa. Infants were just as successful in the 3D to 2D transfer direction as they were in the 2D to 3D transfer direction. A cluster analysis based on emotional responsiveness, the proportion of diverse maternal verbal input, and amount of maternal structuring resulted in two levels of interactional quality: high quality and moderate quality. A logistic regression revealed the level of interactional quality predicted infant transfer. Infants were 19 times more likely to succeed and transfer learning between the touch screen and real object if they were in a high interactional quality dyad, even after controlling for infant activity levels. The present findings suggest that interactional quality between mother and infant plays an important role in making touch screens effective teaching tools for infants' learning.

The Role of Interactional Quality in Learning from Touch Screens during Infancy: Context Matters

PubMed Central

Zack, Elizabeth; Barr, Rachel

2016-01-01

Interactional quality has been shown to enhance learning during book reading and play, but has not been examined during touch screen use. Learning to apply knowledge from a touch screen is complex for infants because it involves transfer of learning between a two-dimensional (2D) screen and three-dimensional (3D) object in the physical world. This study uses a touch screen procedure to examine interactional quality measured via maternal structuring, diversity of maternal language, and dyadic emotional responsiveness and infant outcomes during a transfer of learning task. Fifty 15-month-old infants and their mothers participated in this semi-naturalistic teaching task. Mothers were given a 3D object, and a static image of the object presented on a touch screen. Mothers had 5 min to teach their infant that a button on the real toy works in the same way as a virtual button on the touch screen (or vice versa). Overall, 64% of infants learned how to make the button work, transferring learning from the touch screen to the 3D object or vice versa. Infants were just as successful in the 3D to 2D transfer direction as they were in the 2D to 3D transfer direction. A cluster analysis based on emotional responsiveness, the proportion of diverse maternal verbal input, and amount of maternal structuring resulted in two levels of interactional quality: high quality and moderate quality. A logistic regression revealed the level of interactional quality predicted infant transfer. Infants were 19 times more likely to succeed and transfer learning between the touch screen and real object if they were in a high interactional quality dyad, even after controlling for infant activity levels. The present findings suggest that interactional quality between mother and infant plays an important role in making touch screens effective teaching tools for infants’ learning. PMID:27625613

From Cognitive Capability to Social Reform? Shifting Perceptions of Learning in Immersive Virtual Worlds

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Savin-Baden, Maggi

2008-01-01

Learning in immersive virtual worlds (simulations and virtual worlds such as Second Life) could become a central learning approach in many curricula, but the socio-political impact of virtual world learning on higher education remains under-researched. Much of the recent research into learning in immersive virtual worlds centres around games and…

Place Names: Making the Basics of Geography Fun to Learn.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vogeler, Ingolf

1988-01-01

Arguing that students need to have knowledge about places and regions to understand current and past world affairs, a college-level geography course (University of Wisconsin Eau Claire) which teaches physical and cultural place names is described. Presents course objectives, topics, and activities and states that it serves student needs and…

Learning through Plastic Filament Extrusion

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Orr, Taylor; Flowers, Jim

2015-01-01

3D printing is becoming ever more popular in both the manufacturing world as well as in technology and engineering education classrooms all over the United States. 3D printing is an additive manufacturing process in which successive layers of material are built up to produce three-dimensional objects from computer-aided design (CAD) files, making…

Communication Skills for Career Education: Junior High/Middle Schools.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Washington State Coordinating Council for Occupational Education, Olympia.

The teacher-developed guide attempts to establish a student-centered learning environment for the development of languaging capabilities through information and insights for students about themselves and the world of work. The flexibly arranged materials can be used as a one-semester course or as separate objectives and units within existing…

Global-Centric History and Culture Guide. Cleveland Diocesan Social Science Program.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Catholic Board of Education, Diocese of Cleveland, OH.

This global-centric study for average to superior senior high students provides historical and cultural world understandings. The objective is to prepare students to become intelligent, effective, and articulate citizens. Emphasis is upon learning to assess the nature of values through the knowledge of history and the use of adequate tools of…

World Geography. The Port of Baltimore Workplace Skills Development Project.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Walker, Sam

This set of learning modules was developed during a project to deliver workplace literacy instruction to individuals employed in the more than 50 businesses related to the activities of the Port of Baltimore. It is intended to accomplish the following objectives: familiarize students with basic concepts of geography; give students knowledge of…

Improving a Field School Curriculum Using Modularized Lessons and Authentic Case-Based Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rea, Roy V.; Hodder, Dexter P.

2007-01-01

University course evaluations are replete with student comments expressing frustration with taking time out of work, paying money for, and putting energy into field education projects that lack authentic "real-world" problem-solving objectives. Here, we describe a model for field school education that borrows on pedagogical tools such as…

Navigating through Measurement in Grades 3-5 (with CD-ROM)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Anderson, Nancy Canavan; Gavin, M. Katherine; Dailey, Judith; Stone, Walter; Vuolo, Janice

2005-01-01

This book follows students' natural progression from measuring with informal or nonstandard units to using standard units to measure such attributes as length, weight, angle, and temperature. Activities extend students' learning to the measurement of two- and three-dimensional objects. Students work in a variety of lively real-world contexts,…

World of Work. First Year Report, 1971-1972.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mount Pleasant Public Schools, MI.

Prepared during the first year of a 3-year pilot program, this working draft of a resource guide represents efforts to develop and field test resource units for career education, Grades 1-6. The units, which include objectives and learning activities, are clustered as follows: (1) Distribution and Marketing, (2) Agriculture-Natural Resources, (3)…

A Rational Plan of Hierarchy and Authority for the Collegiate System: A Proposal to the Academic Senate.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Essig, Bob; Martin, Dick

Educational objectives to guide the Academic Senate include: discover and convey knowledge for learning, thinking, and problem-solving; accentuate individuality, creativity, and originality; develop awareness of real social/cultural conditions in the world; enrich emotional response; show the egalitarian relationship between student and teacher.…

Virtual Environments Supporting Learning and Communication in Special Needs Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cobb, Sue V. G.

2007-01-01

Virtual reality (VR) describes a set of technologies that allow users to explore and experience 3-dimensional computer-generated "worlds" or "environments." These virtual environments can contain representations of real or imaginary objects on a small or large scale (from modeling of molecular structures to buildings, streets, and scenery of a…

Social Science Instructional Guides: High School (Grades 9-12).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hartman, Carl; And Others

The guide, part of a social science learning continuum from first through twelfth grades, contains outlines for two-semester social studies courses for grades 9-12. Three components comprise each section: time allocations for units, instructional objectives, and a content outline. The Grade 9 course, Cultures of the Non-Western World, contains…

Interactive Media to Support Language Acquisition for Deaf Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Parton, Becky Sue; Hancock, Robert; Crain-Dorough, Mindy; Oescher, Jeff

2009-01-01

Tangible computing combines digital feedback with physical interactions - an important link for young children. Through the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, a real-world object (i.e. a chair) or a symbolic toy (i.e. a stuffed bear) can be tagged so that students can activate multimedia learning modules automatically. The…

Improved object optimal synthetic description, modeling, learning, and discrimination by GEOGINE computational kernel

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fiorini, Rodolfo A.; Dacquino, Gianfranco

2005-03-01

GEOGINE (GEOmetrical enGINE), a state-of-the-art OMG (Ontological Model Generator) based on n-D Tensor Invariants for n-Dimensional shape/texture optimal synthetic representation, description and learning, was presented in previous conferences elsewhere recently. Improved computational algorithms based on the computational invariant theory of finite groups in Euclidean space and a demo application is presented. Progressive model automatic generation is discussed. GEOGINE can be used as an efficient computational kernel for fast reliable application development and delivery in advanced biomedical engineering, biometric, intelligent computing, target recognition, content image retrieval, data mining technological areas mainly. Ontology can be regarded as a logical theory accounting for the intended meaning of a formal dictionary, i.e., its ontological commitment to a particular conceptualization of the world object. According to this approach, "n-D Tensor Calculus" can be considered a "Formal Language" to reliably compute optimized "n-Dimensional Tensor Invariants" as specific object "invariant parameter and attribute words" for automated n-Dimensional shape/texture optimal synthetic object description by incremental model generation. The class of those "invariant parameter and attribute words" can be thought as a specific "Formal Vocabulary" learned from a "Generalized Formal Dictionary" of the "Computational Tensor Invariants" language. Even object chromatic attributes can be effectively and reliably computed from object geometric parameters into robust colour shape invariant characteristics. As a matter of fact, any highly sophisticated application needing effective, robust object geometric/colour invariant attribute capture and parameterization features, for reliable automated object learning and discrimination can deeply benefit from GEOGINE progressive automated model generation computational kernel performance. Main operational advantages over previous, similar approaches are: 1) Progressive Automated Invariant Model Generation, 2) Invariant Minimal Complete Description Set for computational efficiency, 3) Arbitrary Model Precision for robust object description and identification.

Automated expert modeling for automated student evaluation.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Abbott, Robert G.

The 8th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems provides a leading international forum for the dissemination of original results in the design, implementation, and evaluation of intelligent tutoring systems and related areas. The conference draws researchers from a broad spectrum of disciplines ranging from artificial intelligence and cognitive science to pedagogy and educational psychology. The conference explores intelligent tutoring systems increasing real world impact on an increasingly global scale. Improved authoring tools and learning object standards enable fielding systems and curricula in real world settings on an unprecedented scale. Researchers deploy ITS's in ever larger studies and increasingly use datamore » from real students, tasks, and settings to guide new research. With high volumes of student interaction data, data mining, and machine learning, tutoring systems can learn from experience and improve their teaching performance. The increasing number of realistic evaluation studies also broaden researchers knowledge about the educational contexts for which ITS's are best suited. At the same time, researchers explore how to expand and improve ITS/student communications, for example, how to achieve more flexible and responsive discourse with students, help students integrate Web resources into learning, use mobile technologies and games to enhance student motivation and learning, and address multicultural perspectives.« less

Use of camera drive in stereoscopic display of learning contents of introductory physics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Matsuura, Shu

2011-03-01

Simple 3D physics simulations with stereoscopic display were created for a part of introductory physics e-Learning. First, cameras to see the 3D world can be made controllable by the user. This enabled to observe the system and motions of objects from any position in the 3D world. Second, cameras were made attachable to one of the moving object in the simulation so as to observe the relative motion of other objects. By this option, it was found that users perceive the velocity and acceleration more sensibly on stereoscopic display than on non-stereoscopic 3D display. Simulations were made using Adobe Flash ActionScript, and Papervison 3D library was used to render the 3D models in the flash web pages. To display the stereogram, two viewports from virtual cameras were displayed in parallel in the same web page. For observation of stereogram, the images of two viewports were superimposed by using 3D stereogram projection box (T&TS CO., LTD.), and projected on an 80-inch screen. The virtual cameras were controlled by keyboard and also by Nintendo Wii remote controller buttons. In conclusion, stereoscopic display offers learners more opportunities to play with the simulated models, and to perceive the characteristics of motion better.

Multi-Perspective Indexing of Diverse Spatial Characteristics of an Outdoor Field toward Redesigning of Real-World Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Okada, Masaya; Tada, Masahiro

2014-01-01

Real-world learning is important because it encourages learners to obtain knowledge through various experiences. To design effective real-world learning, it is necessary to analyze the diverse learning activities that occur in real-world learning and to develop effective strategies for learning support. By inventing the technologies of multimodal…

Bridging the Gap: Adaptive Games and Student-Centered VLEs

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Del Blanco, Ángel; Torrente, Javier; Moreno-Ger, Pablo; Fernández-Manjón, Baltasar

The widely used e-learning technology is facing new challenges such as how to produce student-centered systems that can be adapted to the needs of each student. Those objectives should be met in a standard compliant way to simplify general adoption. In this context, educational videogames are proposed as an ideal medium to facilitate adaptation and tracking of the students’ performance for assessment purposes. However, there are still barriers between the gaming and e-learning worlds preventing their mutual interaction. In this paper we propose a middleware to bridge this gap, integrating adaptive educational videogames in e-learning environments with a special focus on the ongoing standardization efforts.

Toddlers’ referential understanding of pictures

PubMed Central

Ganea, Patricia A.; Preissler, Melissa Allen; Butler, Lucas; Carey, Susan; DeLoache, Judy S.

2010-01-01

Pictures are referential in that they can represent objects in the real world. Here we explore the emergence of understanding of the referential potential of pictures in the second year of life. In Study 1, 15-, 18-, and 24-month-old children learned a word for a picture of a novel object (e.g., “blicket”) in the context of a picture-book interaction. Later they were presented with the picture of a blicket along with the real object it depicted and asked to indicate “a blicket.” Many of the 24-, 18-month-olds and even 15-month-olds indicated the real object as an instance of a “blicket”, consistent with an understanding of the referential relation between pictures and objects. In Study 2, children were tested with an exemplar object that differed in color from the depicted object to determine if they would extend the label they had learned for the depicted object to a slightly different category member. The 15-, 18- and 24-month-old participants failed to make a consistent referential response. The results are discussed in terms of whether pictorial understanding at this age is associative or symbolic. PMID:19560783

There is No Free Lunch: Tradeoffs in the Utility of Learned Knowledge

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Kedar, Smadar T.; McKusick, Kathleen B.

1992-01-01

With the recent introduction of learning in integrated systems, there is a need to measure the utility of learned knowledge for these more complex systems. A difficulty arrises when there are multiple, possibly conflicting, utility metrics to be measured. In this paper, we present schemes which trade off conflicting utility metrics in order to achieve some global performance objectives. In particular, we present a case study of a multi-strategy machine learning system, mutual theory refinement, which refines world models for an integrated reactive system, the Entropy Reduction Engine. We provide experimental results on the utility of learned knowledge in two conflicting metrics - improved accuracy and degraded efficiency. We then demonstrate two ways to trade off these metrics. In each, some learned knowledge is either approximated or dynamically 'forgotten' so as to improve efficiency while degrading accuracy only slightly.

Collaborative mining and transfer learning for relational data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Levchuk, Georgiy; Eslami, Mohammed

2015-06-01

Many of the real-world problems, - including human knowledge, communication, biological, and cyber network analysis, - deal with data entities for which the essential information is contained in the relations among those entities. Such data must be modeled and analyzed as graphs, with attributes on both objects and relations encode and differentiate their semantics. Traditional data mining algorithms were originally designed for analyzing discrete objects for which a set of features can be defined, and thus cannot be easily adapted to deal with graph data. This gave rise to the relational data mining field of research, of which graph pattern learning is a key sub-domain [11]. In this paper, we describe a model for learning graph patterns in collaborative distributed manner. Distributed pattern learning is challenging due to dependencies between the nodes and relations in the graph, and variability across graph instances. We present three algorithms that trade-off benefits of parallelization and data aggregation, compare their performance to centralized graph learning, and discuss individual benefits and weaknesses of each model. Presented algorithms are designed for linear speedup in distributed computing environments, and learn graph patterns that are both closer to ground truth and provide higher detection rates than centralized mining algorithm.

Role of virtual reality for cerebral palsy management.

PubMed

Weiss, Patrice L Tamar; Tirosh, Emanuel; Fehlings, Darcy

2014-08-01

Virtual reality is the use of interactive simulations to present users with opportunities to perform in virtual environments that appear, sound, and less frequently, feel similar to real-world objects and events. Interactive computer play refers to the use of a game where a child interacts and plays with virtual objects in a computer-generated environment. Because of their distinctive attributes that provide ecologically realistic and motivating opportunities for active learning, these technologies have been used in pediatric rehabilitation over the past 15 years. The ability of virtual reality to create opportunities for active repetitive motor/sensory practice adds to their potential for neuroplasticity and learning in individuals with neurologic disorders. The objectives of this article is to provide an overview of how virtual reality and gaming are used clinically, to present the results of several example studies that demonstrate their use in research, and to briefly remark on future developments. © The Author(s) 2014.

A Mobile Outdoor Augmented Reality Method Combining Deep Learning Object Detection and Spatial Relationships for Geovisualization

PubMed Central

Rao, Jinmeng; Qiao, Yanjun; Ren, Fu; Wang, Junxing; Du, Qingyun

2017-01-01

The purpose of this study was to develop a robust, fast and markerless mobile augmented reality method for registration, geovisualization and interaction in uncontrolled outdoor environments. We propose a lightweight deep-learning-based object detection approach for mobile or embedded devices; the vision-based detection results of this approach are combined with spatial relationships by means of the host device’s built-in Global Positioning System receiver, Inertial Measurement Unit and magnetometer. Virtual objects generated based on geospatial information are precisely registered in the real world, and an interaction method based on touch gestures is implemented. The entire method is independent of the network to ensure robustness to poor signal conditions. A prototype system was developed and tested on the Wuhan University campus to evaluate the method and validate its results. The findings demonstrate that our method achieves a high detection accuracy, stable geovisualization results and interaction. PMID:28837096

A Mobile Outdoor Augmented Reality Method Combining Deep Learning Object Detection and Spatial Relationships for Geovisualization.

PubMed

Rao, Jinmeng; Qiao, Yanjun; Ren, Fu; Wang, Junxing; Du, Qingyun

2017-08-24

The purpose of this study was to develop a robust, fast and markerless mobile augmented reality method for registration, geovisualization and interaction in uncontrolled outdoor environments. We propose a lightweight deep-learning-based object detection approach for mobile or embedded devices; the vision-based detection results of this approach are combined with spatial relationships by means of the host device's built-in Global Positioning System receiver, Inertial Measurement Unit and magnetometer. Virtual objects generated based on geospatial information are precisely registered in the real world, and an interaction method based on touch gestures is implemented. The entire method is independent of the network to ensure robustness to poor signal conditions. A prototype system was developed and tested on the Wuhan University campus to evaluate the method and validate its results. The findings demonstrate that our method achieves a high detection accuracy, stable geovisualization results and interaction.

Learning Spaces Framework: Learning in an Online World

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (NJ1), 2008

2008-01-01

"Contemporary learning--learning in an online world" describes the integrated nature of the highly technological world in which young people live and learn. A key priority is to design learning spaces that integrate technologies: engaging students in ways not previously possible; creating new learning and teaching possibilities;…

Max-margin multiattribute learning with low-rank constraint.

PubMed

Zhang, Qiang; Chen, Lin; Li, Baoxin

2014-07-01

Attribute learning has attracted a lot of interests in recent years for its advantage of being able to model high-level concepts with a compact set of midlevel attributes. Real-world objects often demand multiple attributes for effective modeling. Most existing methods learn attributes independently without explicitly considering their intrinsic relatedness. In this paper, we propose max margin multiattribute learning with low-rank constraint, which learns a set of attributes simultaneously, using only relative ranking of the attributes for the data. By learning all the attributes simultaneously through low-rank constraint, the proposed method is able to capture their intrinsic correlation for improved learning; by requiring only relative ranking, the method avoids restrictive binary labels of attributes that are often assumed by many existing techniques. The proposed method is evaluated on both synthetic data and real visual data including a challenging video data set. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Group-Based Active Learning of Classification Models.

PubMed

Luo, Zhipeng; Hauskrecht, Milos

2017-05-01

Learning of classification models from real-world data often requires additional human expert effort to annotate the data. However, this process can be rather costly and finding ways of reducing the human annotation effort is critical for this task. The objective of this paper is to develop and study new ways of providing human feedback for efficient learning of classification models by labeling groups of examples. Briefly, unlike traditional active learning methods that seek feedback on individual examples, we develop a new group-based active learning framework that solicits label information on groups of multiple examples. In order to describe groups in a user-friendly way, conjunctive patterns are used to compactly represent groups. Our empirical study on 12 UCI data sets demonstrates the advantages and superiority of our approach over both classic instance-based active learning work, as well as existing group-based active-learning methods.

Putting the Common European Framework of Reference to Good Use

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

North, Brian

2014-01-01

This paper recapitulates the aims of the CEFR and highlights three aspects of good practice in exploiting it: firstly, taking as a starting point the real-world language ability that is the aim of all modern language learners; secondly, the exploitation of good descriptors as transparent learning objectives in order to involve and empower the…

The Intersection of Culture and Behavior in Social Studies Classrooms

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schlein, Candace; Taft, Raol J.; Ramsay, Crystal M.

2016-01-01

Social studies is a school subject that aims to enmesh local and global concerns and ways of understanding the world. It is a complex task to position local concerns and perspectives within an intercultural vantage. In turn, this objective for teaching and learning also presumes that students interact with social studies material from fixed and…

Maintaining Standards in a Textbook-Free World

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schaffhauser, Dian

2012-01-01

Even though non-print-based learning objects have been in the classroom for years, the shift to digital content has gotten more attention lately. One development that has made the difference is the Apple initiative to introduce its iBooks textbooks for iPads, generating a notable amount of buzz. That and President Obama's announcement that he…

Formative Assessment Probes: Big and Small Seeds. Linking Formative Assessment Probes to the Scientific Practices

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Keeley, Page

2016-01-01

This column focuses on promoting learning through assessment. Formative assessment probes are designed to uncover students' ideas about objects, events, and processes in the natural world. This assessment information is then used throughout instruction to move students toward an understanding of the scientific ideas behind the probes. During the…

Developing Craft Skills with Quasi-Cases: The Example of the Big Apple's Flirtation with Congestion Pricing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Straussman, Jeffrey D.

2015-01-01

This article adopts the perspective expounded by Weimer, and Vining and Weimer, that policy analysis requires "craft skills" and, therefore, one of the fundamental objectives of public affairs programs is to prepare graduates for the professional working world by providing opportunities to learn and practice these skills. Second, the…

Teaching Children Science: Hands-On Nature Study in North America, 1890-1930

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory

2010-01-01

In the early twentieth century, a curriculum known as nature study flourished in major city school systems, streetcar suburbs, small towns, and even rural one-room schools. This object-based approach to learning about the natural world marked the first systematic attempt to introduce science into elementary education, and it came at a time when…

Perspectives on Simulation and Miniaturization. Professional Paper No. 1472.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McCluskey, Michael R.

Simulation--here defined as a physical, procedural, or symbolic representation of certain aspects of a functioning system, or as a working model or representation of a real world system--has at least four areas of application: (1) training where the objective of simulation is to provide the trainee with a learning environment that will facilitate…

Beyond the Field Trip: Teaching Tourism through Tours

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kelner, Shaul; Sanders, George

2009-01-01

A course in the sociology of tourism offers an opportunity to examine a world-transforming force that is penetrating more and more aspects of social life. It also offers an opportunity to create a learning environment that uses the object of study as the medium of study. This article examines how instructors can use tourism to teach the sociology…

Pointing Sets the Stage for Learning Language--and Creating Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Goldin-Meadow, Susan

2007-01-01

Tomasello, Carpenter, and Liszkowski (2007) have argued that pointing gestures do much more than single out objects in the world. Pointing gestures function as part of a system of shared intentionality even at early stages of development. As such, pointing gestures form the platform on which linguistic communication rests, paving the way for later…

Syntax "and" Semantics: A Teaching Model.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wolfe, Frank

In translating perception into written language, a child must learn an encoding process which is a continuation of the process of improving sensing of the world around him or her. To verbalize an object (a perception) we use frames which name a referent, locate the referent in space and time, identify its appearance and behavior, and define terms…

SRA Economics Materials in Grades One and Two. Evaluation Reports.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Shaver, James P.; Larkins, A. Guy

A class of first graders and a class of second graders in four Salt Lake City schools comprised the experimental sample in a study whose objectives were (1) to develop a test for assessing learning with "Our Working World" materials, published by Science Research Associate (SRA), and (2) to determine if students using the materials made…

The Bottomless Churn: An Antique World of Collectibles. A Unit for Gifted and Talented Students.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Marion, L. Marvin

The "mini-unit" focuses on the hobby of antiques and collectibles for gifted students. Among 10 objectives listed for the unit are to exhibit elaboration of ideas, use visual imagery, and learn social courtesies by working with older people in the community. Activities emphasize brainstorming, writing, conducting interviews, going on…

Moving beyond Common Paradigms of Leadership: Understanding the Development of Advanced Leadership Identity

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rocco, Melissa Lynn

2017-01-01

In both formal and informal ways, leadership is woven into the fabric of higher education. Developing students into leaders who meet the demands of an increasingly interconnected world is a message found in institutional mission statements, program objectives, and learning outcomes. As such, scholars highlight the need for using relational,…

SCDC Spanish Curricula Units. Science/Math, Unit 10, Grade 3, Teacher's Guide.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Spanish Curricula Development Center, Miami Beach, FL.

Unit 10 of a Spanish science/math curriculum for grade three, composed of kits 37-40, has as its theme "communities around the world". The unit's teacher's guide contains both learning and assessment activities, with the focus, objective, and materials needed for each activity listed. Specific attention is placed on four spiraling questions…

Are We Looking at the Same Sun? Exploring the Seasons Using Data Analysis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Marshall, Jeff; Crenshaw, Kim; Higdon, Robbie

2012-01-01

The seasons are often modeled for students using two spherical objects, one representing the Sun and one representing the Earth. Solely using this model, however, neglects a critical aspect of learning--how students actually see the world. This lesson challenges students to explore seasonal variations as they create and analyze sunrise/sunset…

Diversity in Education Using Blended Learning in Sarawak

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ling, Siew-Eng; Ariffin, Siti Rahayah Bt; Rahman, Saemah Bt; Lai, Kim-Leong

2010-01-01

One of the objectives of Malaysia Ministry of Education is to provide educational opportunities for all Malaysians. Are education opportunities given fairly to all Malaysians who come from two big regions and divided by the South China Sea? The web infancy era, where the World Wide Web (WWW) is blooming fast, has changed the new millennium…

A City Goes to War: A Case Study of Bridgeport, Connecticut, 1914-1917.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Banit, Thomas

1989-01-01

Presents a case study used for teaching about World War I. Describes Bridgeport, Connecticut, during the period 1914-17. Includes maps, ethnographic data, and primary materials, such as newspaper accounts and speeches by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. Provides learning objectives, study questions, and a glossary. Discusses the impact of the war on…

Digital Preservation and Deep Infrastructure; Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Progress Report and Workplan for 2002; Video Gaming, Education and Digital Learning Technologies: Relevance and Opportunities; Digital Collections of Real World Objects; The MusArt Music-Retrieval System: An Overview; eML: Taking Mississippi Libraries into the 21st Century.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Granger, Stewart; Dekkers, Makx; Weibel, Stuart L.; Kirriemuir, John; Lensch, Hendrik P. A.; Goesele, Michael; Seidel, Hans-Peter; Birmingham, William; Pardo, Bryan; Meek, Colin; Shifrin, Jonah; Goodvin, Renee; Lippy, Brooke

2002-01-01

One opinion piece and five articles in this issue discuss: digital preservation infrastructure; accomplishments and changes in the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative in 2001 and plans for 2002; video gaming and how it relates to digital libraries and learning technologies; overview of a music retrieval system; and the online version of the…

Adaptive learning in a compartmental model of visual cortex—how feedback enables stable category learning and refinement

PubMed Central

Layher, Georg; Schrodt, Fabian; Butz, Martin V.; Neumann, Heiko

2014-01-01

The categorization of real world objects is often reflected in the similarity of their visual appearances. Such categories of objects do not necessarily form disjunct sets of objects, neither semantically nor visually. The relationship between categories can often be described in terms of a hierarchical structure. For instance, tigers and leopards build two separate mammalian categories, both of which are subcategories of the category Felidae. In the last decades, the unsupervised learning of categories of visual input stimuli has been addressed by numerous approaches in machine learning as well as in computational neuroscience. However, the question of what kind of mechanisms might be involved in the process of subcategory learning, or category refinement, remains a topic of active investigation. We propose a recurrent computational network architecture for the unsupervised learning of categorial and subcategorial visual input representations. During learning, the connection strengths of bottom-up weights from input to higher-level category representations are adapted according to the input activity distribution. In a similar manner, top-down weights learn to encode the characteristics of a specific stimulus category. Feedforward and feedback learning in combination realize an associative memory mechanism, enabling the selective top-down propagation of a category's feedback weight distribution. We suggest that the difference between the expected input encoded in the projective field of a category node and the current input pattern controls the amplification of feedforward-driven representations. Large enough differences trigger the recruitment of new representational resources and the establishment of additional (sub-) category representations. We demonstrate the temporal evolution of such learning and show how the proposed combination of an associative memory with a modulatory feedback integration successfully establishes category and subcategory representations. PMID:25538637

Integration of Problem-Based Learning and Web-Based Multimedia to Enhance Soil Management Course

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Strivelli, R.; Krzic, M.; Crowley, C.; Dyanatkar, S.; Bomke, A.; Simard, S.; Grand, S.

2012-04-01

In an attempt to address declining enrolment in soil science programs and the changing learning needs of 21st century students, several universities in North America and around the world have re-organized their soil science curriculum and adopted innovative educational approaches and web-based teaching resources. At the University of British Columbia, Canada, an interdisciplinary team set out to integrate teaching approaches to address this trend. The objective of this project was to develop an interactive web-based teaching resource, which combined a face-to-face problem-based learning (PBL) case study with multimedia to illustrate the impacts of three land-uses on soil transformation and quality. The Land Use Impacts (LUI) tool (http://soilweb.landfood.ubc.ca/luitool/) was a collaborative and concentrated effort to maximize the advantages of two educational approaches: (1) the web's interactivity, flexibility, adaptability and accessibility, and (2) PBL's ability to foster an authentic learning environment, encourage group work and promote the application of core concepts. The design of the LUI case study was guided by Herrington's development principles for web-based authentic learning. The LUI tool presented students with rich multimedia (streaming videos, text, data, photographs, maps, and weblinks) and real world tasks (site assessment and soil analysis) to encourage students to utilize knowledge of soil science in collaborative problem-solving. Preliminary student feedback indicated that the LUI tool effectively conveyed case study objectives and was appealing to students. The resource is intended primarily for students enrolled in an upper level undergraduate/graduate university course titled Sustainable Soil Management but it is flexible enough to be adapted to other natural resource courses. Project planning and an interactive overview of the tool will be given during the presentation.

This is Not a Game - Social Virtual Worlds, Fun, and Learning

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bell, Mark W.; Smith-Robbins, Sarah; Withnail, Greg

This chapter asks a simple question: what is required to make learning fun in social virtual worlds? Several scholars have connected fun with learning but most of these have centered on the function of games in learning. Studies of learning in massive multiplayer online role playing games connect the game mechanics to how learning occurs. However, few have asked whether learning in a virtual world can be fun if there is no game. In a social virtual world, like Second Life (SL) there are no game mechanics (unlike game worlds like World of Warcraft [WoW]). There are no quests, challenges, rewards or other game elements in SL. So can a virtual world that has no game-content provided be a place where fun learning can take place? We define fun and explore how fun has been related to learning. We explore theories of fun from Koster, Crawford, Csíkszentmihályi and others as well as views of the ways fun is explored as related to the learning experience. With these models in mind, we explore how fun is different in a social virtual world. Drawing on definitions of fun from Castronova and others, we see game structures in virtual worlds may not be needed to have fun. These fun activities include game creation, business interactions, and most importantly, identity play and socialization in a social virtual world. Finally, we propose that if learning is to be successful and fun in a social virtual world it should pay close attention to these two activities.

Adjective semantics, world knowledge and visual context: comprehension of size terms by 2- to 7-year-old Dutch-speaking children.

PubMed

Tribushinina, Elena

2013-06-01

The interpretation of size terms involves constructing contextually-relevant reference points by combining visual cues with knowledge of typical object sizes. This study aims to establish at what age children learn to integrate these two sources of information in the interpretation process and tests comprehension of the Dutch adjectives groot 'big' and klein 'small' by 2- to 7-year-old children. The results demonstrate that there is a gradual increase in the ability to inhibit visual cues and to use world knowledge for interpreting size terms. 2- and 3-year-old children only used the extremes of the perceptual range as reference points. From age four onwards children, like adults, used a cut-off point in the mid-zone of a series. From age five on, children were able to integrate world knowledge and perceptual context. Although 7-year-olds could make subtle distinctions between sizes of various object classes, their performance on incongruent items was not yet adult-like.

An investigation of difficulties experienced by students developing unified modelling language (UML) class and sequence diagrams

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sien, Ven Yu

2011-12-01

Object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD) is not an easy subject to learn. There are many challenges confronting students when studying OOAD. Students have particular difficulty abstracting real-world problems within the context of OOAD. They are unable to effectively build object-oriented (OO) models from the problem domain because they essentially do not know "what" to model. This article investigates the difficulties and misconceptions undergraduate students have with analysing systems using unified modelling language analysis class and sequence diagrams. These models were chosen because they represent important static and dynamic aspects of the software system under development. The results of this study will help students produce effective OO models, and facilitate software engineering lecturers design learning materials and approaches for introductory OOAD courses.

Causal learning is collaborative: Examining explanation and exploration in social contexts.

PubMed

Legare, Cristine H; Sobel, David M; Callanan, Maureen

2017-10-01

Causal learning in childhood is a dynamic and collaborative process of explanation and exploration within complex physical and social environments. Understanding how children learn causal knowledge requires examining how they update beliefs about the world given novel information and studying the processes by which children learn in collaboration with caregivers, educators, and peers. The objective of this article is to review evidence for how children learn causal knowledge by explaining and exploring in collaboration with others. We review three examples of causal learning in social contexts, which elucidate how interaction with others influences causal learning. First, we consider children's explanation-seeking behaviors in the form of "why" questions. Second, we examine parents' elaboration of meaning about causal relations. Finally, we consider parents' interactive styles with children during free play, which constrains how children explore. We propose that the best way to understand children's causal learning in social context is to combine results from laboratory and natural interactive informal learning environments.

Alienation, recovered animism and altered states of consciousness.

PubMed

Charlton, Bruce G

2007-01-01

Alienation is the feeling that life is 'meaningless', that we do not belong in the world. But alienation is not an inevitable part of the human condition: some people do feel at one with the world as a consequence of the animistic way of thinking which is shared by children and hunter-gatherers. Animism considers all significant entities to have 'minds', to be 'alive', to be sentient agents. The animistic thinker inhabits a world populated by personal powers including not just other human beings, but also important animals and plants, and significant aspects of physical landscape. Humans belong in this world because it is a web of social relationships. Animism is therefore spontaneous, the 'natural' way of thinking for humans: all humans began as animistic children and for most of human evolutionary history would have grown into animistic adults. It requires sustained, prolonged and pervasive formal education to 'overwrite' animistic thinking with the rationalistic objectivity typical of the modern world. It is this learned abstraction that creates alienation--humans are no longer embedded in a world of social relations but become estranged, adrift in a world of indifferent things. Methods used to cure alienation and recover animistic modes of thinking involve detachment from the social systems that tend to maintain objectivity and rationality: for example, solitude, leisure, unstructured time and direct contact with nature. Many people also achieve similar results by deliberately inducing altered states of consciousness. Animistic thinking may emerge in meditation or contemplation, lucid dreaming, from self-hypnosis, when drowsy, in 'trance states' induced by repetitious rhythm or light, or when delirious due to illness, brain injury, psychoses, or intoxication with 'entheogenic' drugs--which is probably one reason for the perennial popularity of inducing intoxicated states. However, intoxication will typically damage memory processes making it harder to learn from any spiritual experiences; and even mild states of cognitive impairment may be dangerous in situations where skilled or responsible behaviour is required. Despite these constraints and limitations, recovering animism through seeking altered states of consciousness could already be considered a major world spiritual practice.

Transfer of learning between 2D and 3D sources during infancy: Informing theory and practice

PubMed Central

Barr, Rachel

2010-01-01

The ability to transfer learning across contexts is an adaptive skill that develops rapidly during early childhood. Learning from television is a specific instance of transfer of learning between a 2-Dimensional (2D) representation and a 3-Dimensional (3D) object. Understanding the conditions under which young children might accomplish this particular kind of transfer is important because by 2 years of age 90% of US children are viewing television on a daily basis. Recent research shows that children can imitate actions presented on television using the corresponding real-world objects, but this same research also shows that children learn less from television than they do from live demonstrations until they are at least 3 years old; termed the video deficit effect. At present, there is no coherent theory to account for the video deficit effect; how learning is disrupted by this change in context is poorly understood. The aims of the present review are (1) to review the conditions under which children transfer learning between 2D images and 3D objects during early childhood, and (2) to integrate developmental theories of memory processing into the transfer of learning from media literature using Hayne’s (2004) developmental representational flexibility account. The review will conclude that studies on the transfer of learning between 2D and 3D sources have important theoretical implications for general developmental theories of cognitive development, and in particular the development of a flexible representational system, as well as policy implications for early education regarding the potential use and limitations of media as effective teaching tools during early childhood. PMID:20563302

Enhancing a Multi-body Mechanism with Learning-Aided Cues in an Augmented Reality Environment

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Singh Sidhu, Manjit

2013-06-01

Augmented Reality (AR) is a potential area of research for education, covering issues such as tracking and calibration, and realistic rendering of virtual objects. The ability to augment real world with virtual information has opened the possibility of using AR technology in areas such as education and training as well. In the domain of Computer Aided Learning (CAL), researchers have long been looking into enhancing the effectiveness of the teaching and learning process by providing cues that could assist learners to better comprehend the materials presented. Although a number of works were done looking into the effectiveness of learning-aided cues, but none has really addressed this issue for AR-based learning solutions. This paper discusses the design and model of an AR based software that uses visual cues to enhance the learning process and the outcome perception results of the cues.

Invariant Visual Object and Face Recognition: Neural and Computational Bases, and a Model, VisNet

PubMed Central

Rolls, Edmund T.

2012-01-01

Neurophysiological evidence for invariant representations of objects and faces in the primate inferior temporal visual cortex is described. Then a computational approach to how invariant representations are formed in the brain is described that builds on the neurophysiology. A feature hierarchy model in which invariant representations can be built by self-organizing learning based on the temporal and spatial statistics of the visual input produced by objects as they transform in the world is described. VisNet can use temporal continuity in an associative synaptic learning rule with a short-term memory trace, and/or it can use spatial continuity in continuous spatial transformation learning which does not require a temporal trace. The model of visual processing in the ventral cortical stream can build representations of objects that are invariant with respect to translation, view, size, and also lighting. The model has been extended to provide an account of invariant representations in the dorsal visual system of the global motion produced by objects such as looming, rotation, and object-based movement. The model has been extended to incorporate top-down feedback connections to model the control of attention by biased competition in, for example, spatial and object search tasks. The approach has also been extended to account for how the visual system can select single objects in complex visual scenes, and how multiple objects can be represented in a scene. The approach has also been extended to provide, with an additional layer, for the development of representations of spatial scenes of the type found in the hippocampus. PMID:22723777

Invariant Visual Object and Face Recognition: Neural and Computational Bases, and a Model, VisNet.

PubMed

Rolls, Edmund T

2012-01-01

Neurophysiological evidence for invariant representations of objects and faces in the primate inferior temporal visual cortex is described. Then a computational approach to how invariant representations are formed in the brain is described that builds on the neurophysiology. A feature hierarchy model in which invariant representations can be built by self-organizing learning based on the temporal and spatial statistics of the visual input produced by objects as they transform in the world is described. VisNet can use temporal continuity in an associative synaptic learning rule with a short-term memory trace, and/or it can use spatial continuity in continuous spatial transformation learning which does not require a temporal trace. The model of visual processing in the ventral cortical stream can build representations of objects that are invariant with respect to translation, view, size, and also lighting. The model has been extended to provide an account of invariant representations in the dorsal visual system of the global motion produced by objects such as looming, rotation, and object-based movement. The model has been extended to incorporate top-down feedback connections to model the control of attention by biased competition in, for example, spatial and object search tasks. The approach has also been extended to account for how the visual system can select single objects in complex visual scenes, and how multiple objects can be represented in a scene. The approach has also been extended to provide, with an additional layer, for the development of representations of spatial scenes of the type found in the hippocampus.

Active Learning in a Large General Physics Classroom.

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Trousil, Rebecca

2008-04-01

In 2004, we launched a new calculus-based, introductory physics sequence at Washington University. Designed as an alternative to our traditional lecture-based sequence, the primary objectives for this new course were to actively engage students in the learning process, to significantly strengthen students' conceptual reasoning skills, to help students develop higher level quantitative problem solving skills necessary for analyzing ``real world'' problems, and to integrate modern physics into the curriculum. This talk will describe our approach, using The Six Ideas That Shaped Physics text by Thomas Moore, to creating an active learning environment in large classes as well as share our perspective on key elements for success and challenges that we face in the large class environment.

Research on the Healthy Lifestyle Model, Active Ageing, and Loneliness of Senior Learners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hung, Jui-Ying; Lu, Kuo-Song

2014-01-01

Taiwan has the fastest ageing population in the world. Thus, the government and local policy makers need to formulate policies not just for the nursing and care needs of the aged. They also need to actively promote the need for lifelong learning among seniors in order to achieve elderly-friendly objectives, such as health promotion and delays in…

A Postcolonial Discourse Analysis of Finnish School Textbooks: Learning about the World from a Tourist Perspective

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mikander, Pia; Zilliacus, Harriet

2016-01-01

In this article, we ask how Finnish basic education school textbooks in social science portray tourism and countries with a big tourism sector. We have analyzed the textbook quotes from a postcolonial perspective, using discourse theory analysis. The idea is to challenge what is considered objective information about tourist locations in school…

Educating for an Inclusive World: Lessons Learned from a Globally Networked Human Rights and Disability Course for Social Work and Law Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Critelli, Filomena; Lewis, Laura; Méndez-López, Adalberto

2017-01-01

This article examines an innovative model of online international education regarding disability through a human rights perspective piloted through a collaboration between Universidad LaSalle, Mexico, and University at Buffalo, United States. The course is organized around a pressing global human rights and development issue. Its objective is to…

OERs in Context--Case Study of Innovation and Sustainability of Educational Practices at the University of Mauritius

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Issack, Santally Mohammad

2011-01-01

Over the recent years, there has been a growing interest in Open Educational Resources (OER). A similar trend was observed about a decade ago in the concept of Learning Objects, which inevitably faded without really making an impact in real-world educational contexts. A number of repositories were created that contain thousands of learning…

Assessing Understanding of Complex Learning Outcomes and Real-World Skills Using an Authentic Software Tool: A Study from Biomedical Sciences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dermo, John; Boyne, James

2014-01-01

We describe a study conducted during 2009-12 into innovative assessment practice, evaluating an assessed coursework task on a final year Medical Genetics module for Biomedical Science undergraduates. An authentic e-assessment coursework task was developed, integrating objectively marked online questions with an online DNA sequence analysis tool…

Promoting Intercultural Understanding and Reducing Stereotypes: Incorporating the Cultural Portfolio Project into Taiwan's EFL College Classes

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Su, Ya-Chen

2011-01-01

Learning about foreign language (FL) cultures is becoming an important objective in the FL curricula and national standards of different countries throughout the world. The purpose of the study was to examine the effects of the cultural portfolio project on: (1) students' concept development in their perceptions of the target language culture and…

Tools, Techniques, and Applications: Normalizing the VR Paradigm

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Duncan, Gaeme

2008-01-01

Oshynee's precision Learning Objective performance factor rubrics with associated behavioral anchors integrates with Thinking Worlds(TradeMark), to provide event data recording and dynamic prescriptive feedback. Thinking Worlds(TradeMark) provides SCORM parametric data for reporting within the game and within overarching curricula or workplace evaluation strategy. - Open-sourced, browser-based digital dashboard reporting tools collect data from TW, LMS, LCMS, HR, and workplace metrics or control systems The games may be delivered across the internet or in a range of networked and stand-alone methods using the delivery model (s) required by the host organization.

How do children learn to follow gaze, share joint attention, imitate their teachers, and use tools during social interactions?

PubMed

Grossberg, Stephen; Vladusich, Tony

2010-01-01

How does an infant learn through visual experience to imitate actions of adult teachers, despite the fact that the infant and adult view one another and the world from different perspectives? To accomplish this, an infant needs to learn how to share joint attention with adult teachers and to follow their gaze towards valued goal objects. The infant also needs to be capable of view-invariant object learning and recognition whereby it can carry out goal-directed behaviors, such as the use of tools, using different object views than the ones that its teachers use. Such capabilities are often attributed to "mirror neurons". This attribution does not, however, explain the brain processes whereby these competences arise. This article describes the CRIB (Circular Reactions for Imitative Behavior) neural model of how the brain achieves these goals through inter-personal circular reactions. Inter-personal circular reactions generalize the intra-personal circular reactions of Piaget, which clarify how infants learn from their own babbled arm movements and reactive eye movements how to carry out volitional reaches, with or without tools, towards valued goal objects. The article proposes how intra-personal circular reactions create a foundation for inter-personal circular reactions when infants and other learners interact with external teachers in space. Both types of circular reactions involve learned coordinate transformations between body-centered arm movement commands and retinotopic visual feedback, and coordination of processes within and between the What and Where cortical processing streams. Specific breakdowns of model processes generate formal symptoms similar to clinical symptoms of autism. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

2.5-year-olds use cross-situational consistency to learn verbs under referential uncertainty.

PubMed

Scott, Rose M; Fisher, Cynthia

2012-02-01

Recent evidence shows that children can use cross-situational statistics to learn new object labels under referential ambiguity (e.g., Smith & Yu, 2008). Such evidence has been interpreted as support for proposals that statistical information about word-referent co-occurrence plays a powerful role in word learning. But object labels represent only a fraction of the vocabulary children acquire, and arguably represent the simplest case of word learning based on observations of world scenes. Here we extended the study of cross-situational word learning to a new segment of the vocabulary, action verbs, to permit a stronger test of the role of statistical information in word learning. In two experiments, on each trial 2.5-year-olds encountered two novel intransitive (e.g., "She's pimming!"; Experiment 1) or transitive verbs (e.g., "She's pimming her toy!"; Experiment 2) while viewing two action events. The consistency with which each verb accompanied each action provided the only source of information about the intended referent of each verb. The 2.5-year-olds used cross-situational consistency in verb learning, but also showed significant limits on their ability to do so as the sentences and scenes became slightly more complex. These findings help to define the role of cross-situational observation in word learning. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

2.5-year-olds use cross-situational consistency to learn verbs under referential uncertainty

PubMed Central

Scott, Rose M.; Fisher, Cynthia

2011-01-01

Recent evidence shows that children can use cross-situational statistics to learn new object labels under referential ambiguity (e.g., Smith & Yu, 2008). Such evidence has been interpreted as support for proposals that statistical information about word-referent co-occurrence plays a powerful role in word learning. But object labels represent only a fraction of the vocabulary children acquire, and arguably represent the simplest case of word learning based on observations of world scenes. Here we extended the study of cross-situational word learning to a new segment of the vocabulary, action verbs, to permit a stronger test of the role of statistical information in word learning. In two experiments, on each trial 2.5-year-olds encountered two novel intransitive (e.g., “She’s pimming!”; Experiment 1) or transitive verbs (e.g., “She’s pimming her toy!”; Experiment 2) while viewing two action events. The consistency with which each verb accompanied each action provided the only source of information about the intended referent of each verb. The 2.5-year-olds used cross-situational consistency in verb learning, but also showed significant limits on their ability to do so as the sentences and scenes became slightly more complex. These findings help to define the role of cross-situational observation in word learning. PMID:22104489

How Do Virtual World Experiences Bring about Learning? A Critical Review of Theories

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Loke, Swee-Kin

2015-01-01

While students do learn real-world knowledge and skills in virtual worlds, educators have yet to adequately theorise how students' virtual world experiences bring about this learning. This paper critically reviewed theories currently used to underpin empirical work in virtual worlds for education. In particular, it evaluated how applicable these…

Machine learning for real time remote detection

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Labbé, Benjamin; Fournier, Jérôme; Henaff, Gilles; Bascle, Bénédicte; Canu, Stéphane

2010-10-01

Infrared systems are key to providing enhanced capability to military forces such as automatic control of threats and prevention from air, naval and ground attacks. Key requirements for such a system to produce operational benefits are real-time processing as well as high efficiency in terms of detection and false alarm rate. These are serious issues since the system must deal with a large number of objects and categories to be recognized (small vehicles, armored vehicles, planes, buildings, etc.). Statistical learning based algorithms are promising candidates to meet these requirements when using selected discriminant features and real-time implementation. This paper proposes a new decision architecture benefiting from recent advances in machine learning by using an effective method for level set estimation. While building decision function, the proposed approach performs variable selection based on a discriminative criterion. Moreover, the use of level set makes it possible to manage rejection of unknown or ambiguous objects thus preserving the false alarm rate. Experimental evidences reported on real world infrared images demonstrate the validity of our approach.

Information based universal feature extraction

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Amiri, Mohammad; Brause, Rüdiger

2015-02-01

In many real world image based pattern recognition tasks, the extraction and usage of task-relevant features are the most crucial part of the diagnosis. In the standard approach, they mostly remain task-specific, although humans who perform such a task always use the same image features, trained in early childhood. It seems that universal feature sets exist, but they are not yet systematically found. In our contribution, we tried to find those universal image feature sets that are valuable for most image related tasks. In our approach, we trained a neural network by natural and non-natural images of objects and background, using a Shannon information-based algorithm and learning constraints. The goal was to extract those features that give the most valuable information for classification of visual objects hand-written digits. This will give a good start and performance increase for all other image learning tasks, implementing a transfer learning approach. As result, in our case we found that we could indeed extract features which are valid in all three kinds of tasks.

Teaching psychosomatic medicine using problem-based learning and role-playing.

PubMed

Heru, Alison M

2011-01-01

Problem-based learning (PBL) has been implemented in medical education world-wide. Despite its popularity, it has not been generally considered useful for residency programs. The author presents a model for the implementation of PBL in residency programs. The author presents a description of a PBL curriculum for teaching psychosomatic medicine to PGY 2 members in a psychiatry training program. The goals of PBL are to encourage self-directed learning; enhance curiosity, using case-based, contextualized learning; promote collaborative practice; and support patient-centered care. The addition of role-playing exercises helps PGY 2 residents to develop their skills from simply developing a differential diagnosis to being able to construct biopsychosocial formulations, and it provides these residents an opportunity to practice presenting case formulations to the patient and family. Residents and faculty enjoyed the PBL role-playing sessions. Residents wanted the learning objectives given to them rather than generating their own learning objectives, to move through the cases faster, and to receive more information and more cases. Teaching psychosomatic medicine, using PBL and role-playing, allows many of the proposed Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine residency core competencies to be met. However, further refinement of the PBL method needs to take place in order to adapt its use to residency programs.

A Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning with WorldView-2 Pan-Sharpened Imagery for Tea Crop Mapping

PubMed Central

Chuang, Yung-Chung Matt; Shiu, Yi-Shiang

2016-01-01

Tea is an important but vulnerable economic crop in East Asia, highly impacted by climate change. This study attempts to interpret tea land use/land cover (LULC) using very high resolution WorldView-2 imagery of central Taiwan with both pixel and object-based approaches. A total of 80 variables derived from each WorldView-2 band with pan-sharpening, standardization, principal components and gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) texture indices transformation, were set as the input variables. For pixel-based image analysis (PBIA), 34 variables were selected, including seven principal components, 21 GLCM texture indices and six original WorldView-2 bands. Results showed that support vector machine (SVM) had the highest tea crop classification accuracy (OA = 84.70% and KIA = 0.690), followed by random forest (RF), maximum likelihood algorithm (ML), and logistic regression analysis (LR). However, the ML classifier achieved the highest classification accuracy (OA = 96.04% and KIA = 0.887) in object-based image analysis (OBIA) using only six variables. The contribution of this study is to create a new framework for accurately identifying tea crops in a subtropical region with real-time high-resolution WorldView-2 imagery without field survey, which could further aid agriculture land management and a sustainable agricultural product supply. PMID:27128915

A Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning with WorldView-2 Pan-Sharpened Imagery for Tea Crop Mapping.

PubMed

Chuang, Yung-Chung Matt; Shiu, Yi-Shiang

2016-04-26

Tea is an important but vulnerable economic crop in East Asia, highly impacted by climate change. This study attempts to interpret tea land use/land cover (LULC) using very high resolution WorldView-2 imagery of central Taiwan with both pixel and object-based approaches. A total of 80 variables derived from each WorldView-2 band with pan-sharpening, standardization, principal components and gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) texture indices transformation, were set as the input variables. For pixel-based image analysis (PBIA), 34 variables were selected, including seven principal components, 21 GLCM texture indices and six original WorldView-2 bands. Results showed that support vector machine (SVM) had the highest tea crop classification accuracy (OA = 84.70% and KIA = 0.690), followed by random forest (RF), maximum likelihood algorithm (ML), and logistic regression analysis (LR). However, the ML classifier achieved the highest classification accuracy (OA = 96.04% and KIA = 0.887) in object-based image analysis (OBIA) using only six variables. The contribution of this study is to create a new framework for accurately identifying tea crops in a subtropical region with real-time high-resolution WorldView-2 imagery without field survey, which could further aid agriculture land management and a sustainable agricultural product supply.

Learning Behaviors and Interaction Patterns among Students in Virtual Learning Worlds

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lin, Chi-Syan; Ma, Jung Tsan; Chen, Yi-Lung; Kuo, Ming-Shiou

2010-01-01

The goal of this study is to investigate how students behave themselves in the virtual learning worlds. The study creates a 3D virtual learning world, entitled the Best Digital Village, and implements a learning program on it. The learning program, the Expo, takes place at the Exhibition Center in the Best Digital Village. The space in the Expo is…

How to Do Things with Mouse Clicks: Applying Austin's Speech Act Theory to Explain Learning in Virtual Worlds

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Loke, Swee-Kin; Golding, Clinton

2016-01-01

This article addresses learning in desktop virtual worlds where students role play for professional education. When students role play in such virtual worlds, they can learn some knowledge and skills that are useful in the physical world. However, existing learning theories do not provide a plausible explanation of how performing non-verbal…

Student experiments on Skylab

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Floyd, H. B.

1974-01-01

Review of the background and experimental results of the Skylab student project, and assessment of its overall benefits. Virtually all of the objectives of the experiments adopted from student proposals were met. NASA benefited from the program by learning that meaningful experiments could be incorporated into a carry-on or suitcase concept at low cost and within very short time periods. The students benefited greatly from their association with the Skylab program by being afforded a learning opportunity and contact with the real world of research, normally beyond their reach. In addition, hometowns, states, and regions developed a close identification with space exploration.

Learning to select useful landmarks.

PubMed

Greiner, R; Isukapalli, R

1996-01-01

To navigate effectively, an autonomous agent must be able to quickly and accurately determine its current location. Given an initial estimate of its position (perhaps based on dead-reckoning) and an image taken of a known environment, our agent first attempts to locate a set of landmarks (real-world objects at known locations), then uses their angular separation to obtain an improved estimate of its current position. Unfortunately, some landmarks may not be visible, or worse, may be confused with other landmarks, resulting in both time wasted in searching for the undetected landmarks, and in further errors in the agent's estimate of its position. To address these problems, we propose a method that uses previous experiences to learn a selection function that, given the set of landmarks that might be visible, returns the subset that can be used to reliably provide an accurate registration of the agent's position. We use statistical techniques to prove that the learned selection function is, with high probability, effectively at a local optimum in the space of such functions. This paper also presents empirical evidence, using real-world data, that demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Leveraging Large-Scale Semantic Networks for Adaptive Robot Task Learning and Execution.

PubMed

Boteanu, Adrian; St Clair, Aaron; Mohseni-Kabir, Anahita; Saldanha, Carl; Chernova, Sonia

2016-12-01

This work seeks to leverage semantic networks containing millions of entries encoding assertions of commonsense knowledge to enable improvements in robot task execution and learning. The specific application we explore in this project is object substitution in the context of task adaptation. Humans easily adapt their plans to compensate for missing items in day-to-day tasks, substituting a wrap for bread when making a sandwich, or stirring pasta with a fork when out of spoons. Robot plan execution, however, is far less robust, with missing objects typically leading to failure if the robot is not aware of alternatives. In this article, we contribute a context-aware algorithm that leverages the linguistic information embedded in the task description to identify candidate substitution objects without reliance on explicit object affordance information. Specifically, we show that the task context provided by the task labels within the action structure of a task plan can be leveraged to disambiguate information within a noisy large-scale semantic network containing hundreds of potential object candidates to identify successful object substitutions with high accuracy. We present two extensive evaluations of our work on both abstract and real-world robot tasks, showing that the substitutions made by our system are valid, accepted by users, and lead to a statistically significant reduction in robot learning time. In addition, we report the outcomes of testing our approach with a large number of crowd workers interacting with a robot in real time.

Children's environmental knowing: A case study of children's experiences during an environmental education programme

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Scott, Sandra Anne

This study explores children's experiences during WaterWorlds (pseudonym) a field-based environmental education programme at a marine science centre. The study objectives were to investigate how children understand and interpret their experiences, and how these experiences foster their environmental knowing. To address these objectives, I carried out a case study at a marine science centre in British Columbia. I examined children's WaterWorlds experiences and explored their environmental understandings and commitment to environmental action. I analysed the experiences of children in four separate classes and carried out an in-depth examination of four individual children. Data were collected using informal semi-structured interviews, observations, conversations, researcher journal logs, and student documents including their writing and illustrations. My findings indicate that the WaterWorlds programme experience fosters children's environmental knowing. Participation in WaterWorlds activities led to connection, caring, and concern for other species and in some cases, for the marine environment as a whole. During the programme, children chose the ways they interpreted and expressed their environmental knowledge, ethic of care, advocacy, and commitment to action. This development of each child's self-expression resulted in motivational and powerful learning experiences that inspired and nurtured their connections to the earth. This research provides evidence and examples of how educators can foster children's environmental knowing through multi-disciplinary environmental education experiences. It illustrates that activities such as observing and documenting the lives of other animal species, collecting data and conducting research on those species, and working and learning alongside experts in the field of environmental education are powerful experiences that motivate concern and care for the earth among children.

Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation Training by Avatars: A Qualitative Study of Medical Students’ Experiences Using a Multiplayer Virtual World

PubMed Central

Hedman, Leif; Felländer-Tsai, Li

2016-01-01

Background Emergency medical practices are often team efforts. Training for various tasks and collaborations may be carried out in virtual environments. Although promising results exist from studies of serious games, little is known about the subjective reactions of learners when using multiplayer virtual world (MVW) training in medicine. Objective The objective of this study was to reach a better understanding of the learners’ reactions and experiences when using an MVW for team training of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Methods Twelve Swedish medical students participated in semistructured focus group discussions after CPR training in an MVW with partially preset options. The students’ perceptions and feelings related to use of this educational tool were investigated. Using qualitative methodology, discussions were analyzed by a phenomenological data-driven approach. Quality measures included negotiations, back-and-forth reading, triangulation, and validation with the informants. Results Four categories characterizing the students’ experiences could be defined: (1) Focused Mental Training, (2) Interface Diverting Focus From Training, (3) Benefits of Practicing in a Group, and (4) Easy Loss of Focus When Passive. We interpreted the results, compared them to findings of others, and propose advantages and risks of using virtual worlds for learning. Conclusions Beneficial aspects of learning CPR in a virtual world were confirmed. To achieve high participant engagement and create good conditions for training, well-established procedures should be practiced. Furthermore, students should be kept in an active mode and frequent feedback should be utilized. It cannot be completely ruled out that the use of virtual training may contribute to erroneous self-beliefs that can affect later clinical performance. PMID:27986645

EMERGENCY RESPONSE TEAMS TRAINING IN PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS - THE SERIOUSNESS OF SERIOUS GAMES.

PubMed

Stanojevic, Vojislav; Stanojevic, Cedomirka

2016-07-01

The rapid development of multimedia technologies in the last twenty years has lead to the emergence of new ways of learning academic and professional skills, which implies the application of multimedia technology in the form of a software -" serious computer games". Three-Dimensional Virtual Worlds. The basis of this game-platform is made of the platform of three-dimensional virtual worlds that can be described as communication systems in which participants share the same three-dimensional virtual space within which they can move, manipulate objects and communicate through their graphical representatives- avatars. Medical Education and Training. Arguments in favor of these computer tools in the learning process are accessibility, repeatability, low cost, the use of attractive graphics and a high degree of adaptation to the user. Specifically designed avatars allow students to get adapted to their roles in certain situations, especially to those which are considered rare, dangerous or unethical in real life. Drilling of major incidents, which includes the need to create environments for training, cannot be done in the real world due to high costs'and necessity to utilize the extensive resources. In addition, it is impossible to engage all the necessary health personnel at the same time. New technologies intended for conducting training, which are also called "virtual worlds", make the following possible: training at all times depending on user's commitments; simultaneous simulations on multiple levels, in several areas, in different circumstances, including dozens of unique victims; repeated scenarios and learning from mistakes; rapid feedback and the development of non-technical skills which are critical for reducing errors in dynamic, high-risk environments. Virtual worlds, which should be the subject of further research and improvements, in the field of hospital emergency response training for mass casualty incidents, certainly have a promising future.

Retracted: Design Education in the Global Era

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

de Lobo, Theresa

The aim of this paper is to show the collaboration of design disciplines to instill a broader sense of design for students through intercultural service learning projects. While there are programs that are reinventing their curriculum, there are still several that follow the classic structure of a first year art foundation program with the final years concentrating on the desired discipline. The interactions at a global scale, has heightened the need for graduates to learn to interact more effectively with people from different cultures. This approach combines the concern of addressing a need for design in a real world situation, with learning how to understand culture, place, and experience through a collaborative project. Referencing a specific international service learning project, and drawing from literature on internationalization of education, this paper explores key concepts, learning objectives, methods, and challenges faced in addressing the need to prepare students for practice in an increasingly integrated workplace.

Brewing for Students: An Inquiry-Based Microbiology Lab †

PubMed Central

Sato, Brian K.; Alam, Usman; Dacanay, Samantha J.; Lee, Amanda K.; Shaffer, Justin F.

2015-01-01

In an effort to improve and assess student learning, there has been a push to increase the incorporation of discovery-driven modules and those that contain real-world relevance into laboratory curricula. To further this effort, we have developed, implemented, and assessed an undergraduate microbiology laboratory experiment that requires students to use the scientific method while brewing beer. The experiment allows students to brew their own beer and characterize it based on taste, alcohol content, calorie content, pH, and standard reference method. In addition, we assessed whether students were capable of achieving the module learning objectives through a pre-/posttest, student self-evaluation, exam-embedded questions, and an associated worksheet. These objectives included describing the role of the brewing ingredients and predicting how altering the ingredients would affect the characteristics of the beer, amongst others. By completing this experimental module, students accomplished the module objectives, had greater interest in brewing, and were more likely to view beer in scientific terms. Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education PMID:26753030

Brewing for Students: An Inquiry-Based Microbiology Lab.

PubMed

Sato, Brian K; Alam, Usman; Dacanay, Samantha J; Lee, Amanda K; Shaffer, Justin F

2015-12-01

In an effort to improve and assess student learning, there has been a push to increase the incorporation of discovery-driven modules and those that contain real-world relevance into laboratory curricula. To further this effort, we have developed, implemented, and assessed an undergraduate microbiology laboratory experiment that requires students to use the scientific method while brewing beer. The experiment allows students to brew their own beer and characterize it based on taste, alcohol content, calorie content, pH, and standard reference method. In addition, we assessed whether students were capable of achieving the module learning objectives through a pre-/posttest, student self-evaluation, exam-embedded questions, and an associated worksheet. These objectives included describing the role of the brewing ingredients and predicting how altering the ingredients would affect the characteristics of the beer, amongst others. By completing this experimental module, students accomplished the module objectives, had greater interest in brewing, and were more likely to view beer in scientific terms. Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education.

Sims to Teen Second Life: Transition of the SimSavvy Girls to Tech Savvy Isle

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Johnson, Barbara Z.; King, Elizabeth; Hayes, Elisabeth

2008-01-01

In its second year, the Tech Savvy Girls Project adopted "Teen Second Life" as a platform for interest-driven learning and designed projects and objects around themes important to them and their futures as technology-using, creative people. By using the building tools in an open-ended virtual world, they were able to pursue interests common to…

Defense Simulation Internet: next generation information highway.

PubMed

Lilienthal, M G

1995-06-01

The Department of Defense has been engaged in the Defense Modeling and Simulation Initiative (DMSI) to provide advanced distributed simulation warfighters in geographically distributed localities. Lessons learned from the Defense Simulation Internet (DSI) concerning architecture, standards, protocols, interoperability, information sharing, and distributed data bases are equally applicable to telemedicine. Much of the vision and objectives of the DMSI are easily translated into the vision for world wide telemedicine.

Inspiring Generations through Knowledge and Discovery. Strategic Plan. Fiscal Years 2010-2015

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Smithsonian Institution, 2015

2015-01-01

Imagine being able to access all known information about an insect species--whether it was discovered 100 years or 100 days ago--with one touch of the screen. Picture a world in which you can not only see Smithsonian objects online but also hear them and watch them in motion. Or imagine learning that Smithsonian astrophysicists discovered a new,…

The Effect of 3D Virtual Learning Environment on Secondary School Third Grade Students' Attitudes toward Mathematics

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Simsek, Irfan

2016-01-01

With this research, in Second Life environment which is a three dimensional online virtual world, it is aimed to reveal the effects of student attitudes toward mathematics courses and design activities which will enable the third grade students of secondary school (primary education seventh grade) to see the 3D objects in mathematics courses in a…

How Things Work: Teaching Physics in the Context of Everyday Objects

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bloomfield, Louis

2015-03-01

How Things Work is an unconventional introduction to physics, a course that starts with whole objects and looks inside them to see what makes them work. Effectively ``case-study physics,'' it is designed primarily for non-science students who are unsure of the role of physics in the world and are looking for relevance in their studies. How Things Work is essentially the generalization of context-based introductory courses (Physics of the Human Body, Physics of the Automobile, and Physics of Music) and demonstrates that when physics is taught in the context of ordinary objects, these students are enthusiastic about it, look forward to classes, ask insightful questions, experiment on their own, and find themselves explaining to friends and family how things in their world work. In this talk, I will discuss the concept and structure of a How Things Work course and look briefly at how to teach its objects and assess what students learn from it. Although this course focuses on concepts rather than on calculations, it is rich in physics and requires that students think hard about the world around them. It also teaches problem solving and logical thinking skills, and demands that students face their misconceptions and failures of intuition. Lastly, it is actually quantitative in many respects, though its results are usually more words than numbers: your weight, the battery's voltage, or the acceleration due to gravity.

A decentralized and onsite wastewater management course: bringing together global concerns and practical pedagogy.

PubMed

Gaulke, L S; Borgford-Parnell, J L; Stensel, H D

2008-01-01

This paper reports on the design, implementation, and results of a course focused on decentralized and onsite wastewater treatment in global contexts. Problem-based learning was the primary pedagogical method, with which students tackled real-world problems and designed systems to meet the needs of diverse populations. Both learning and course evaluations demonstrated that the course was successful in fulfilling learning objectives, increasing student design skills, and raising awareness of global applications. Based on this experience a list of recommendations was created for co-developing and team-teaching multidisciplinary design courses. These recommendations include ideas for aligning student and teacher goals, overcoming barriers to effective group-work, and imbedding continuous course assessments. Copyright IWA Publishing 2008.

Computer game-based and traditional learning method: a comparison regarding students' knowledge retention.

PubMed

Rondon, Silmara; Sassi, Fernanda Chiarion; Furquim de Andrade, Claudia Regina

2013-02-25

Educational computer games are examples of computer-assisted learning objects, representing an educational strategy of growing interest. Given the changes in the digital world over the last decades, students of the current generation expect technology to be used in advancing their learning requiring a need to change traditional passive learning methodologies to an active multisensory experimental learning methodology. The objective of this study was to compare a computer game-based learning method with a traditional learning method, regarding learning gains and knowledge retention, as means of teaching head and neck Anatomy and Physiology to Speech-Language and Hearing pathology undergraduate students. Students were randomized to participate to one of the learning methods and the data analyst was blinded to which method of learning the students had received. Students' prior knowledge (i.e. before undergoing the learning method), short-term knowledge retention and long-term knowledge retention (i.e. six months after undergoing the learning method) were assessed with a multiple choice questionnaire. Students' performance was compared considering the three moments of assessment for both for the mean total score and for separated mean scores for Anatomy questions and for Physiology questions. Students that received the game-based method performed better in the pos-test assessment only when considering the Anatomy questions section. Students that received the traditional lecture performed better in both post-test and long-term post-test when considering the Anatomy and Physiology questions. The game-based learning method is comparable to the traditional learning method in general and in short-term gains, while the traditional lecture still seems to be more effective to improve students' short and long-term knowledge retention.

Computer game-based and traditional learning method: a comparison regarding students’ knowledge retention

PubMed Central

2013-01-01

Background Educational computer games are examples of computer-assisted learning objects, representing an educational strategy of growing interest. Given the changes in the digital world over the last decades, students of the current generation expect technology to be used in advancing their learning requiring a need to change traditional passive learning methodologies to an active multisensory experimental learning methodology. The objective of this study was to compare a computer game-based learning method with a traditional learning method, regarding learning gains and knowledge retention, as means of teaching head and neck Anatomy and Physiology to Speech-Language and Hearing pathology undergraduate students. Methods Students were randomized to participate to one of the learning methods and the data analyst was blinded to which method of learning the students had received. Students’ prior knowledge (i.e. before undergoing the learning method), short-term knowledge retention and long-term knowledge retention (i.e. six months after undergoing the learning method) were assessed with a multiple choice questionnaire. Students’ performance was compared considering the three moments of assessment for both for the mean total score and for separated mean scores for Anatomy questions and for Physiology questions. Results Students that received the game-based method performed better in the pos-test assessment only when considering the Anatomy questions section. Students that received the traditional lecture performed better in both post-test and long-term post-test when considering the Anatomy and Physiology questions. Conclusions The game-based learning method is comparable to the traditional learning method in general and in short-term gains, while the traditional lecture still seems to be more effective to improve students’ short and long-term knowledge retention. PMID:23442203

Inferring mass in complex scenes by mental simulation.

PubMed

Hamrick, Jessica B; Battaglia, Peter W; Griffiths, Thomas L; Tenenbaum, Joshua B

2016-12-01

After observing a collision between two boxes, you can immediately tell which is empty and which is full of books based on how the boxes moved. People form rich perceptions about the physical properties of objects from their interactions, an ability that plays a crucial role in learning about the physical world through our experiences. Here, we present three experiments that demonstrate people's capacity to reason about the relative masses of objects in naturalistic 3D scenes. We find that people make accurate inferences, and that they continue to fine-tune their beliefs over time. To explain our results, we propose a cognitive model that combines Bayesian inference with approximate knowledge of Newtonian physics by estimating probabilities from noisy physical simulations. We find that this model accurately predicts judgments from our experiments, suggesting that the same simulation mechanism underlies both peoples' predictions and inferences about the physical world around them. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Information and communication technologies in tomorrow's digital classroom

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bogoeva, Asya

2014-05-01

Education has to respond to the new challenges and opportunities offered by the 21-th Century as well as to the main trend in the world community development related to a creation of Knowledge Society. Implementation of ICT at school is a priority of the Global education and helps to develop the four pillars of learning - learning to know, learning to do, learning to be and learning to live together. Digital competence of the students is also a part of the European Union key competences. The essential elements in geographical study are: spatial analysis, with an emphasis on location; ecological analysis, with an emphasis on people-environment relationships; and regional analysis, with an emphasis on areal differentiation. Modern geography is best characterized as the study of distributions and relationships among different natural and social patterns of distributions. Viewing the world from a spatial perspective and employing a holistic approach are important characteristics of contemporary and future Geography learning. Using innovative methods for presenting the global aspects of distribution patterns and their changes is a priority of teaching geosciences at our school. The use of geo-media in classroom helps learners develop their ICT competences. Geolocalised information is used everywhere in society and it is therefore essential for students to learn how to use different forms of geographic media Geo-media is now being used in scientific researches and reasoning. One of the geo-media tools that I use in my classes is Google Earth for presenting different geographic processes and phenomena like visualization of current global weather conditions, global warming, deforestation areas, earthquake areas, etc. Using Geographic Information systems for presenting and studying geographical processes is also one way to identify, analyze, and understand the locations. Our school is a part of digital-earth.eu network which is under development now. The European Centers of Excellence at national level promote innovative approaches of teaching and learning environments including the active use of geo-media and GIS is started to develop. The main objectives of the Bulgarian Center of Excellence are to create in collaboration with teachers and ESRI organization learning materials for school education. Students learn how to use ArcGIS in order to create their own interactive maps related to the Bulgarian geography education. They have already used ArcGIS software to study and analyze changes in the Bulgarian geographical location, boundaries and border controls, as well as Pan European transport corridors and define positive and negative aspects of crossroad location of Bulgaria. There is also available software about the Bulgarian water resources as well as about the Bulgarian population and its demographic characteristics. During the classes students create their own map according to given tasks, analyze maps elicit certain information for decision making and in that way they develop their spatial thinking skills. Interdisciplinary approach in teaching geosciences at comprehensive school by using ICT is another innovative method that can be used in the classroom. Chemistry and geography as geosciences have common objects of investigation - minerals, rocks and ores as raw materials for industry. Subject objectives for both disciplines can be achieved in a binary lesson. Students make their own preliminary web-based investigation and in the classroom they discuss characteristics of a certain metallic ores, their global distribution and local deposits, their significance for economic development and environmental issues related to their extraction. Implementation of ICT in tomorrow's digital classroom will help students to understand the complexity of the world around us, show them different examples of our changing planet and develop their spatial thinking knowledge.

The Best of All Worlds: Immersive Interfaces for Art Education in Virtual and Real World Teaching and Learning Environments

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Grenfell, Janette

2013-01-01

Selected ubiquitous technologies encourage collaborative participation between higher education students and educators within a virtual socially networked e-learning landscape. Multiple modes of teaching and learning, ranging from real world experiences, to text and digital images accessed within the Deakin studies online learning management…

Visualization Analytics for Second Language Vocabulary Learning in Virtual Worlds

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hsiao, Indy Y. T.; Lan, Yu-Ju; Kao, Chia-Ling; Li, Ping

2017-01-01

Language learning occurring in authentic contexts has been shown to be more effective. Virtual worlds provide simulated contexts that have the necessary elements of authentic contexts for language learning, and as a result, many studies have adopted virtual worlds as a useful platform for language learning. However, few studies so far have…

Virtual Learning is the Real Thing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tekaat-Davey, Diana

2006-01-01

In this article, the author discusses how in California, high school students are learning about real business through a virtual world. Virtual enterprise programs are helping students learn about the real business world. Learning about the business world has become about as real as it can in California high schools. Enrollment in the programs…

Neurally and ocularly informed graph-based models for searching 3D environments

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jangraw, David C.; Wang, Jun; Lance, Brent J.; Chang, Shih-Fu; Sajda, Paul

2014-08-01

Objective. As we move through an environment, we are constantly making assessments, judgments and decisions about the things we encounter. Some are acted upon immediately, but many more become mental notes or fleeting impressions—our implicit ‘labeling’ of the world. In this paper, we use physiological correlates of this labeling to construct a hybrid brain-computer interface (hBCI) system for efficient navigation of a 3D environment. Approach. First, we record electroencephalographic (EEG), saccadic and pupillary data from subjects as they move through a small part of a 3D virtual city under free-viewing conditions. Using machine learning, we integrate the neural and ocular signals evoked by the objects they encounter to infer which ones are of subjective interest to them. These inferred labels are propagated through a large computer vision graph of objects in the city, using semi-supervised learning to identify other, unseen objects that are visually similar to the labeled ones. Finally, the system plots an efficient route to help the subjects visit the ‘similar’ objects it identifies. Main results. We show that by exploiting the subjects’ implicit labeling to find objects of interest instead of exploring naively, the median search precision is increased from 25% to 97%, and the median subject need only travel 40% of the distance to see 84% of the objects of interest. We also find that the neural and ocular signals contribute in a complementary fashion to the classifiers’ inference of subjects’ implicit labeling. Significance. In summary, we show that neural and ocular signals reflecting subjective assessment of objects in a 3D environment can be used to inform a graph-based learning model of that environment, resulting in an hBCI system that improves navigation and information delivery specific to the user’s interests.

Extending human potential in a technical learning environment

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fielden, Kay A.

This thesis is a report of a participatory inquiry process looking at enhancing the learning process in a technical academic field in high education by utilising tools and techniques which go beyond the rational/logical, intellectual domain in a functional, objective world. By empathising with, nurturing and sustaining the whole person, and taking account of past patterning as well as future visions including technological advances to augment human awareness, the scene is set for depth learning. Depth learning in a tertiary environment can only happen as a result of the dynamic that exists between the dominant, logical/rational, intellectual paradigm and the experiential extension of the boundaries surrounding this domain. Any experiences which suppress the full, holistic expression of our being alienate us from the fullness of the expression and hence from depth learning. Depth learning is indicated by intrinsic motivation, which is more likely to occur in a trusting and supporting environment. The research took place within a systemic intellectual framework, where emergence is the prime characteristic used to evaluate results.

Bootstrapped Learning Analysis and Curriculum Development Environment (BLADE)

DTIC Science & Technology

2012-02-01

framework  Development of the automated teacher   The software development aspect of the BL program was conducted primarily in the Java programming...parameters are analogous to Java class data members or to fields in a C structure. Here is an example composite IL object from Blocks World, an...2 and 3, alternative methods of implementing generators were developed, first in Java , later in Ruby. Both of these alternatives lowered the

Learning in Virtual Worlds: Using Communities of Practice to Explain How People Learn from Play

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Oliver, Martin; Carr, Diane

2009-01-01

Although there is interest in the educational potential of online multiplayer games and virtual worlds, there is still little evidence to explain specifically what and how people learn from these environments. This paper addresses this issue by exploring the experiences of couples that play "World of Warcraft" together. Learning outcomes were…

Effects of Teaching and Learning Styles on Students' Reflection Levels for Ubiquitous Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hsieh, Sheng-Wen; Jang, Yu-Ruei; Hwang, Gwo-Jen; Chen, Nian-Shing

2011-01-01

Ubiquitous learning (u-learning), in conjunction with supports from the digital world, is recognized as an effective approach for situating students in real-world learning environments. Earlier studies concerning u-learning have mainly focused on investigating the learning attitudes and learning achievements of students, while the causations such…

A neural framework for organization and flexible utilization of episodic memory in cumulatively learning baby humanoids.

PubMed

Mohan, Vishwanathan; Sandini, Giulio; Morasso, Pietro

2014-12-01

Cumulatively developing robots offer a unique opportunity to reenact the constant interplay between neural mechanisms related to learning, memory, prospection, and abstraction from the perspective of an integrated system that acts, learns, remembers, reasons, and makes mistakes. Situated within such interplay lie some of the computationally elusive and fundamental aspects of cognitive behavior: the ability to recall and flexibly exploit diverse experiences of one's past in the context of the present to realize goals, simulate the future, and keep learning further. This article is an adventurous exploration in this direction using a simple engaging scenario of how the humanoid iCub learns to construct the tallest possible stack given an arbitrary set of objects to play with. The learning takes place cumulatively, with the robot interacting with different objects (some previously experienced, some novel) in an open-ended fashion. Since the solution itself depends on what objects are available in the "now," multiple episodes of past experiences have to be remembered and creatively integrated in the context of the present to be successful. Starting from zero, where the robot knows nothing, we explore the computational basis of organization episodic memory in a cumulatively learning humanoid and address (1) how relevant past experiences can be reconstructed based on the present context, (2) how multiple stored episodic memories compete to survive in the neural space and not be forgotten, (3) how remembered past experiences can be combined with explorative actions to learn something new, and (4) how multiple remembered experiences can be recombined to generate novel behaviors (without exploration). Through the resulting behaviors of the robot as it builds, breaks, learns, and remembers, we emphasize that mechanisms of episodic memory are fundamental design features necessary to enable the survival of autonomous robots in a real world where neither everything can be known nor can everything be experienced.

Case study: the Argentina Road Safety Project: lessons learned for the decade of action for road safety, 2011-2020.

PubMed

Raffo, Veronica; Bliss, Tony; Shotten, Marc; Sleet, David; Blanchard, Claire

2013-12-01

This case study of the Argentina Road Safety Project demonstrates how the application of World Bank road safety project guidelines focused on institution building can accelerate knowledge transfer, scale up investment and improve the focus on results. The case study highlights road safety as a development priority and outlines World Bank initiatives addressing the implementation of the World Report on Road Traffic Injury's recommendations and the subsequent launch of the Decade of Action for Road Safety, from 2011-2020. The case study emphasizes the vital role played by the lead agency in ensuring sustainable road safety improvements and promoting the shift to a 'Safe System' approach, which necessitated the strengthening of all elements of the road safety management system. It summarizes road safety performance and institutional initiatives in Argentina leading up to the preparation and implementation of the project. We describe the project's development objectives, financing arrangements, specific components and investment staging. Finally, we discuss its innovative features and lessons learned, and present a set of supplementary guidelines, both to assist multilateral development banks and their clients with future road safety initiatives, and to encourage better linkages between the health and transportation sectors supporting them.

Family learning with mobile devices in the outdoors: Designing an e-Trailguide to facilitate families' joint engagement with the natural world

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

McClain, Lucy R.

This study describes the implementation of a self-guiding mobile learning tool designed to support families' engagements with the natural world as they explored the flora and fauna along one nature trail at an environmental center. Thirty-one family groups (n = 105 individuals) participated in this study during the summer season and used an iPad-based e-Trailguide during their nature walk. Design-based research methods guided this study's design, which focused on the third iteration of the e-Trailguide. Data included evaluation of families' content knowledge gains related to the local biodiversity as revealed through post-hike interviews, while videorecords of each family's nature walk experience were also collected. Qualitative analyses focused on the design features within the e-Trailguide that supported the families' technology-mediated engagements with nature and their interactions with each other at one Discovery Spot along the nature trail. Findings include: (a) open-ended interviews after the e-Trailguide experience provided a descriptive understanding of the families' conceptual knowledge gains; (b) four place-based design features within the e-Trailguide enabled and supported families' observational, pointing, and tactile investigation engagements with the natural world; (c) parents took on teacher-like roles for their children by connecting information from the e-Trailguide to the natural objects nearby as evidenced through their frequency of pointing gestures; and (d) the development of an analytical framework related to joint observation strategies used between family members to support science-related sense making. Design recommendations for the future implementation of e-Trailguides in outdoor settings include the incorporation of place-based observational questions, place-based textual prompts for focusing observations, drawing activities to record observations, and place-based images to support identification of wildlife. Key words: family learning, engagement, mobile-based learning, outdoor learning, observation, environmental education, informal science learning.

Distributed solar photovoltaic array location and extent dataset for remote sensing object identification

PubMed Central

Bradbury, Kyle; Saboo, Raghav; L. Johnson, Timothy; Malof, Jordan M.; Devarajan, Arjun; Zhang, Wuming; M. Collins, Leslie; G. Newell, Richard

2016-01-01

Earth-observing remote sensing data, including aerial photography and satellite imagery, offer a snapshot of the world from which we can learn about the state of natural resources and the built environment. The components of energy systems that are visible from above can be automatically assessed with these remote sensing data when processed with machine learning methods. Here, we focus on the information gap in distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) arrays, of which there is limited public data on solar PV deployments at small geographic scales. We created a dataset of solar PV arrays to initiate and develop the process of automatically identifying solar PV locations using remote sensing imagery. This dataset contains the geospatial coordinates and border vertices for over 19,000 solar panels across 601 high-resolution images from four cities in California. Dataset applications include training object detection and other machine learning algorithms that use remote sensing imagery, developing specific algorithms for predictive detection of distributed PV systems, estimating installed PV capacity, and analysis of the socioeconomic correlates of PV deployment. PMID:27922592

Distributed solar photovoltaic array location and extent dataset for remote sensing object identification

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bradbury, Kyle; Saboo, Raghav; L. Johnson, Timothy; Malof, Jordan M.; Devarajan, Arjun; Zhang, Wuming; M. Collins, Leslie; G. Newell, Richard

2016-12-01

Earth-observing remote sensing data, including aerial photography and satellite imagery, offer a snapshot of the world from which we can learn about the state of natural resources and the built environment. The components of energy systems that are visible from above can be automatically assessed with these remote sensing data when processed with machine learning methods. Here, we focus on the information gap in distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) arrays, of which there is limited public data on solar PV deployments at small geographic scales. We created a dataset of solar PV arrays to initiate and develop the process of automatically identifying solar PV locations using remote sensing imagery. This dataset contains the geospatial coordinates and border vertices for over 19,000 solar panels across 601 high-resolution images from four cities in California. Dataset applications include training object detection and other machine learning algorithms that use remote sensing imagery, developing specific algorithms for predictive detection of distributed PV systems, estimating installed PV capacity, and analysis of the socioeconomic correlates of PV deployment.

Distributed solar photovoltaic array location and extent dataset for remote sensing object identification.

PubMed

Bradbury, Kyle; Saboo, Raghav; L Johnson, Timothy; Malof, Jordan M; Devarajan, Arjun; Zhang, Wuming; M Collins, Leslie; G Newell, Richard

2016-12-06

Earth-observing remote sensing data, including aerial photography and satellite imagery, offer a snapshot of the world from which we can learn about the state of natural resources and the built environment. The components of energy systems that are visible from above can be automatically assessed with these remote sensing data when processed with machine learning methods. Here, we focus on the information gap in distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) arrays, of which there is limited public data on solar PV deployments at small geographic scales. We created a dataset of solar PV arrays to initiate and develop the process of automatically identifying solar PV locations using remote sensing imagery. This dataset contains the geospatial coordinates and border vertices for over 19,000 solar panels across 601 high-resolution images from four cities in California. Dataset applications include training object detection and other machine learning algorithms that use remote sensing imagery, developing specific algorithms for predictive detection of distributed PV systems, estimating installed PV capacity, and analysis of the socioeconomic correlates of PV deployment.

What is the context of contextual cueing?

PubMed

Makovski, Tal

2016-12-01

People have a powerful ability to extract regularities from noisy environments and to utilize this knowledge to assist in visual search. Extensive research has shown that this ability, termed contextual cueing (CC), is robust and ubiquitous, but it is still unclear what exactly is the context that is being leaned. Researchers have typically focused on how people learn spatial configuration regularities and have hence used simplified, meaningless search stimuli. Here, observers performed visual search tasks using images of real-world objects. The results revealed that, contrary to past findings, the repetition of either arbitrary spatial information or identity information was not sufficient to produce context learning. Instead, learning was found only when both types of information were repeated together. These results were further replicated in hybrid search tasks, in which subjects looked for multiple target templates. Together, these data suggest that CC is more limited than typically assumed, yet this learning is highly robust.

Learning and disrupting invariance in visual recognition with a temporal association rule

PubMed Central

Isik, Leyla; Leibo, Joel Z.; Poggio, Tomaso

2012-01-01

Learning by temporal association rules such as Foldiak's trace rule is an attractive hypothesis that explains the development of invariance in visual recognition. Consistent with these rules, several recent experiments have shown that invariance can be broken at both the psychophysical and single cell levels. We show (1) that temporal association learning provides appropriate invariance in models of object recognition inspired by the visual cortex, (2) that we can replicate the “invariance disruption” experiments using these models with a temporal association learning rule to develop and maintain invariance, and (3) that despite dramatic single cell effects, a population of cells is very robust to these disruptions. We argue that these models account for the stability of perceptual invariance despite the underlying plasticity of the system, the variability of the visual world and expected noise in the biological mechanisms. PMID:22754523

Developing Personal Learning Environments Based on Calm Technologies

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fiaidhi, Jinan

Educational technology is constantly evolving and growing, and it is inevitable that this progression will continually offer new and interesting advances in our world. The instigation of calm technologies for the delivery of education is another new approach now emerging. Calm technology aims to reduce the "excitement" of information overload by letting the learner select what information is at the center of their attention and what information need to be at the peripheral. In this paper we report on the adaptation of calm technologies in an educational setting with emphasis on the needs to cater the preferences of the individual learner to respond to the challenge of providing truly learner-centered, accessible, personalized and flexible learning. Central to calm computing vision is the notion of representing learning objects as widgets, harvesting widgets from the periphery based on semantic wikis as well as widgets garbage collection from the virtual/central learning memory.

Scalable Machine Learning for Massive Astronomical Datasets

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ball, Nicholas M.; Gray, A.

2014-04-01

We present the ability to perform data mining and machine learning operations on a catalog of half a billion astronomical objects. This is the result of the combination of robust, highly accurate machine learning algorithms with linear scalability that renders the applications of these algorithms to massive astronomical data tractable. We demonstrate the core algorithms kernel density estimation, K-means clustering, linear regression, nearest neighbors, random forest and gradient-boosted decision tree, singular value decomposition, support vector machine, and two-point correlation function. Each of these is relevant for astronomical applications such as finding novel astrophysical objects, characterizing artifacts in data, object classification (including for rare objects), object distances, finding the important features describing objects, density estimation of distributions, probabilistic quantities, and exploring the unknown structure of new data. The software, Skytree Server, runs on any UNIX-based machine, a virtual machine, or cloud-based and distributed systems including Hadoop. We have integrated it on the cloud computing system of the Canadian Astronomical Data Centre, the Canadian Advanced Network for Astronomical Research (CANFAR), creating the world's first cloud computing data mining system for astronomy. We demonstrate results showing the scaling of each of our major algorithms on large astronomical datasets, including the full 470,992,970 objects of the 2 Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS) Point Source Catalog. We demonstrate the ability to find outliers in the full 2MASS dataset utilizing multiple methods, e.g., nearest neighbors. This is likely of particular interest to the radio astronomy community given, for example, that survey projects contain groups dedicated to this topic. 2MASS is used as a proof-of-concept dataset due to its convenience and availability. These results are of interest to any astronomical project with large and/or complex datasets that wishes to extract the full scientific value from its data.

Scalable Machine Learning for Massive Astronomical Datasets

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ball, Nicholas M.; Astronomy Data Centre, Canadian

2014-01-01

We present the ability to perform data mining and machine learning operations on a catalog of half a billion astronomical objects. This is the result of the combination of robust, highly accurate machine learning algorithms with linear scalability that renders the applications of these algorithms to massive astronomical data tractable. We demonstrate the core algorithms kernel density estimation, K-means clustering, linear regression, nearest neighbors, random forest and gradient-boosted decision tree, singular value decomposition, support vector machine, and two-point correlation function. Each of these is relevant for astronomical applications such as finding novel astrophysical objects, characterizing artifacts in data, object classification (including for rare objects), object distances, finding the important features describing objects, density estimation of distributions, probabilistic quantities, and exploring the unknown structure of new data. The software, Skytree Server, runs on any UNIX-based machine, a virtual machine, or cloud-based and distributed systems including Hadoop. We have integrated it on the cloud computing system of the Canadian Astronomical Data Centre, the Canadian Advanced Network for Astronomical Research (CANFAR), creating the world's first cloud computing data mining system for astronomy. We demonstrate results showing the scaling of each of our major algorithms on large astronomical datasets, including the full 470,992,970 objects of the 2 Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS) Point Source Catalog. We demonstrate the ability to find outliers in the full 2MASS dataset utilizing multiple methods, e.g., nearest neighbors, and the local outlier factor. 2MASS is used as a proof-of-concept dataset due to its convenience and availability. These results are of interest to any astronomical project with large and/or complex datasets that wishes to extract the full scientific value from its data.

Neurally and ocularly informed graph-based models for searching 3D environments.

PubMed

Jangraw, David C; Wang, Jun; Lance, Brent J; Chang, Shih-Fu; Sajda, Paul

2014-08-01

As we move through an environment, we are constantly making assessments, judgments and decisions about the things we encounter. Some are acted upon immediately, but many more become mental notes or fleeting impressions-our implicit 'labeling' of the world. In this paper, we use physiological correlates of this labeling to construct a hybrid brain-computer interface (hBCI) system for efficient navigation of a 3D environment. First, we record electroencephalographic (EEG), saccadic and pupillary data from subjects as they move through a small part of a 3D virtual city under free-viewing conditions. Using machine learning, we integrate the neural and ocular signals evoked by the objects they encounter to infer which ones are of subjective interest to them. These inferred labels are propagated through a large computer vision graph of objects in the city, using semi-supervised learning to identify other, unseen objects that are visually similar to the labeled ones. Finally, the system plots an efficient route to help the subjects visit the 'similar' objects it identifies. We show that by exploiting the subjects' implicit labeling to find objects of interest instead of exploring naively, the median search precision is increased from 25% to 97%, and the median subject need only travel 40% of the distance to see 84% of the objects of interest. We also find that the neural and ocular signals contribute in a complementary fashion to the classifiers' inference of subjects' implicit labeling. In summary, we show that neural and ocular signals reflecting subjective assessment of objects in a 3D environment can be used to inform a graph-based learning model of that environment, resulting in an hBCI system that improves navigation and information delivery specific to the user's interests.

Counting, accounting, and accountability: Helen Verran's relational empiricism.

PubMed

Kenney, Martha

2015-10-01

Helen Verran uses the term 'relational empiricism' to describe situated empirical inquiry that is attentive to the relations that constitute its objects of study, including the investigator's own practices. Relational empiricism draws on and reconfigures Science and Technology Studies' traditional concerns with reflexivity and relationality, casting empirical inquiry as an important and non-innocent world-making practice. Through a reading of Verran's postcolonial projects in Nigeria and Australia, this article develops a concept of empirical and political 'accountability' to complement her relational empiricism. In Science and an African Logic, Verran provides accounts of the relations that materialize her empirical objects. These accounts work to decompose her original objects, generating new objects that are more promising for the specific postcolonial contexts of her work. The process of decomposition is part of remaining accountable for her research methods and accountable to the worlds she is working in and writing about. This is a practice of narrating relations and learning to tell better technoscientific stories. What counts as better, however, is not given, but is always contextual and at stake. In this way, Verran acts not as participant-observer, but as participant-storyteller, telling stories to facilitate epistemic flourishing within and as part of a historically located community of practice. The understanding of accountability that emerges from this discussion is designed as a contribution, both practical and evocative, to the theoretical toolkit of Science and Technology Studies scholars who are interested in thinking concretely about how we can be more accountable to the worlds we study.

Not All Attention Orienting is Created Equal: Recognition Memory is Enhanced When Attention Orienting Involves Distractor Suppression

PubMed Central

Markant, Julie; Worden, Michael S.; Amso, Dima

2015-01-01

Learning through visual exploration often requires orienting of attention to meaningful information in a cluttered world. Previous work has shown that attention modulates visual cortex activity, with enhanced activity for attended targets and suppressed activity for competing inputs, thus enhancing the visual experience. Here we examined the idea that learning may be engaged differentially with variations in attention orienting mechanisms that drive driving eye movements during visual search and exploration. We hypothesized that attention orienting mechanisms that engaged suppression of a previously attended location will boost memory encoding of the currently attended target objects to a greater extent than those that involve target enhancement alone To test this hypothesis we capitalized on the classic spatial cueing task and the inhibition of return (IOR) mechanism (Posner, Rafal, & Choate, 1985; Posner, 1980) to demonstrate that object images encoded in the context of concurrent suppression at a previously attended location were encoded more effectively and remembered better than those encoded without concurrent suppression. Furthermore, fMRI analyses revealed that this memory benefit was driven by attention modulation of visual cortex activity, as increased suppression of the previously attended location in visual cortex during target object encoding predicted better subsequent recognition memory performance. These results suggest that not all attention orienting impacts learning and memory equally. PMID:25701278

A New Dimension for Earth Science Learning

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bland, G.; Henry, A.; Bydlowski, D.

2017-12-01

NASA Science Objectives include capturing the global view of Earth from space. This unique perspective is often augmented by instrumented research aircraft, to provide in-situ and remote sensing observations in support of the world picture. Our "Advancing Earth Research Observations with Kites and Atmospheric /Terrestrial Sensors" (AEROKATS) project aims to bring this novel and exciting perspective into the hands of learners young and old. The practice of using instrumented kites as surrogate satellites and aircraft is gaining momentum, as our team undertakes the technical, operational, and scientific challenges in preparations to bring new and easy-to-field tools to broad audiences. The third dimension in spatial perception ("up") has previously been difficult to effectively incorporate in learning and local-scale research activities. AEROKATS brings simple to use instrumented aerial systems into the hands of students, educators, and scientists, with the tangible benefits of detailed, high resolution measurements and observations directly applicable to real-world studies of the environments around us.

Games as Distributed Teaching and Learning Systems

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gee, Elisabeth; Gee, James Paul

2017-01-01

Background: Videogames and virtual worlds have frequently been studied as learning environments in isolation; that is, scholars have focused on understanding the features of games or virtual worlds as separate from or different than "real world" environments for learning. Although more recently, scholars have explored the teaching and…

Effectiveness of Collaborative Learning with 3D Virtual Worlds

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cho, Young Hoan; Lim, Kenneth Y. T.

2017-01-01

Virtual worlds have affordances to enhance collaborative learning in authentic contexts. Despite the potential of collaborative learning with a virtual world, few studies investigated whether it is more effective in student achievements than teacher-directed instruction. This study investigated the effectiveness of collaborative problem solving…

Simulation in the Internet age: the place of web-based simulation in nursing education. An integrative review.

PubMed

Cant, Robyn P; Cooper, Simon J

2014-12-01

The objective of this article was to review the literature on utilisation and place of Web-based simulation within nursing education. Web-based simulation combines electronic multimedia options with a central video or virtual world to produce interactive learning activities mediated by the learner. An integrative review. A search was conducted of healthcare databases between 2000 and 2014 and of Internet sources for hosted simulation programs in nursing. Eighteen primary programs were identified for inclusion. A strategy for integrative review was adopted in which studies were identified, filtered, classified, analysed and compared. Of 18 programs, two game-based programs were identified which represented a 'virtual world' in which students could simultaneously or individually immerse themselves in a character role-play. However, most programs (n=10) taught an aspect of procedural patient care using multimedia (e.g. video, audio, graphics, quiz, text, memo). Time-limited sequences, feedback and reflective activities were often incorporated. Other studies (n=8) taught interpersonal communication skills or technical skills for equipment use. Descriptive study outcomes indicated ease of program use, strong satisfaction with learning and appreciation of program accessibility. Additionally, four studies reported significant improvements in knowledge post-intervention. Web-based simulation is highly acceptable to students and appears to provide learning benefits that align with other simulation approaches and it augments face-to-face teaching. Web-based simulation is likely to have a major place in nursing curricula in the next decade, yet further research is necessary to objectively evaluate learner outcomes and to justify its use. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Learning about Learning: A Conundrum and a Possible Resolution

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Barnett, Ronald

2011-01-01

What is it to learn in the modern world? We can identify four "learning epochs" through which our understanding of learning has passed: a metaphysical view; an empirical view; an experiential view; and, currently, a "learning-amid-contestation" view. In this last and current view, learning has its place in a world in which, the more one learns,…

The Role That Web 2.0 Currently Has and Could Have in the Future in Supporting the Teaching of ICT Design for All

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mitrea, Paulina; Mitrea, Delia

The main objective of the article is to highlight the role that Web2.0 currently has and could have in the future in supporting the teaching of ICT Design for All. According to this, first the concepts of Web2.0 and eLearning2.0 are clarified and connected. The new way of thinking about eLearning being inspired by the emergence of Web2.0, the term eLearning2.0 was introduced to identify a new paradigm. So, eLearning 2.0, by contrast to eLearning1.0 is built around collaboration, also eLearning2.0 assumes that knowledge is socially constructed. Related to the role of Web2.0 in supporting the teaching of ICT Design for All, the 4 steps involved by the ICT Design For All Teaching Principles are presented and detailed. Finally, some real world examples are shown, as evidence of how the new methods of communication offered by Web2.0 can be used to support students as they learn about Design for All.

Semantic Web, Reusable Learning Objects, Personal Learning Networks in Health: Key Pieces for Digital Health Literacy.

PubMed

Konstantinidis, Stathis Th; Wharrad, Heather; Windle, Richard; Bamidis, Panagiotis D

2017-01-01

The knowledge existing in the World Wide Web is exponentially expanding, while continuous advancements in health sciences contribute to the creation of new knowledge. There are a lot of efforts trying to identify how the social connectivity can endorse patients' empowerment, while other studies look at the identification and the quality of online materials. However, emphasis has not been put on the big picture of connecting the existing resources with the patients "new habits" of learning through their own Personal Learning Networks. In this paper we propose a framework for empowering patients' digital health literacy adjusted to patients' currents needs by utilizing the contemporary way of learning through Personal Learning Networks, existing high quality learning resources and semantics technologies for interconnecting knowledge pieces. The framework based on the concept of knowledge maps for health as defined in this paper. Health Digital Literacy needs definitely further enhancement and the use of the proposed concept might lead to useful tools which enable use of understandable health trusted resources tailored to each person needs.

Anthropomorphic robot for recognition of objects

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ginzburg, Vera M.

1999-08-01

Heated debates were taking place a few decades ago between the proponents of digital and analog methods in information. Technology have resulted in unequivocal triumph of the former. However, some serious technological problems confronting the world civilization on the threshold of the new millennium, such as Y2K and computer network vulnerability, probably spring from this one-sided approach. Dire consequences of problems of this kind can be alleviated through learning from the nature.

Consumer Education: A Teaching-Learning Unit on the Rights and Responsibilities of all Consumers and Special Problems of Elderly Consumers, Poor Consumers, Handicapped Consumers, Non-English Speaking Consumers and Nonreaders, Minors.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tennessee Univ., Knoxville.

To help high school students understand the role of consumers in the everyday world, the teaching guide presents objectives and activities related to seven consumer topics. Topics are rights and responsibilities of all consumers, common transportation concerns of consumers with special problems, and problems which particularly affect consumers who…

Exploring Non-Traditional Learning Methods in Virtual and Real-World Environments

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lukman, Rebeka; Krajnc, Majda

2012-01-01

This paper identifies the commonalities and differences within non-traditional learning methods regarding virtual and real-world environments. The non-traditional learning methods in real-world have been introduced within the following courses: Process Balances, Process Calculation, and Process Synthesis, and within the virtual environment through…

Learning from Dealing with Real World Problems

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Akcay, Hakan

2017-01-01

The purpose of this article is to provide an example of using real world issues as tools for science teaching and learning. Using real world issues provides students with experiences in learning in problem-based environments and encourages them to apply their content knowledge to solving current and local problems.

Learning in Virtual Worlds: Results from Two Studies

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jestice, Rebecca J.

2010-01-01

Virtual worlds are garnering a lot of attention from educators and trainers as a new tool to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of online learning. Virtual worlds are considered beneficial to the learning process because their unique combination of features and capabilities and their richness allows the employment of new instructional…

Virtual worlds: a new frontier for nurse education?

PubMed

Green, Janet; Wyllie, Aileen; Jackson, Debra

2014-01-01

Virtual worlds have the potential to offer nursing students social networking and, learning, opportunities through the use of collaborative and immersive learning. If nursing educators, are to stay, abreast of contemporary learning opportunities an exploration of the potential benefits of, virtual, worlds and their possibilities is needed. Literature was sourced that explored virtual worlds, and their, use in education, but nursing education specifically. It is clear that immersive learning has, positive, benefits for nursing, however the best way to approach virtual reality in nursing education, has yet to, be ascertained.

Social Virtual Worlds for Technology-Enhanced Learning on an Augmented Learning Platform

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jin, Li; Wen, Zhigang; Gough, Norman

2010-01-01

Virtual worlds have been linked with e-learning applications to create virtual learning environments (VLEs) for the past decade. However, while they can support many educational activities that extend both traditional on-campus teaching and distance learning, they are used primarily for learning content generated and managed by instructors. With…

Teaching Giants to Learn: Lessons from Army Learning in World War II

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Visser, Max

2017-01-01

Purpose: This paper aims to discuss the "truism" that learning organizations cannot be large organizations and, conversely, that large organizations cannot be learning organizations. This paper analyzes learning in the German and US armies in the Second World War, based on a four-dimensional model of the learning organization.…

Attribute-based classification for zero-shot visual object categorization.

PubMed

Lampert, Christoph H; Nickisch, Hannes; Harmeling, Stefan

2014-03-01

We study the problem of object recognition for categories for which we have no training examples, a task also called zero--data or zero-shot learning. This situation has hardly been studied in computer vision research, even though it occurs frequently; the world contains tens of thousands of different object classes, and image collections have been formed and suitably annotated for only a few of them. To tackle the problem, we introduce attribute-based classification: Objects are identified based on a high-level description that is phrased in terms of semantic attributes, such as the object's color or shape. Because the identification of each such property transcends the specific learning task at hand, the attribute classifiers can be prelearned independently, for example, from existing image data sets unrelated to the current task. Afterward, new classes can be detected based on their attribute representation, without the need for a new training phase. In this paper, we also introduce a new data set, Animals with Attributes, of over 30,000 images of 50 animal classes, annotated with 85 semantic attributes. Extensive experiments on this and two more data sets show that attribute-based classification indeed is able to categorize images without access to any training images of the target classes.

Effects of Integrating an Active Learning-Promoting Mechanism into Location-Based Real-World Learning Environments on Students' Learning Performances and Behaviors

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hwang, Gwo-Jen; Chang, Shao-Chen; Chen, Pei-Ying; Chen, Xiang-Ya

2018-01-01

Engaging students in real-world learning contexts has been identified by educators as being an important way of helping them learn to apply what they have learned from textbooks to practical problems. The advancements in mobile and image-processing technologies have enabled students to access learning resources and receive learning guidance in…

Children's Learning from Touch Screens: A Dual Representation Perspective.

PubMed

Sheehan, Kelly J; Uttal, David H

2016-01-01

Parents and educators often expect that children will learn from touch screen devices, such as during joint e-book reading. Therefore an essential question is whether young children understand that the touch screen can be a symbolic medium - that entities represented on the touch screen can refer to entities in the real world. Research on symbolic development suggests that symbolic understanding requires that children develop dual representational abilities, meaning children need to appreciate that a symbol is an object in itself (i.e., picture of a dog) while also being a representation of something else (i.e., the real dog). Drawing on classic research on symbols and new research on children's learning from touch screens, we offer the perspective that children's ability to learn from the touch screen as a symbolic medium depends on the effect of interactivity on children's developing dual representational abilities. Although previous research on dual representation suggests the interactive nature of the touch screen might make it difficult for young children to use as a symbolic medium, the unique interactive affordances may help alleviate this difficulty. More research needs to investigate how the interactivity of the touch screen affects children's ability to connect the symbols on the screen to the real world. Given the interactive nature of the touch screen, researchers and educators should consider both the affordances of the touch screen as well as young children's cognitive abilities when assessing whether young children can learn from it as a symbolic medium.

Development of dog-like retrieving capability in a ground robot

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

MacKenzie, Douglas C.; Ashok, Rahul; Rehg, James M.; Witus, Gary

2013-01-01

This paper presents the Mobile Intelligence Team's approach to addressing the CANINE outdoor ground robot competition. The competition required developing a robot that provided retrieving capabilities similar to a dog, while operating fully autonomously in unstructured environments. The vision team consisted of Mobile Intelligence, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Wayne State University. Important computer vision aspects of the project were the ability to quickly learn the distinguishing characteristics of novel objects, searching images for the object as the robot drove a search pattern, identifying people near the robot for safe operations, correctly identify the object among distractors, and localizing the object for retrieval. The classifier used to identify the objects will be discussed, including an analysis of its performance, and an overview of the entire system architecture presented. A discussion of the robot's performance in the competition will demonstrate the system's successes in real-world testing.

Building machines that learn and think like people.

PubMed

Lake, Brenden M; Ullman, Tomer D; Tenenbaum, Joshua B; Gershman, Samuel J

2017-01-01

Recent progress in artificial intelligence has renewed interest in building systems that learn and think like people. Many advances have come from using deep neural networks trained end-to-end in tasks such as object recognition, video games, and board games, achieving performance that equals or even beats that of humans in some respects. Despite their biological inspiration and performance achievements, these systems differ from human intelligence in crucial ways. We review progress in cognitive science suggesting that truly human-like learning and thinking machines will have to reach beyond current engineering trends in both what they learn and how they learn it. Specifically, we argue that these machines should (1) build causal models of the world that support explanation and understanding, rather than merely solving pattern recognition problems; (2) ground learning in intuitive theories of physics and psychology to support and enrich the knowledge that is learned; and (3) harness compositionality and learning-to-learn to rapidly acquire and generalize knowledge to new tasks and situations. We suggest concrete challenges and promising routes toward these goals that can combine the strengths of recent neural network advances with more structured cognitive models.

Science Spots AR: A Platform for Science Learning Games with Augmented Reality

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Laine, Teemu H.; Nygren, Eeva; Dirin, Amir; Suk, Hae-Jung

2016-01-01

Lack of motivation and of real-world relevance have been identified as reasons for low interest in science among children. Game-based learning and storytelling are prominent methods for generating intrinsic motivation in learning. Real-world relevance requires connecting abstract scientific concepts with the real world. This can be done by…

Social Presence and Motivation in a Three-Dimensional Virtual World: An Explanatory Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yilmaz, Rabia M.; Topu, F. Burcu; Goktas, Yuksel; Coban, Murat

2013-01-01

Three-dimensional (3-D) virtual worlds differ from other learning environments in their similarity to real life, providing opportunities for more effective communication and interaction. With these features, 3-D virtual worlds possess considerable potential to enhance learning opportunities. For effective learning, the users' motivation levels and…

Learning Experience with Virtual Worlds

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wagner, Christian

2008-01-01

Virtual worlds create a new opportunity to enrich the educational experience through media-rich immersive learning. Virtual worlds have gained notoriety in games such as World of Warcraft (WoW), which has become the most successful online game ever, and in "general purpose" worlds, such as Second Life (SL), whose participation levels (more than 10…

Your eyes give you away: pupillary responses, EEG dynamics, and applications for BCI (Conference Presentation)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sajda, Paul

2017-05-01

As we move through an environment, we are constantly making assessments, judgments, and decisions about the things we encounter. Some are acted upon immediately, but many more become mental notes or fleeting impressions - our implicit "labeling" of the world. In this talk I will describe our work using physiological correlates of this labeling to construct a hybrid brain-computer interface (hBCI) system for efficient navigation of a 3-D environment. Specifically, we record electroencephalographic (EEG), saccadic, and pupillary data from subjects as they move through a small part of a 3-D virtual city under free-viewing conditions. Using machine learning, we integrate the neural and ocular signals evoked by the objects they encounter to infer which ones are of subjective interest. These inferred labels are propagated through a large computer vision graph of objects in the city, using semi-supervised learning to identify other, unseen objects that are visually similar to those that are labelled. Finally, the system plots an efficient route so that subjects visit similar objects of interest. We show that by exploiting the subjects' implicit labeling, the median search precision is increased from 25% to 97%, and the median subject need only travel 40% of the distance to see 84% of the objects of interest. We also find that the neural and ocular signals contribute in a complementary fashion to the classifiers' inference of subjects' implicit labeling. In summary, we show that neural and ocular signals reflecting subjective assessment of objects in a 3-D environment can be used to inform a graph-based learning model of that environment, resulting in an hBCI system that improves navigation and information delivery specific to the user's interests.

A focus group study of chiropractic students following international service learning experiences

PubMed Central

Boysen, James C.; Salsbury, Stacie A.; Derby, Dustin; Lawrence, Dana J.

2016-01-01

Objective: One objective of chiropractic education is to cultivate clinical confidence in novice practitioners. The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe how participation in a short-term international service learning experience changed perceptions of clinical confidence in senior chiropractic students. Methods: Seventeen senior chiropractic students participated in 4 moderated focus group sessions within 4 months after a clinical educational opportunity held in international settings. Participants answered standard questions on how this educational experience may have changed their clinical confidence. Two investigators performed qualitative thematic analysis of the verbatim transcripts to identify core concepts and supporting themes. Results: The core concept was transformation from an unsure student to a confident doctor. The service learning experience allowed students to deliver chiropractic treatment to patients in a real-world setting, engage in frequent repetitions of technical skills, perform clinical decision-making and care coordination, and communicate with patients and other health professionals. Students described increased clinical confidence in 9 competency areas organized within 3 domains: (1) chiropractic competencies including observation, palpation, and manipulation; (2) clinical competencies including problem solving, clinic flow, and decision-making; and (3) communication competencies, including patient communication, interprofessional communication, and doctor–patient relationship. Students recommended that future service learning programs include debriefing sessions similar to the experience offered by these focus groups to enhance student learning. Conclusion: Senior chiropractic students who participated in an international service learning program gained confidence and valuable practical experience in integrating their chiropractic, clinical, and communication skills for their future practices. PMID:27258817

Domestic horses (Equus ferus caballus) fail to intuitively reason about object properties like solidity and weight.

PubMed

Haemmerli, Sarah; Thill, Corinne; Amici, Federica; Cacchione, Trix

2018-05-01

From early infancy, humans reason about the external world in terms of identifiable, solid, cohesive objects persisting in space and time. This is one of the most fundamental human skills, which may be part of our innate conception of object properties. Although object permanence has been extensively studied across a variety of taxa, little is known about how non-human animals reason about other object properties. In this study, we therefore tested how domestic horses (Equus ferus caballus) intuitively reason about object properties like solidity and height, to locate hidden food. Horses were allowed to look for a food reward behind two opaque screens, only one of which had either the proper height or inclination to hide food rewards. Our results suggest that horses could not intuitively reason about physical object properties, but rather learned to select the screen with the proper height or inclination from the second set of 5 trials.

Toddler learning from video: Effect of matched pedagogical cues.

PubMed

Lauricella, Alexis R; Barr, Rachel; Calvert, Sandra L

2016-11-01

Toddlers learn about their social world by following visual and verbal cues from adults, but they have difficulty transferring what they see in one context to another (e.g., from a screen to real life). Therefore, it is important to understand how the use of matched pedagogical cues, specifically adult eye gaze and language, influence toddlers' imitation from live and digital presentations. Fifteen- and 18-month-old toddlers (N=123) were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions or a baseline control condition. The four experimental conditions differed as a function of the interactive cues (audience gaze with interactive language or object gaze with non-interactive language) and presentation type (live or video). Results indicate that toddlers' successfully imitate a task when eye gaze was directed at the object or at the audience and equally well when the task was demonstrated live or via video. All four experimental conditions performed significantly better than the baseline control, indicating learned behavior. Additionally, results demonstrate that girls attended more to the demonstrations and outperformed the boys on the imitation task. In sum, this study demonstrates that young toddlers can learn from video when the models use matched eye gaze and verbal cues, providing additional evidence for ways in which the transfer deficit effect can be ameliorated. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Semantic memory for contextual regularities within and across scene categories: evidence from eye movements.

PubMed

Brockmole, James R; Le-Hoa Võ, Melissa

2010-10-01

When encountering familiar scenes, observers can use item-specific memory to facilitate the guidance of attention to objects appearing in known locations or configurations. Here, we investigated how memory for relational contingencies that emerge across different scenes can be exploited to guide attention. Participants searched for letter targets embedded in pictures of bedrooms. In a between-subjects manipulation, targets were either always on a bed pillow or randomly positioned. When targets were systematically located within scenes, search for targets became more efficient. Importantly, this learning transferred to bedrooms without pillows, ruling out learning that is based on perceptual contingencies. Learning also transferred to living room scenes, but it did not transfer to kitchen scenes, even though both scene types contained pillows. These results suggest that statistical regularities abstracted across a range of stimuli are governed by semantic expectations regarding the presence of target-predicting local landmarks. Moreover, explicit awareness of these contingencies led to a central tendency bias in recall memory for precise target positions that is similar to the spatial category effects observed in landmark memory. These results broaden the scope of conditions under which contextual cuing operates and demonstrate how semantic memory plays a causal and independent role in the learning of associations between objects in real-world scenes.

Effects of age on a real-world What-Where-When memory task

PubMed Central

Mazurek, Adèle; Bhoopathy, Raja Meenakshi; Read, Jenny C. A.; Gallagher, Peter; Smulders, Tom V.

2015-01-01

Many cognitive abilities decline with aging, making it difficult to detect pathological changes against a background of natural changes in cognition. Most of the tests to assess cognitive decline are artificial tasks that have little resemblance to the problems faced by people in everyday life. This means both that people may have little practice doing such tasks (potentially contributing to the decline in performance) and that the tasks may not be good predictors of real-world cognitive problems. In this study, we test the performance of young people (18–25 years) and older people (60+-year-olds) on a novel, more ecologically valid test of episodic memory: the real-world What-Where-When (WWW) memory test. We also compare them on a battery of other cognitive tests, including working memory, psychomotor speed, executive function, and episodic memory. Older people show the expected age-related declines on the test battery. In the WWW memory task, older people were more likely to fail to remember any WWW combination than younger people were, although they did not significantly differ in their overall WWW score due to some older people performing as well as or better than most younger people. WWW memory performance was significantly predicted by other measures of episodic memory, such as the single-trial learning and long-term retention in the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning task and Combined Object Location Memory in the Object Relocation task. Self-reported memory complaints also predicted performance on the WWW task. These findings confirm that our real-world WWW memory task is a valid measure of episodic memory, with high ecological validity, which may be useful as a predictor of everyday memory abilities. The task will require a bit more development to improve its sensitivity to cognitive declines in aging and to potentially distinguish between mentally healthy older adults and those with early signs of cognitive pathologies. PMID:26042030

Teaching Language in Context. Second Edition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Derewianka, Beverly; Jones, Pauline

2016-01-01

Language is at the heart of the learning process. We learn through language. Our knowledge about the world is constructed in language-the worlds of home and the community, the worlds of school subjects, the worlds of literature, the worlds of the workplace, and so on. It is through language that we interact with others and build our identities.…

Children's Virtual Play Worlds Culture, Learning, and Participation. New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies. Volume 58

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Burke, Anne, Ed.; Marsh, Jackie, Ed.

2013-01-01

As children's digital lives become more relevant to schools and educators, the question of play and learning is being revisited in new and interesting ways. "Children's Virtual Play Worlds: Culture, Learning, and Participation" provides a more reasoned account of children's play engagements in virtual worlds through a number of scholarly…

Spider World: A Robot Language for Learning to Program. Assessing the Cognitive Consequences of Computer Environments for Learning (ACCCEL).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dalbey, John; Linn, Marcia

Spider World is an interactive program designed to help individuals with no previous computer experience to learn the fundamentals of programming. The program emphasizes cognitive tasks which are central to programming and provides significant problem-solving opportunities. In Spider World, the user commands a hypothetical robot (called the…

Implementing the Liquid Curriculum: The Impact of Virtual World Learning on Higher Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Steils, Nicole; Tombs, Gemma; Mawer, Matt; Savin-Baden, Maggi; Wimpenny, Katherine

2015-01-01

This paper presents findings from a large-scale study which explored the socio-political impact of teaching and learning in virtual worlds on UK higher education. Three key themes emerged with regard to constructing curricula for virtual world teaching and learning, namely designing courses, framing practice and locating specific student needs.…

An Expert System-based Context-Aware Ubiquitous Learning Approach for Conducting Science Learning Activities

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wu, Po-Han; Hwang, Gwo-Jen; Tsai, Wen-Hung

2013-01-01

Context-aware ubiquitous learning has been recognized as being a promising approach that enables students to interact with real-world learning targets with supports from the digital world. Several researchers have indicated the importance of providing learning guidance or hints to individual students during the context-aware ubiquitous learning…

Applications and Experiences

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sacco, Giovanni Maria; Ferré, Sébastien

This chapter discusses a number of real-world applications of dynamic taxonomies. Most current applications are object-seeking or knowledge-seeking exploratory tasks, and address important areas such as e-commerce, multimedia infobases, diagnostic systems, digital libraries and news systems, e-government, file systems, and geographical information systems. Applications in these areas are discussed in detail in the following, and applications in cultural heritage, art and architecture, e-recruitment, e-hrm, e-matchmaking, e-health, and e-learning are briefly reviewed.

Comparison of oral surgery task performance in a virtual reality surgical simulator and an animal model using objective measures.

PubMed

Ioannou, Ioanna; Kazmierczak, Edmund; Stern, Linda

2015-01-01

The use of virtual reality (VR) simulation for surgical training has gathered much interest in recent years. Despite increasing popularity and usage, limited work has been carried out in the use of automated objective measures to quantify the extent to which performance in a simulator resembles performance in the operating theatre, and the effects of simulator training on real world performance. To this end, we present a study exploring the effects of VR training on the performance of dentistry students learning a novel oral surgery task. We compare the performance of trainees in a VR simulator and in a physical setting involving ovine jaws, using a range of automated metrics derived by motion analysis. Our results suggest that simulator training improved the motion economy of trainees without adverse effects on task outcome. Comparison of surgical technique on the simulator with the ovine setting indicates that simulator technique is similar, but not identical to real world technique.

Role of cerebellum in learning postural tasks.

PubMed

Ioffe, M E; Chernikova, L A; Ustinova, K I

2007-01-01

For a long time, the cerebellum has been known to be a structure related to posture and equilibrium control. According to the anatomic structure of inputs and internal structure of the cerebellum, its role in learning was theoretically reasoned and experimentally proved. The hypothesis of an inverse internal model based on feedback-error learning mechanism combines feedforward control by the cerebellum and feedback control by the cerebral motor cortex. The cerebellar cortex is suggested to acquire internal models of the body and objects in the external world. During learning of a new tool the motor cortex receives feedback from the realized movement while the cerebellum produces only feedforward command. To realize a desired movement without feedback of the realized movement, the cerebellum needs to form an inverse model of the hand/arm system. This suggestion was supported by FMRi data. The role of cerebellum in learning new postural tasks mainly concerns reorganization of natural synergies. A learned postural pattern in dogs has been shown to be disturbed after lesions of the cerebral motor cortex or cerebellar nuclei. In humans, learning voluntary control of center of pressure position is greatly disturbed after cerebellar lesions. However, motor cortex and basal ganglia are also involved in the feedback learning postural tasks.

Analysis of the “naming game” with learning errors in communications

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lou, Yang; Chen, Guanrong

2015-07-01

Naming game simulates the process of naming an objective by a population of agents organized in a certain communication network. By pair-wise iterative interactions, the population reaches consensus asymptotically. We study naming game with communication errors during pair-wise conversations, with error rates in a uniform probability distribution. First, a model of naming game with learning errors in communications (NGLE) is proposed. Then, a strategy for agents to prevent learning errors is suggested. To that end, three typical topologies of communication networks, namely random-graph, small-world and scale-free networks, are employed to investigate the effects of various learning errors. Simulation results on these models show that 1) learning errors slightly affect the convergence speed but distinctively increase the requirement for memory of each agent during lexicon propagation; 2) the maximum number of different words held by the population increases linearly as the error rate increases; 3) without applying any strategy to eliminate learning errors, there is a threshold of the learning errors which impairs the convergence. The new findings may help to better understand the role of learning errors in naming game as well as in human language development from a network science perspective.

Policy improvement by a model-free Dyna architecture.

PubMed

Hwang, Kao-Shing; Lo, Chia-Yue

2013-05-01

The objective of this paper is to accelerate the process of policy improvement in reinforcement learning. The proposed Dyna-style system combines two learning schemes, one of which utilizes a temporal difference method for direct learning; the other uses relative values for indirect learning in planning between two successive direct learning cycles. Instead of establishing a complicated world model, the approach introduces a simple predictor of average rewards to actor-critic architecture in the simulation (planning) mode. The relative value of a state, defined as the accumulated differences between immediate reward and average reward, is used to steer the improvement process in the right direction. The proposed learning scheme is applied to control a pendulum system for tracking a desired trajectory to demonstrate its adaptability and robustness. Through reinforcement signals from the environment, the system takes the appropriate action to drive an unknown dynamic to track desired outputs in few learning cycles. Comparisons are made between the proposed model-free method, a connectionist adaptive heuristic critic, and an advanced method of Dyna-Q learning in the experiments of labyrinth exploration. The proposed method outperforms its counterparts in terms of elapsed time and convergence rate.

Analysis of the "naming game" with learning errors in communications.

PubMed

Lou, Yang; Chen, Guanrong

2015-07-16

Naming game simulates the process of naming an objective by a population of agents organized in a certain communication network. By pair-wise iterative interactions, the population reaches consensus asymptotically. We study naming game with communication errors during pair-wise conversations, with error rates in a uniform probability distribution. First, a model of naming game with learning errors in communications (NGLE) is proposed. Then, a strategy for agents to prevent learning errors is suggested. To that end, three typical topologies of communication networks, namely random-graph, small-world and scale-free networks, are employed to investigate the effects of various learning errors. Simulation results on these models show that 1) learning errors slightly affect the convergence speed but distinctively increase the requirement for memory of each agent during lexicon propagation; 2) the maximum number of different words held by the population increases linearly as the error rate increases; 3) without applying any strategy to eliminate learning errors, there is a threshold of the learning errors which impairs the convergence. The new findings may help to better understand the role of learning errors in naming game as well as in human language development from a network science perspective.

Intelligent mobility research for robotic locomotion in complex terrain

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Trentini, Michael; Beckman, Blake; Digney, Bruce; Vincent, Isabelle; Ricard, Benoit

2006-05-01

The objective of the Autonomous Intelligent Systems Section of Defence R&D Canada - Suffield is best described by its mission statement, which is "to augment soldiers and combat systems by developing and demonstrating practical, cost effective, autonomous intelligent systems capable of completing military missions in complex operating environments." The mobility requirement for ground-based mobile systems operating in urban settings must increase significantly if robotic technology is to augment human efforts in these roles and environments. The intelligence required for autonomous systems to operate in complex environments demands advances in many fields of robotics. This has resulted in large bodies of research in areas of perception, world representation, and navigation, but the problem of locomotion in complex terrain has largely been ignored. In order to achieve its objective, the Autonomous Intelligent Systems Section is pursuing research that explores the use of intelligent mobility algorithms designed to improve robot mobility. Intelligent mobility uses sensing, control, and learning algorithms to extract measured variables from the world, control vehicle dynamics, and learn by experience. These algorithms seek to exploit available world representations of the environment and the inherent dexterity of the robot to allow the vehicle to interact with its surroundings and produce locomotion in complex terrain. The primary focus of the paper is to present the intelligent mobility research within the framework of the research methodology, plan and direction defined at Defence R&D Canada - Suffield. It discusses the progress and future direction of intelligent mobility research and presents the research tools, topics, and plans to address this critical research gap. This research will create effective intelligence to improve the mobility of ground-based mobile systems operating in urban settings to assist the Canadian Forces in their future urban operations.

Argentina: no lesson learned.

PubMed

Iriart, Celia; Waitzkin, Howard

2006-01-01

This article examines the political, ideological, social, and economic processes by which the Argentinean economy was transformed, the structural consequences, and the policies responsible for dismantling the welfare state. The health care system reform during the 1990s was an important component in accomplishing the last objective. Analyses of the policies adopted after the crisis of 2001 reveal that, despite the discourse against international financial institutions, President Nestor Kirchner, elected in 2002, followed the same approach by accepting and applying the second generation of health reforms recommended by the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank with additional pressure from the World Trade Organization and several free trade agreements. This "new reform" furthered business opportunities for multinational corporations while further shrinking the state administration's role in supplying health, education, and other social services to people who need them more than ever. Social movements have emerged that are developing alternative projects and showing that, when the base is solidarity, "another world is possible."

Learning from the World and Learning for the World: An Essay on World Schools

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McKenzie, Malcolm

2012-01-01

This essay draws on the author's personal experiences as a head of school on three continents, over 20 years, as well as on some of his recent writings and talks. From Martin Luther King Jr's idea of a world house is derived the concept of a "world school". This project charts a way for national schools to develop world-minded graduates. It is…

REKRIATE: A Knowledge Representation System for Object Recognition and Scene Interpretation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Meystel, Alexander M.; Bhasin, Sanjay; Chen, X.

1990-02-01

What humans actually observe and how they comprehend this information is complex due to Gestalt processes and interaction of context in predicting the course of thinking and enforcing one idea while repressing another. How we extract the knowledge from the scene, what we get from the scene indeed and what we bring from our mechanisms of perception are areas separated by a thin, ill-defined line. The purpose of this paper is to present a system for Representing Knowledge and Recognizing and Interpreting Attention Trailed Entities dubbed as REKRIATE. It will be used as a tool for discovering the underlying principles involved in knowledge representation required for conceptual learning. REKRIATE has some inherited knowledge and is given a vocabulary which is used to form rules for identification of the object. It has various modalities of sensing and has the ability to measure the distance between the objects in the image as well as the similarity between different images of presumably the same object. All sensations received from matrix of different sensors put into an adequate form. The methodology proposed is applicable to not only the pictorial or visual world representation, but to any sensing modality. It is based upon the two premises: a) inseparability of all domains of the world representation including linguistic, as well as those formed by various sensor modalities. and b) representativity of the object at several levels of resolution simultaneously.

Virtual Worlds and the Learner Hero: How Today's Video Games Can Inform Tomorrow's Digital Learning Environments

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rigby, C. Scott; Przybylski, Andrew K.

2009-01-01

Participation in expansive video games called "virtual worlds" has become a mainstream leisure activity for tens of millions of people around the world. The growth of this industry and the strong motivational appeal of these digital worlds invite a closer examination as to how educators can learn from today's virtual worlds in the development of…

Seamless Connection between Learning and Assessment--Applying Progressive Learning Tasks in Mobile Ecology Inquiry

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hung, Pi-Hsia; Hwang, Gwo-Jen; Lin, Yu-Fen; Wu, Tsung-Hsun; Su, I-Hsiang

2013-01-01

Mobile learning has been recommended for motivating students on field trips; nevertheless, owing to the complexity and the richness of the learning resources from both the real-world and the digital-world environments, information overload remains one of the major concerns. Most mobile learning designs provide feedback only for multiple choice…

Learning, Teaching and Ambiguity in Virtual Worlds

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Carr, Diane; Oliver, Martin; Burn, Andrew

What might online communities and informal learning practices teach us about virtual world pedagogy? In this chapter we describe a research project in which learning practices in online worlds such as World of Warcraft and Second LifeTM (SL) were investigated. Working within an action research framework, we employed a range of methods to investigate how members of online communities define the worlds they encounter, negotiate the terms of participation, and manage the incremental complexity of game worlds. The implications of such practices for online pedagogy were then explored through teaching in SL. SL eludes simple definitions. Users, or "residents", of SL partake of a range of pleasures and activities - socialising, building, creating and exhibiting art, playing games, exploring, shopping, or running a business, for instance. We argue that the variable nature of SL gives rise to degrees of ambiguity. This ambiguity impacts on inworld social practices, and has significant implications for online teaching and learning.

Not all attention orienting is created equal: recognition memory is enhanced when attention orienting involves distractor suppression.

PubMed

Markant, Julie; Worden, Michael S; Amso, Dima

2015-04-01

Learning through visual exploration often requires orienting of attention to meaningful information in a cluttered world. Previous work has shown that attention modulates visual cortex activity, with enhanced activity for attended targets and suppressed activity for competing inputs, thus enhancing the visual experience. Here we examined the idea that learning may be engaged differentially with variations in attention orienting mechanisms that drive eye movements during visual search and exploration. We hypothesized that attention orienting mechanisms that engaged suppression of a previously attended location would boost memory encoding of the currently attended target objects to a greater extent than those that involve target enhancement alone. To test this hypothesis we capitalized on the classic spatial cueing task and the inhibition of return (IOR) mechanism (Posner, 1980; Posner, Rafal, & Choate, 1985) to demonstrate that object images encoded in the context of concurrent suppression at a previously attended location were encoded more effectively and remembered better than those encoded without concurrent suppression. Furthermore, fMRI analyses revealed that this memory benefit was driven by attention modulation of visual cortex activity, as increased suppression of the previously attended location in visual cortex during target object encoding predicted better subsequent recognition memory performance. These results suggest that not all attention orienting impacts learning and memory equally. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Teaching Real-World Applications of Business Statistics Using Communication to Scaffold Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Green, Gareth P.; Jones, Stacey; Bean, John C.

2015-01-01

Our assessment research suggests that quantitative business courses that rely primarily on algorithmic problem solving may not produce the deep learning required for addressing real-world business problems. This article illustrates a strategy, supported by recent learning theory, for promoting deep learning by moving students gradually from…

Undergraduate Student Self-Efficacy and Perceptions of Virtual World Learning Experience

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stanton, Lorraine May

2017-01-01

Virtual worlds are innovative teaching and learning methods that can provide immersive and engaging learning experiences (Lu, 2010). Though they have potential benefits, students sometimes experience a steep learning curve and discomfort with the technology (Warburton, 2009). This study explored how students in two American Studies classes using…

Learning in a virtual world: experience with using second life for medical education.

PubMed

Wiecha, John; Heyden, Robin; Sternthal, Elliot; Merialdi, Mario

2010-01-23

Virtual worlds are rapidly becoming part of the educational technology landscape. Second Life (SL) is one of the best known of these environments. Although the potential of SL has been noted for health professions education, a search of the world's literature and of the World Wide Web revealed a limited number of formal applications of SL for this purpose and minimal evaluation of educational outcomes. Similarly, the use of virtual worlds for continuing health professional development appears to be largely unreported. We designed and delivered a pilot postgraduate medical education program in the virtual world, Second Life. Our objectives were to: (1) explore the potential of a virtual world for delivering continuing medical education (CME) designed for physicians; (2) determine possible instructional designs using SL for CME; (3) understand the limitations of SL for CME; (4) understand the barriers, solutions, and costs associated with using SL, including required training; and (5) measure participant learning outcomes and feedback. We trained and enrolled 14 primary care physicians in an hour-long, highly interactive event in SL on the topic of type 2 diabetes. Participants completed surveys to measure change in confidence and performance on test cases to assess learning. The post survey also assessed participants' attitudes toward the virtual learning environment. Of the 14 participant physicians, 12 rated the course experience, 10 completed the pre and post confidence surveys, and 10 completed both the pre and post case studies. On a seven-point Likert scale (1, strongly disagree to 7, strongly agree), participants' mean reported confidence increased from pre to post SL event with respect to: selecting insulin for patients with type 2 diabetes (pre = 4.9 to post = 6.5, P= .002); initiating insulin (pre = 5.0 to post = 6.2, P= .02); and adjusting insulin dosing (pre = 5.2 to post = 6.2, P= .02). On test cases, the percent of participants providing a correct insulin initiation plan increased from 60% (6 of 10) pre to 90% (9 of 10) post (P= .2), and the percent of participants providing correct initiation of mealtime insulin increased from 40% (4 of 10) pre to 80% (8 of 10) post (P= .09). All participants (12 of 12) agreed that this experience in SL was an effective method of medical education, that the virtual world approach to CME was superior to other methods of online CME, that they would enroll in another such event in SL, and that they would recommend that their colleagues participate in an SL CME course. Only 17% (2 of 12) disagreed with the statement that this potential Second Life method of CME is superior to face-to-face CME. The results of this pilot suggest that virtual worlds offer the potential of a new medical education pedagogy to enhance learning outcomes beyond that provided by more traditional online or face-to-face postgraduate professional development activities. Obvious potential exists for application of these methods at the medical school and residency levels as well.

Should laptops be allowed in the classroom? Two viewpoints: viewpoint 1: laptops in classrooms facilitate curricular advancement and promote student learning and viewpoint 2: deconstructing and rethinking the use of laptops in the classroom.

PubMed

Spallek, Heiko; von Bergmann, HsingChi

2014-12-01

This Point/Counterpoint article discusses the pros and cons of deploying one aspect of instructional technology in dental education: the use of laptops in the classroom. Two opposing viewpoints, written by different authors, evaluate the arguments. Viewpoint 1 argues that laptops in classrooms can be a catalyst for rapid curricular advancement and prepare dental graduates for the digital age of dentistry. As dental education is not limited to textual information, but includes skill development in spatial relationships and hands-on training, technology can play a transformative role in students' learning. Carefully implemented instructional technology can enhance student motivation when it transforms students from being the objects of teaching to the subjects of learning. Ubiquitous access to educational material allows for just-in-time learning and can overcome organizational barriers when, for instance, introducing interprofessional education. Viewpoint 2 argues that, in spite of widespread agreement that instructional technology leads to curricular innovation, the notion of the use of laptops in classrooms needs to be deconstructed and rethought when effective learning outcomes are sought. Analyzing the purpose, pedagogy, and learning product while applying lessons learned from K-12 implementation leads to a more complex picture of laptop integration in dental classrooms and forms the basis for questioning the value of such usage. For laptop use to contribute to student learning, rather than simply providing opportunity for students to take notes and access the Internet during class, this viewpoint emphasizes that dental educators need to think carefully about the purpose of this technology and to develop appropriate pedagogical strategies to achieve their objectives. The two viewpoints agree that significant faculty development efforts should precede any introduction of technology into the educational process and that technology alone cannot change education. While the first viewpoint emphasizes the pivotal role of technology in bringing dental education into the contemporary digital world, the second viewpoint focuses on challenges surrounding laptop usage in the classroom including the alignment of instructional methods with learning objectives.

Classify epithelium-stroma in histopathological images based on deep transferable network.

PubMed

Yu, X; Zheng, H; Liu, C; Huang, Y; Ding, X

2018-04-20

Recently, the deep learning methods have received more attention in histopathological image analysis. However, the traditional deep learning methods assume that training data and test data have the same distributions, which causes certain limitations in real-world histopathological applications. However, it is costly to recollect a large amount of labeled histology data to train a new neural network for each specified image acquisition procedure even for similar tasks. In this paper, an unsupervised domain adaptation is introduced into a typical deep convolutional neural network (CNN) model to mitigate the repeating of the labels. The unsupervised domain adaptation is implemented by adding two regularisation terms, namely the feature-based adaptation and entropy minimisation, to the object function of a widely used CNN model called the AlexNet. Three independent public epithelium-stroma datasets were used to verify the proposed method. The experimental results have demonstrated that in the epithelium-stroma classification, the proposed method can achieve better performance than the commonly used deep learning methods and some existing deep domain adaptation methods. Therefore, the proposed method can be considered as a better option for the real-world applications of histopathological image analysis because there is no requirement for recollection of large-scale labeled data for every specified domain. © 2018 The Authors Journal of Microscopy © 2018 Royal Microscopical Society.

Facilitating Exploratory Learning in Schools through Virtual Worlds: Experiences from a Course Run at a School

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Iqbal, Ahmer

2012-01-01

The following paper examines the results of a research study in which a virtual world, Quest Atlantis (QA), was used to engage students in exploratory learning to teach about water quality issues. The main aim of the research was to find out how new digital learning environments and educational technology, such as virtual worlds, can be introduced…

Digging Deeper: Learning and Re-Learning with Student and Teacher Minecraft Communities

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dodgson, David

2017-01-01

Minecraft has become well established in the world of education. Around the world, the game is being used in a variety of educational settings for virtual project work and as a virtual world for collaboration and social interaction. Minecraft is an activity players want to talk about. It is a game they want to learn more about. In order to do…

Monocular correspondence detection for symmetrical objects by template matching

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Vilmar, G.; Besslich, Philipp W., Jr.

1990-09-01

We describe a possibility to reconstruct 3-D information from a single view of an 3-D bilateral symmetric object. The symmetry assumption allows us to obtain a " second view" from a different viewpoint by a simple reflection of the monocular image. Therefore we have to solve the correspondence problem in a special case where known feature-based or area-based binocular approaches fail. In principle our approach is based on a frequency domain template matching of the features on the epipolar lines. During a training period our system " learns" the assignment of correspondence models to image features. The object shape is interpolated when no template matches to the image features. This fact is an important advantage of this methodology because no " real world" image holds the symmetry assumption perfectly. To simplify the training process we used single views on human faces (e. g. passport photos) but our system is trainable on any other kind of objects.

Development and Evaluation of a Web 2.0-Based Ubiquitous Learning Platform for Schoolyard Plant Identification

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hwang, Gwo-Haur; Chu, Hui-Chun; Chen, Beyin; Cheng, Zheng Shan

2014-01-01

The rapid progress of wireless communication, sensing, and mobile technologies has enabled students to learn in an environment that combines learning resources from both the real world and the digital world. It can be viewed as a new learning style which has been called context-aware ubiquitous learning. Most context-aware ubiquitous learning…

NASA's Hybrid Reality Lab: One Giant Leap for Full Dive

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Delgado, Francisco J.; Noyes, Matthew

2017-01-01

This presentation demonstrates how NASA is using consumer VR headsets, game engine technology and NVIDIA's GPUs to create highly immersive future training systems augmented with extremely realistic haptic feedback, sound, additional sensory information, and how these can be used to improve the engineering workflow. Include in this presentation is an environment simulation of the ISS, where users can interact with virtual objects, handrails, and tracked physical objects while inside VR, integration of consumer VR headsets with the Active Response Gravity Offload System, and a space habitat architectural evaluation tool. Attendees will learn how the best elements of real and virtual worlds can be combined into a hybrid reality environment with tangible engineering and scientific applications.

From teaching to learning in a mobile, wireless world.

PubMed

Billings, Diane M

2005-08-01

What research evidence justifies this shift from teaching to learning in the mobile, wireless world? We do not need evidence to answer questions such as, "Will the mobile, wireless device technology support teaching and learning?" (we already know it will), or "Will distance learning with mobile, wireless devices be as effective as that in the classroom?" (abundant evidence indicates there will be no significant differences). However, we do need to know, "How can we use these learning technologies to improve student learning and the outcomes of our academic programs?" Answers to this question will ultimately help educators prepare students to deliver safe and competent patient care in the mobile, wireless world.

A Developmental Approach to Machine Learning?

PubMed Central

Smith, Linda B.; Slone, Lauren K.

2017-01-01

Visual learning depends on both the algorithms and the training material. This essay considers the natural statistics of infant- and toddler-egocentric vision. These natural training sets for human visual object recognition are very different from the training data fed into machine vision systems. Rather than equal experiences with all kinds of things, toddlers experience extremely skewed distributions with many repeated occurrences of a very few things. And though highly variable when considered as a whole, individual views of things are experienced in a specific order – with slow, smooth visual changes moment-to-moment, and developmentally ordered transitions in scene content. We propose that the skewed, ordered, biased visual experiences of infants and toddlers are the training data that allow human learners to develop a way to recognize everything, both the pervasively present entities and the rarely encountered ones. The joint consideration of real-world statistics for learning by researchers of human and machine learning seems likely to bring advances in both disciplines. PMID:29259573

Beyond agency: sources of knowing and learning in children's science- and technology-related problem solving

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kim, Mijung; Roth, Wolff-Michael

2016-12-01

In (science) education, primacy is given to agency, the human capability to act and, in this, to learn. However, phenomenological philosophers and societal-historical psychologists point out that agency, the purposeful (intentional) engagement with the world, is only the effect of a much more profound capacity: passibility, the capacity to be affected. In this study, we begin with what has been recognized as a fundamental condition of learning: learners cannot intentionally orient to the learning outcome because they inherently do not know it so that that knowledge cannot be the object of intention. In this study, we provide evidence for three empirically grounded assertions: (a) children do not intend new knowledge and understanding, which instead give themselves in and through materials and material configurations; (b) knowing-how is received (as unintended gifts) because our bodies are endowed with passibility, the capability to be affected; and (c) the new knowledge and understanding exists as and in social relation first. We suggest implications for engineering design in science classrooms.

Holistic science: An understanding of science education encompassing ethical and social issues

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Malekpour, Susan

Science has often been viewed, by the majority of our educators and the general public, as being objective and emotionless. Based on this view, our educators teach science in the same manner, objectively and in an abstract form. This manner of teaching has hindered our learners' ability for active learning and distanced them from the subject matter. In this action research, I have examined holistic science pedagogy in conjunction with a constructivism theory. In holistic science pedagogy, scientific knowledge is combined with subjective personal experiences and social issues. There is an interaction between student and scientific data when the student's context, relationships, and lived experiences that play a role in the scientific recognition of the world were incorporated into the learning process. In this pedagogical model, the factual content was viewed from the context of social and ethical implications. By empowering learners with this ability, science knowledge will no longer be exclusive to a select group. This process empowers the general population with the ability to understand scientific knowledge and therefore the ability to make informed decisions based on this knowledge. The goal was to make curriculum developers more conscious of factors that can positively influence the learning process and increase student engagement and understanding within the science classroom. The holistic approach to science pedagogy has enlightened and empowered our adult learners more effectively. Learners became more actively engaged in their own process of learning. Teachers must be willing to listen and implement student suggestions on improving the teaching/learning process. Teachers should be willing to make the effort in connecting with their students by structuring courses so the topics would be relevant to the students in relation to real world and social/ethical and political issues. Holistic science pedagogy strives for social change through the empowerment of adult learners with scientific knowledge. This research has demonstrated that learners can better understand the decision-making process and more easily relate their experiences, and therefore their knowledge, to social/political and ethical issues.

The eNutrition Academy: Supporting a New Generation of Nutritional Scientists around the World12

PubMed Central

Geissler, Catherine; Amuna, Paul; Kattelmann, Kendra K; Zotor, Francis B; Donovan, Sharon M

2016-01-01

Nutrition training and building capacity to provide a competent workforce to support national and regional efforts to combat malnutrition remain a major challenge in Africa and other developing regions of the world. The capacity to provide the necessary intellectual drive for nutrition research, policy, and practice in countries lacking in readiness for nutrition actions is imperative to improve the health of their people. To help address this need, the eNutrition Academy (eNA) was formed as a global partnership organization by the African Nutrition Society, the Federation of African Nutrition Societies, the Nutrition Society of the United Kingdom and Ireland, the ASN, and the International Union of Nutritional Sciences, supported by Cambridge University Press. The primary objective of this partnership is to provide an online learning platform that is free to access, enabling users to benefit from a wide range of learning materials from basic tools to more-advanced learning materials for teachers and researchers in developing countries. The goal of this article was to summarize the findings of a symposium held at the ASN Scientific Sessions and Annual Meeting at Experimental Biology 2015, which explored the themes of international capacity development, with a particular focus on the African continent, online learning, and the eNA e-learning platform. Given the vast human capacity present in Africa that is poised to create new solutions to address the public health needs of the continent, now is an opportune time to establish South-North and South-South partnerships to develop the next generation of African nutritional scientists. PMID:27180382

The eNutrition Academy: Supporting a New Generation of Nutritional Scientists around the World.

PubMed

Geissler, Catherine; Amuna, Paul; Kattelmann, Kendra K; Zotor, Francis B; Donovan, Sharon M

2016-01-01

Nutrition training and building capacity to provide a competent workforce to support national and regional efforts to combat malnutrition remain a major challenge in Africa and other developing regions of the world. The capacity to provide the necessary intellectual drive for nutrition research, policy, and practice in countries lacking in readiness for nutrition actions is imperative to improve the health of their people. To help address this need, the eNutrition Academy (eNA) was formed as a global partnership organization by the African Nutrition Society, the Federation of African Nutrition Societies, the Nutrition Society of the United Kingdom and Ireland, the ASN, and the International Union of Nutritional Sciences, supported by Cambridge University Press. The primary objective of this partnership is to provide an online learning platform that is free to access, enabling users to benefit from a wide range of learning materials from basic tools to more-advanced learning materials for teachers and researchers in developing countries. The goal of this article was to summarize the findings of a symposium held at the ASN Scientific Sessions and Annual Meeting at Experimental Biology 2015, which explored the themes of international capacity development, with a particular focus on the African continent, online learning, and the eNA e-learning platform. Given the vast human capacity present in Africa that is poised to create new solutions to address the public health needs of the continent, now is an opportune time to establish South-North and South-South partnerships to develop the next generation of African nutritional scientists.

Cooperation and Coordination Between Fuzzy Reinforcement Learning Agents in Continuous State Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Berenji, Hamid R.; Vengerov, David

1999-01-01

Successful operations of future multi-agent intelligent systems require efficient cooperation schemes between agents sharing learning experiences. We consider a pseudo-realistic world in which one or more opportunities appear and disappear in random locations. Agents use fuzzy reinforcement learning to learn which opportunities are most worthy of pursuing based on their promise rewards, expected lifetimes, path lengths and expected path costs. We show that this world is partially observable because the history of an agent influences the distribution of its future states. We consider a cooperation mechanism in which agents share experience by using and-updating one joint behavior policy. We also implement a coordination mechanism for allocating opportunities to different agents in the same world. Our results demonstrate that K cooperative agents each learning in a separate world over N time steps outperform K independent agents each learning in a separate world over K*N time steps, with this result becoming more pronounced as the degree of partial observability in the environment increases. We also show that cooperation between agents learning in the same world decreases performance with respect to independent agents. Since cooperation reduces diversity between agents, we conclude that diversity is a key parameter in the trade off between maximizing utility from cooperation when diversity is low and maximizing utility from competitive coordination when diversity is high.

Uniting Community and University through Service Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Arney, Janna B.; Jones, Irma

2006-01-01

At its core, service-learning is about creating opportunities for students to apply theory they learn in the classroom to real-world problems and real-world needs. A service-learning project was initiated with the CEO of the Brownsville Chamber of Commerce. The project required 2nd-year business communication students to interview community…

Project-Based Learning around the World

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Weatherby, Kristen

2007-01-01

This paper, the first of a two-part article, addresses ways that project-based learning is being used in countries around the world. It introduces Microsoft's worldwide K-12 education initiative, Partners in Learning, and provides some background as to why Microsoft is interested in developing project-based learning curricula for teachers to help…

Learning Ethics through Virtual Fieldtrips: Teaching Ethical Theories through Virtual Experiences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Houser, Rick; Thoma, Steve; Coppock, Amanda; Mazer, Matthew; Midkiff, Lewis; Younanian, Marisa; Young, Sarah

2011-01-01

Teaching ethical reasoning is considered an important component of the undergraduate learning experience. A recent approach to teaching using experiential learning is through virtual worlds such as Second Life. We discuss how ethics may be taught using experiential learning in the virtual world of Second Life. Participants in the class in this…

An Investigation into Cooperative Learning in a Virtual World Using Problem-Based Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Parson, Vanessa; Bignell, Simon

2017-01-01

Three-dimensional multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) have the potential to provide experiential learning qualitatively similar to that found in the real world. MUVEs offer a pedagogically-driven immersive learning opportunity for educationalists that is cost-effective and enjoyable. A family of digital virtual avatars was created within…

Student participation in World Wide Web-based curriculum development of general chemistry

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hunter, William John Forbes

1998-12-01

This thesis describes an action research investigation of improvements to instruction in General Chemistry at Purdue University. Specifically, the study was conducted to guide continuous reform of curriculum materials delivered via the World Wide Web by involving students, instructors, and curriculum designers. The theoretical framework for this study was based upon constructivist learning theory and knowledge claims were developed using an inductive analysis procedure. This results of this study are assertions made in three domains: learning chemistry content via the World Wide Web, learning about learning via the World Wide Web, and learning about participation in an action research project. In the chemistry content domain, students were able to learn chemical concepts that utilized 3-dimensional visualizations, but not textual and graphical information delivered via the Web. In the learning via the Web domain, the use of feedback, the placement of supplementary aids, navigation, and the perception of conceptual novelty were all important to students' use of the Web. In the participation in action research domain, students learned about the complexity of curriculum. development, and valued their empowerment as part of the process.

Ecological literacy and beyond: Problem-based learning for future professionals.

PubMed

Lewinsohn, Thomas M; Attayde, José Luiz; Fonseca, Carlos Roberto; Ganade, Gislene; Jorge, Leonardo Ré; Kollmann, Johannes; Overbeck, Gerhard E; Prado, Paulo Inácio; Pillar, Valério D; Popp, Daniela; da Rocha, Pedro L B; Silva, Wesley Rodrigues; Spiekermann, Annette; Weisser, Wolfgang W

2015-03-01

Ecological science contributes to solving a broad range of environmental problems. However, lack of ecological literacy in practice often limits application of this knowledge. In this paper, we highlight a critical but often overlooked demand on ecological literacy: to enable professionals of various careers to apply scientific knowledge when faced with environmental problems. Current university courses on ecology often fail to persuade students that ecological science provides important tools for environmental problem solving. We propose problem-based learning to improve the understanding of ecological science and its usefulness for real-world environmental issues that professionals in careers as diverse as engineering, public health, architecture, social sciences, or management will address. Courses should set clear learning objectives for cognitive skills they expect students to acquire. Thus, professionals in different fields will be enabled to improve environmental decision-making processes and to participate effectively in multidisciplinary work groups charged with tackling environmental issues.

Dual Low-Rank Pursuit: Learning Salient Features for Saliency Detection.

PubMed

Lang, Congyan; Feng, Jiashi; Feng, Songhe; Wang, Jingdong; Yan, Shuicheng

2016-06-01

Saliency detection is an important procedure for machines to understand visual world as humans do. In this paper, we consider a specific saliency detection problem of predicting human eye fixations when they freely view natural images, and propose a novel dual low-rank pursuit (DLRP) method. DLRP learns saliency-aware feature transformations by utilizing available supervision information and constructs discriminative bases for effectively detecting human fixation points under the popular low-rank and sparsity-pursuit framework. Benefiting from the embedded high-level information in the supervised learning process, DLRP is able to predict fixations accurately without performing the expensive object segmentation as in the previous works. Comprehensive experiments clearly show the superiority of the proposed DLRP method over the established state-of-the-art methods. We also empirically demonstrate that DLRP provides stronger generalization performance across different data sets and inherits the advantages of both the bottom-up- and top-down-based saliency detection methods.

Learning in the Wild of a Virtual World

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Aurilio, Suzanne

2009-01-01

This study took place in the online 3D virtual world Second Life[R], a recreational environment designed for world-building and socializing, and intended for individuals 18 years old and older. It described learning from the perspective of Second Life[R] Residents and focused on their world-building activities. As a virtual ethnographer, my avatar…

Students' First Impression of Second Life: A Case from the United Arab Emirates

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Abdallah, Salam; Douglas, Jamal

2010-01-01

Emerging 3D virtual worlds such as Second Life can offer students with opportunities to enhance learning using rich collaborative asynchronous media. Virtual worlds are believed to impact the future of higher education and therefore, universities across the world are immersing themselves inside virtual worlds to establish a unique learning and…

Evidence for kind representations in the absence of language: experiments with rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta).

PubMed

Phillips, Webb; Santos, Laurie R

2007-03-01

How do we come to recognize and represent different kinds of objects in the world? Some developmental psychologists have hypothesized that learning language plays a crucial role in this capacity. If this hypothesis were correct, then non-linguistic animals should lack the capacity to represent objects as kinds. Previous research with rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) has shown that this species can successfully individuate different kinds of objects - monkeys who saw one kind of object hidden inside a box searched longer after finding a different kind of object. However, in these studies and the infant studies on which they were based, the objects to be individuated differed both in kind and in properties. Thus, subjects in these experiments may not be representing the kinds of objects per se, but instead only their immediate perceptual properties. Here, we show that rhesus monkeys successfully individuate different kinds of objects even when their perceptual properties are held constant. Although these data provide the best evidence to date that language is not necessary to represent kinds, we discuss our findings in terms of possible associative hypotheses as well.

Object-Oriented Control System Design Using On-Line Training of Artificial Neural Networks

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Rubaai, Ahmed

1997-01-01

This report deals with the object-oriented model development of a neuro-controller design for permanent magnet (PM) dc motor drives. The system under study is described as a collection of interacting objects. Each object module describes the object behaviors, called methods. The characteristics of the object are included in its variables. The knowledge of the object exists within its variables, and the performance is determined by its methods. This structure maps well to the real world objects that comprise the system being modeled. A dynamic learning architecture that possesses the capabilities of simultaneous on-line identification and control is incorporated to enforce constraints on connections and control the dynamics of the motor. The control action is implemented "on-line", in "real time" in such a way that the predicted trajectory follows a specified reference model. A design example of controlling a PM dc motor drive on-line shows the effectiveness of the design tool. This will therefore be very useful in aerospace applications. It is expected to provide an innovative and noval software model for the rocket engine numerical simulator executive.

Get the picture? The effects of iconicity on toddlers' reenactment from picture books.

PubMed

Simcock, Gabrielle; DeLoache, Judy

2006-11-01

What do toddlers learn from everyday picture-book reading interactions? To date, there has been scant research exploring this question. In this study, the authors adapted a standard imitation procedure to examine 18- to 30-month-olds' ability to learn how to reenact a novel action sequence from a picture book. The results provide evidence that toddlers can imitate specific target actions on novel real-world objects on the basis of a picture-book interaction. Children's imitative performance after the reading interaction varied both as a function of age and the level of iconicity of the pictures in the book. These findings are discussed in terms of children's emerging symbolic capacity and the flexibility of the cognitive representation.

Learning Long-Range Vision for an Offroad Robot

DTIC Science & Technology

2008-09-01

robot to perceive and navigate in an unstructured natural world is a difficult task. Without learning, navigation systems are short-range and extremely...unsupervised or weakly supervised learning methods are necessary for training general feature representations for natural scenes. The process was...the world looked dark, and Legos when I was weary. iii ABSTRACT Teaching a robot to perceive and navigate in an unstructured natural world is a

Body motion and physics: How elementary school students use gesture and action to make sense of the physical world

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Noble, Tracy

This study is an exploration of the role of physical activity in making sense of the physical world. Recent work on embodied cognition has helped to break down the barrier between the body and cognition, providing the inspiration for this work. In this study, I asked ten elementary-school students to explain to me how a toy parachute works. The methods used were adapted from those used to study the role of the body in cognition in science education, child development, and psychology. This study focused on the processes of learning rather than on measuring learning outcomes. Multiple levels of analysis were pursued in a mixed-method research design. The first level was individual analyses of two students' utterances and body motions. These analyses provided initial hypotheses about the interaction of speech and body motion in students' developing understandings. The second level was group analyses of all ten students' data, in search of patterns and relationships between body motion and speech production across all the student-participants. Finally, a third level of analysis was used to explore all cases in which students produced analogies while they discussed how the parachute works. The multiple levels of analysis used in this study allowed for raising and answering some questions, and allowed for the characterization of both individual differences and group commonalities. The findings of this study show that there are several significant patterns of interaction between body motion and speech that demonstrate a role for the body in cognition. The use of sensory feedback from physical interactions with objects to create new explanations, and the use of interactions with objects to create blended spaces to support the construction of analogies are two of these patterns. Future work is needed to determine the generalizability of these patterns to other individuals and other learning contexts. However, the existence of these patterns lends concrete support to the ideas of embodied cognition and demonstrates how students can use their own embodied experience to understand the world.

Parallel-distributed mobile robot simulator

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Okada, Hiroyuki; Sekiguchi, Minoru; Watanabe, Nobuo

1996-06-01

The aim of this project is to achieve an autonomous learning and growth function based on active interaction with the real world. It should also be able to autonomically acquire knowledge about the context in which jobs take place, and how the jobs are executed. This article describes a parallel distributed movable robot system simulator with an autonomous learning and growth function. The autonomous learning and growth function which we are proposing is characterized by its ability to learn and grow through interaction with the real world. When the movable robot interacts with the real world, the system compares the virtual environment simulation with the interaction result in the real world. The system then improves the virtual environment to match the real-world result more closely. This the system learns and grows. It is very important that such a simulation is time- realistic. The parallel distributed movable robot simulator was developed to simulate the space of a movable robot system with an autonomous learning and growth function. The simulator constructs a virtual space faithful to the real world and also integrates the interfaces between the user, the actual movable robot and the virtual movable robot. Using an ultrafast CG (computer graphics) system (FUJITSU AG series), time-realistic 3D CG is displayed.

A Knowledge Acquisition Approach to Developing Mindtools for Organizing and Sharing Differentiating Knowledge in a Ubiquitous Learning Environment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hwang, Gwo-Jen; Chu, Hui-Chun; Lin, Yu-Shih; Tsai, Chin-Chung

2011-01-01

Previous studies have reported the importance and benefits of situating students in a real-world learning environment with access to digital-world resources. At the same time, researchers have indicated the need to develop learning guidance mechanisms or tools for assisting students to learn in such a complex learning scenario. In this study, a…

Teaching Clinical Ophthalmology: Medical Student Feedback on Team Case-Based Versus Lecture Format.

PubMed

Horne, Anupama; Rosdahl, Jullia

Team-based learning with case presentations in small groups in the medical school education setting allows students to be actively engaged and interactive with their peers to work through real-world clinical scenarios. Our objective is to assess the effects of this curriculum on the medical student experience. This study was designed to gather feedback from medical students on an ophthalmology elective regarding their experience with our newly developed team-based learning curriculum. Feedback evaluations were completed by medical students at the end of their elective and consisted of both a Likert scare rating and a free-response section. A total of 30 medical students. Students rated the case-based sessions significantly better than traditional lecture format with respect to the overall learning experience (p = 0.004), enjoyment of learning (p < 0.001), and increasing retention and ability to apply knowledge (p < 0.001). There is a strong preference by medical students for team-based learning within clinical ophthalmology. Copyright © 2017 Association of Program Directors in Surgery. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Detecting and preventing error propagation via competitive learning.

PubMed

Silva, Thiago Christiano; Zhao, Liang

2013-05-01

Semisupervised learning is a machine learning approach which is able to employ both labeled and unlabeled samples in the training process. It is an important mechanism for autonomous systems due to the ability of exploiting the already acquired information and for exploring the new knowledge in the learning space at the same time. In these cases, the reliability of the labels is a crucial factor, because mislabeled samples may propagate wrong labels to a portion of or even the entire data set. This paper has the objective of addressing the error propagation problem originated by these mislabeled samples by presenting a mechanism embedded in a network-based (graph-based) semisupervised learning method. Such a procedure is based on a combined random-preferential walk of particles in a network constructed from the input data set. The particles of the same class cooperate among them, while the particles of different classes compete with each other to propagate class labels to the whole network. Computer simulations conducted on synthetic and real-world data sets reveal the effectiveness of the model. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Mental health and learning disability nursing students' perceptions of the usefulness of the objective structured clinical examination to assess their competence in medicine administration.

PubMed

Hemingway, Steve; Stephenson, John; Roberts, Bronwyn; McCann, Terence

2014-08-01

The aim of this study was to evaluate mental health and learning disability nursing students' perceptions of the usefulness of the objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) in assessing their administration of medicine competence. Learning disability (n = 24) and mental health (n = 46) students from a single cohort were invited to evaluate their experience of the OSCE. A 10-item survey questionnaire was used, comprising open- and closed-response questions. Twelve (50%) learning disability and 32 (69.6%) mental health nursing students participated. The OSCE was rated highly compared to other theoretical assessments; it was also reported as clinically real and as a motivational learning strategy. However, it did not rate as well as clinical practice. Content analysis of written responses identified four themes: (i) benefits of the OSCE; (ii) suggestions to improve the OSCE; (iii) concern about the lack of clinical reality of the OSCE; and (iv) OSCE-induced stress. The themes, although repeating some of the positive statistical findings, showed that participants were critical of the university setting as a place to conduct clinical assessment, highlighted OSCE-related stress, and questioned the validity of the OSCE as a real-world assessment. The OSCE has an important role in the development of student nurses' administration of medicine skills. However, it might hinder their performance as a result of the stress of being assessed in a simulated environment.

Secure Logistic Regression Based on Homomorphic Encryption: Design and Evaluation

PubMed Central

Song, Yongsoo; Wang, Shuang; Xia, Yuhou; Jiang, Xiaoqian

2018-01-01

Background Learning a model without accessing raw data has been an intriguing idea to security and machine learning researchers for years. In an ideal setting, we want to encrypt sensitive data to store them on a commercial cloud and run certain analyses without ever decrypting the data to preserve privacy. Homomorphic encryption technique is a promising candidate for secure data outsourcing, but it is a very challenging task to support real-world machine learning tasks. Existing frameworks can only handle simplified cases with low-degree polynomials such as linear means classifier and linear discriminative analysis. Objective The goal of this study is to provide a practical support to the mainstream learning models (eg, logistic regression). Methods We adapted a novel homomorphic encryption scheme optimized for real numbers computation. We devised (1) the least squares approximation of the logistic function for accuracy and efficiency (ie, reduce computation cost) and (2) new packing and parallelization techniques. Results Using real-world datasets, we evaluated the performance of our model and demonstrated its feasibility in speed and memory consumption. For example, it took approximately 116 minutes to obtain the training model from the homomorphically encrypted Edinburgh dataset. In addition, it gives fairly accurate predictions on the testing dataset. Conclusions We present the first homomorphically encrypted logistic regression outsourcing model based on the critical observation that the precision loss of classification models is sufficiently small so that the decision plan stays still. PMID:29666041

A Higher Education Case: Millennial Experience toward Learning in a Virtual World Designed as an Authentic Learning Environment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Franetovic, Marija

2012-01-01

Current educational initiatives encourage the use of authentic learning environments to realistically prepare students for jobs in a constantly changing world. Many students of the Millennial generation may be social media savvy. However, what can be said about learning conditions and student readiness for active, reflective and collaborative…

Theory and Practice: How Filming "Learning in the Real World" Helps Students Make the Connection

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Commander, Nannette Evans; Ward, Teresa E.; Zabrucky, Karen M.

2012-01-01

This article describes an assignment, titled "Learning in the Real World," designed for graduate students in a learning theory course. Students work in small groups to create high quality audio-visual films that present "real learning" through interviews and/or observations of learners. Students select topics relevant to theories we are discussing…

The Benefits and Barriers of Using Virtual Worlds to Engage Healthcare Professionals on Distance Learning Programmes

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hack, Catherine Jane

2016-01-01

Using the delivery of a large postgraduate distance learning module in bioethics to health professionals as an illustrative example, the type of learning activity that could be enhanced through delivery in an immersive virtual world (IVW) was explored. Several activities were repurposed from the "traditional" virtual learning environment…

Development of a Ubiquitous Learning Platform Based on a Real-Time Help-Seeking Mechanism

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hwang, Gwo-Jen; Wu, Chih-Hsiang; Tseng, Judy C. R.; Huang, Iwen

2011-01-01

The popularity of mobile devices has encouraged the advance of ubiquitous learning, in which students are situated in a real-world learning environment with support from the digital world via the use of mobile, wireless communications, or even sensing technologies. Most of the ubiquitous learning systems are implemented with high-cost sensing…

iSee: Teaching Visual Learning in an Organic Virtual Learning Environment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Han, Hsiao-Cheng

2017-01-01

This paper presents a three-year participatory action research project focusing on the graduate level course entitled Visual Learning in 3D Animated Virtual Worlds. The purpose of this research was to understand "How the virtual world processes of observing and creating can best help students learn visual theories". The first cycle of…

Learning Clinical Procedures Through Internet Digital Objects: Experience of Undergraduate Students Across Clinical Faculties

PubMed Central

Li, Tse Yan; Wong, Kin; Tse, Christine Shuk Kwan; Chan, Ying Yee

2015-01-01

Background Various digital learning objects (DLOs) are available via the World Wide Web, showing the flow of clinical procedures. It is unclear to what extent these freely accessible Internet DLOs facilitate or hamper students’ acquisition of clinical competence. Objective This study aimed to understand the experience of undergraduate students across clinical disciplines—medicine, dentistry, and nursing—in using openly accessible Internet DLOs, and to investigate the role of Internet DLOs in facilitating their clinical learning. Methods Mid-year and final-year groups were selected from each undergraduate clinical degree program of the University of Hong Kong—Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS), Bachelor of Dental Surgery (BDS), and Bachelor of Nursing (BNurs). All students were invited to complete a questionnaire on their personal and educational backgrounds, and their experiences and views on using Internet DLOs in learning clinical procedures. The questionnaire design was informed by the findings of six focus groups. Results Among 439 respondents, 97.5% (428/439) learned a variety of clinical procedures through Internet DLOs. Most nursing students (107/122, 87.7%) learned preventive measures through Internet DLOs, with a lower percentage of medical students (99/215, 46.0%) and dental students (43/96, 45%) having learned them this way (both P<.001). Three-quarters (341/439, 77.7%) of students accessed DLOs through public search engines, whereas 93.2% (409/439) accessed them by watching YouTube videos. Students often shared DLOs with classmates (277/435, 63.7%), but rarely discussed them with teachers (54/436, 12.4%). The accuracy, usefulness, and importance of Internet DLOs were rated as 6.85 (SD 1.48), 7.27 (SD 1.53), and 7.13 (SD 1.72), respectively, out of a high score of 10. Conclusions Self-exploration of DLOs in the unrestricted Internet environment is extremely common among current e-generation learners and was regarded by students across clinical faculties as an important supplement to their formal learning in the planned curriculum. This trend calls for a transformation of the educator’s role from dispensing knowledge to guidance and support. PMID:27731303

Segmentation and learning in the quantitative analysis of microscopy images

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ruggiero, Christy; Ross, Amy; Porter, Reid

2015-02-01

In material science and bio-medical domains the quantity and quality of microscopy images is rapidly increasing and there is a great need to automatically detect, delineate and quantify particles, grains, cells, neurons and other functional "objects" within these images. These are challenging problems for image processing because of the variability in object appearance that inevitably arises in real world image acquisition and analysis. One of the most promising (and practical) ways to address these challenges is interactive image segmentation. These algorithms are designed to incorporate input from a human operator to tailor the segmentation method to the image at hand. Interactive image segmentation is now a key tool in a wide range of applications in microscopy and elsewhere. Historically, interactive image segmentation algorithms have tailored segmentation on an image-by-image basis, and information derived from operator input is not transferred between images. But recently there has been increasing interest to use machine learning in segmentation to provide interactive tools that accumulate and learn from the operator input over longer periods of time. These new learning algorithms reduce the need for operator input over time, and can potentially provide a more dynamic balance between customization and automation for different applications. This paper reviews the state of the art in this area, provides a unified view of these algorithms, and compares the segmentation performance of various design choices.

Facilitating 3D Virtual World Learning Environments Creation by Non-Technical End Users through Template-Based Virtual World Instantiation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Liu, Chang; Zhong, Ying; Ozercan, Sertac; Zhu, Qing

2013-01-01

This paper presents a template-based solution to overcome technical barriers non-technical computer end users face when developing functional learning environments in three-dimensional virtual worlds (3DVW). "iVirtualWorld," a prototype of a platform-independent 3DVW creation tool that implements the proposed solution, facilitates 3DVW…

What People Talk About in Virtual Worlds

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Maher, Mary Lou

This chapter examines what people talk about in virtual worlds, employing protocol analysis. Each of two scenario studies was developed to assess the impact of virtual worlds as a collaborative environment for a specific purpose: one for learning and one for designing. The first designed a place in Active Worlds for a course on Web Site Design, having group learning spaces surrounded by individual student galleries. Student text chat was analyzed through a coding scheme with four major categories: control, technology, learning, and place. The second studied expert architects in a Second Life environment called DesignWorld that combined 3D modeling and sketching tools. Video and audio recordings were coded in terms of four categories of communication content (designing, representation of the model, awareness of each other, and software features), and in terms of synthesis comparing alternative designs versus analysis of how well the proposed solution satisfies the given design task. Both studies found that people talk about their avatars, identity, and location in the virtual world. However, the discussion is chiefly about the task and not about the virtual world, implying that virtual worlds provide a viable environment for learning and designing that does not distract people from their task.

Research on the Learning Effects of Multimedia Assisted Instruction on Mandarin Vocabulary for Vietnamese Students: A Preliminary Study Involving E-Learning System

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chen, Chen-Yuan; Chung, Wan-Lin

2011-01-01

As Mandarin gains popularity in the whole world, Mandarin education becomes valued by the countries all over the world. The United Nations classifies Mandarin as one of the six major languages, and the number of people who learn Mandarin in the whole world grows with each passing day as the mainland China market grows. This study discusses the…

Design and evaluation of a simulation for pediatric dentistry in virtual worlds.

PubMed

Papadopoulos, Lazaros; Pentzou, Afroditi-Evaggelia; Louloudiadis, Konstantinos; Tsiatsos, Thrasyvoulos-Konstantinos

2013-10-29

Three-dimensional virtual worlds are becoming very popular among educators in the medical field. Virtual clinics and patients are already used for case study and role play in both undergraduate and continuing education levels. Dental education can also take advantage of the virtual world's pedagogical features in order to give students the opportunity to interact with virtual patients (VPs) and practice in treatment planning. The objective of this study was to design and evaluate a virtual patient as a supplemental teaching tool for pediatric dentistry. A child VP, called Erietta, was created by utilizing the programming and building tools that online virtual worlds offer. The case is about an eight-year old girl visiting the dentist with her mother for the first time. Communication techniques such as Tell-Show-Do and parents' interference management were the basic elements of the educational scenario on which the VP was based. An evaluation of the simulation was made by 103 dental students in their fourth year of study. Two groups were formed: an experimental group which was exposed to the simulation (n=52) and a control group which did not receive the simulation (n=51). At the end, both groups were asked to complete a knowledge questionnaire and the results were compared. A statistically significant difference between the two groups was found by applying a t test for independent samples (P<.001), showing a positive learning effect from the VP. The majority of the participants evaluated the aspects of the simulation very positively while 69% (36/52) of the simulation group expressed their preference for using this module as an additional teaching tool. This study demonstrated that a pediatric dentistry VP built in a virtual world offers significant learning potential when used as a supplement to the traditional teaching techniques.

The Power of Real-World Application

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stam, Brad

2011-01-01

Linked learning transforms students' high school experience by linking a college preparatory course sequence with demanding technical education, and linking real-world experiences with classroom learning to help students gain an advantage in high school, postsecondary education, and careers. With linked learning, students follow industry-themed…

STEAM by Design

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Keane, Linda; Keane, Mark

2016-01-01

We live in a designed world. STEAM by Design presents a transdisciplinary approach to learning that challenges young minds with the task of making a better world. Learning today, like life, is dynamic, connected and engaging. STEAM (Science, Technology, Environment, Engineering, Art, and Math) teaching and learning integrates information in…

Distinct contributions of attention and working memory to visual statistical learning and ensemble processing.

PubMed

Hall, Michelle G; Mattingley, Jason B; Dux, Paul E

2015-08-01

The brain exploits redundancies in the environment to efficiently represent the complexity of the visual world. One example of this is ensemble processing, which provides a statistical summary of elements within a set (e.g., mean size). Another is statistical learning, which involves the encoding of stable spatial or temporal relationships between objects. It has been suggested that ensemble processing over arrays of oriented lines disrupts statistical learning of structure within the arrays (Zhao, Ngo, McKendrick, & Turk-Browne, 2011). Here we asked whether ensemble processing and statistical learning are mutually incompatible, or whether this disruption might occur because ensemble processing encourages participants to process the stimulus arrays in a way that impedes statistical learning. In Experiment 1, we replicated Zhao and colleagues' finding that ensemble processing disrupts statistical learning. In Experiments 2 and 3, we found that statistical learning was unimpaired by ensemble processing when task demands necessitated (a) focal attention to individual items within the stimulus arrays and (b) the retention of individual items in working memory. Together, these results are consistent with an account suggesting that ensemble processing and statistical learning can operate over the same stimuli given appropriate stimulus processing demands during exposure to regularities. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Multi-instance multi-label distance metric learning for genome-wide protein function prediction.

PubMed

Xu, Yonghui; Min, Huaqing; Song, Hengjie; Wu, Qingyao

2016-08-01

Multi-instance multi-label (MIML) learning has been proven to be effective for the genome-wide protein function prediction problems where each training example is associated with not only multiple instances but also multiple class labels. To find an appropriate MIML learning method for genome-wide protein function prediction, many studies in the literature attempted to optimize objective functions in which dissimilarity between instances is measured using the Euclidean distance. But in many real applications, Euclidean distance may be unable to capture the intrinsic similarity/dissimilarity in feature space and label space. Unlike other previous approaches, in this paper, we propose to learn a multi-instance multi-label distance metric learning framework (MIMLDML) for genome-wide protein function prediction. Specifically, we learn a Mahalanobis distance to preserve and utilize the intrinsic geometric information of both feature space and label space for MIML learning. In addition, we try to deal with the sparsely labeled data by giving weight to the labeled data. Extensive experiments on seven real-world organisms covering the biological three-domain system (i.e., archaea, bacteria, and eukaryote; Woese et al., 1990) show that the MIMLDML algorithm is superior to most state-of-the-art MIML learning algorithms. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Learning in a Virtual World: Experience With Using Second Life for Medical Education

PubMed Central

Heyden, Robin; Sternthal, Elliot; Merialdi, Mario

2010-01-01

Background Virtual worlds are rapidly becoming part of the educational technology landscape. Second Life (SL) is one of the best known of these environments. Although the potential of SL has been noted for health professions education, a search of the world’s literature and of the World Wide Web revealed a limited number of formal applications of SL for this purpose and minimal evaluation of educational outcomes. Similarly, the use of virtual worlds for continuing health professional development appears to be largely unreported. Methods We designed and delivered a pilot postgraduate medical education program in the virtual world, Second Life. Our objectives were to: (1) explore the potential of a virtual world for delivering continuing medical education (CME) designed for physicians; (2) determine possible instructional designs using SL for CME; (3) understand the limitations of SL for CME; (4) understand the barriers, solutions, and costs associated with using SL, including required training; and (5) measure participant learning outcomes and feedback. We trained and enrolled 14 primary care physicians in an hour-long, highly interactive event in SL on the topic of type 2 diabetes. Participants completed surveys to measure change in confidence and performance on test cases to assess learning. The post survey also assessed participants’ attitudes toward the virtual learning environment. Results Of the 14 participant physicians, 12 rated the course experience, 10 completed the pre and post confidence surveys, and 10 completed both the pre and post case studies. On a seven-point Likert scale (1, strongly disagree to 7, strongly agree), participants’ mean reported confidence increased from pre to post SL event with respect to: selecting insulin for patients with type 2 diabetes (pre = 4.9 to post = 6.5, P= .002); initiating insulin (pre = 5.0 to post = 6.2, P= .02); and adjusting insulin dosing (pre = 5.2 to post = 6.2, P= .02). On test cases, the percent of participants providing a correct insulin initiation plan increased from 60% (6 of 10) pre to 90% (9 of 10) post (P= .2), and the percent of participants providing correct initiation of mealtime insulin increased from 40% (4 of 10) pre to 80% (8 of 10) post (P= .09). All participants (12 of 12) agreed that this experience in SL was an effective method of medical education, that the virtual world approach to CME was superior to other methods of online CME, that they would enroll in another such event in SL, and that they would recommend that their colleagues participate in an SL CME course. Only 17% (2 of 12) disagreed with the statement that this potential Second Life method of CME is superior to face-to-face CME. Conclusions The results of this pilot suggest that virtual worlds offer the potential of a new medical education pedagogy to enhance learning outcomes beyond that provided by more traditional online or face-to-face postgraduate professional development activities. Obvious potential exists for application of these methods at the medical school and residency levels as well. PMID:20097652

Web-based resources for critical care education.

PubMed

Kleinpell, Ruth; Ely, E Wesley; Williams, Ged; Liolios, Antonios; Ward, Nicholas; Tisherman, Samuel A

2011-03-01

To identify, catalog, and critically evaluate Web-based resources for critical care education. A multilevel search strategy was utilized. Literature searches were conducted (from 1996 to September 30, 2010) using OVID-MEDLINE, PubMed, and the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature with the terms "Web-based learning," "computer-assisted instruction," "e-learning," "critical care," "tutorials," "continuing education," "virtual learning," and "Web-based education." The Web sites of relevant critical care organizations (American College of Chest Physicians, American Society of Anesthesiologists, American Thoracic Society, European Society of Intensive Care Medicine, Society of Critical Care Medicine, World Federation of Societies of Intensive and Critical Care Medicine, American Association of Critical Care Nurses, and World Federation of Critical Care Nurses) were reviewed for the availability of e-learning resources. Finally, Internet searches and e-mail queries to critical care medicine fellowship program directors and members of national and international acute/critical care listserves were conducted to 1) identify the use of and 2) review and critique Web-based resources for critical care education. To ensure credibility of Web site information, Web sites were reviewed by three independent reviewers on the basis of the criteria of authority, objectivity, authenticity, accuracy, timeliness, relevance, and efficiency in conjunction with suggested formats for evaluating Web sites in the medical literature. Literature searches using OVID-MEDLINE, PubMed, and the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature resulted in >250 citations. Those pertinent to critical care provide examples of the integration of e-learning techniques, the development of specific resources, reports of the use of types of e-learning, including interactive tutorials, case studies, and simulation, and reports of student or learner satisfaction, among other general reviews of the benefits of utilizing e-learning. Review of the Web sites of relevant critical care organizations revealed the existence of a number of e-learning resources, including online critical care courses, tutorials, podcasts, webcasts, slide sets, and continuing medical education resources, some requiring membership or a fee to access. Respondents to listserve queries (>100) and critical care medicine fellowship director and advanced practice nursing educator e-mail queries (>50) identified the use of a number of tutorials, self-directed learning modules, and video-enhanced programs for critical care education and practice. In all, >135 Web-based education resources exist, including video Web resources for critical care education in a variety of e-learning formats, such as tutorials, self-directed learning modules, interactive case studies, webcasts, podcasts, and video-enhanced programs. As identified by critical care educators and practitioners, e-learning is actively being integrated into critical care medicine and nursing training programs for continuing medical education and competency training purposes. Knowledge of available Web-based educational resources may enhance critical care practitioners' ongoing learning and clinical competence, although this has not been objectively measured to date.

Learning Object Repositories

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lehman, Rosemary

2007-01-01

This chapter looks at the development and nature of learning objects, meta-tagging standards and taxonomies, learning object repositories, learning object repository characteristics, and types of learning object repositories, with type examples. (Contains 1 table.)

Transfer learning for visual categorization: a survey.

PubMed

Shao, Ling; Zhu, Fan; Li, Xuelong

2015-05-01

Regular machine learning and data mining techniques study the training data for future inferences under a major assumption that the future data are within the same feature space or have the same distribution as the training data. However, due to the limited availability of human labeled training data, training data that stay in the same feature space or have the same distribution as the future data cannot be guaranteed to be sufficient enough to avoid the over-fitting problem. In real-world applications, apart from data in the target domain, related data in a different domain can also be included to expand the availability of our prior knowledge about the target future data. Transfer learning addresses such cross-domain learning problems by extracting useful information from data in a related domain and transferring them for being used in target tasks. In recent years, with transfer learning being applied to visual categorization, some typical problems, e.g., view divergence in action recognition tasks and concept drifting in image classification tasks, can be efficiently solved. In this paper, we survey state-of-the-art transfer learning algorithms in visual categorization applications, such as object recognition, image classification, and human action recognition.

Healing relationships with nature.

PubMed

Burkhardt, M A

2000-02-01

Our health is intimately connected to the health of our environment. The contemporary world view which sees a radical distinction between humans as subjects and world as object can obscure our recognition of how much we rely on nature for health and survival. Indigenous traditions and contemporary scholars remind us that we live in a universe in which all things are connected, and in which nature continues to offer its gifts in co-creative partnership for the health and wellbeing of all. Living in awareness of our relationship with nature enables us to open more to the experience of nature's nurturing. Many complementary therapies derive from ancient practices that involve nature in healing partnership. As nurses and midwives we must learn to expand our boundaries to encompass the many ways that nature partners with us for healing.

Design of Learning Spaces in 3D Virtual Worlds: An Empirical Investigation of "Second Life"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Minocha, Shailey; Reeves, Ahmad John

2010-01-01

"Second Life" (SL) is a three-dimensional (3D) virtual world, and educational institutions are adopting SL to support their teaching and learning. Although the question of how 3D learning spaces should be designed to support student learning and engagement has been raised among SL educators and designers, there is hardly any guidance or…

Ethical Considerations for Educational Research in a Virtual World

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Girvan, C.; Savage, T.

2012-01-01

The combination of features in virtual worlds provides an opportunity to implement and research unique learning experiences. With increasing interest and activity from the educational research community, exploring virtual worlds for teaching and learning, there is a need to identify and understand the ethical implications of conducting research in…

E-Learning Challenges in the Arab World: Revelations from a Case Study Profile

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Abouchedid, Kamal; Eid, George M.

2004-01-01

The overwhelming traditional knowledge delivery system for higher education in the Arab world demonstrates the pronounced information technology (IT) gap between Arab countries and the developed world. This study demonstrates the problems and possibilities of implementing e-learning in Arab educational institutions through analysing the attitudes…

Department of Defense Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education Workshop on Computing Education

DTIC Science & Technology

2010-10-18

August 2010 was building the right game “ – World of Warcraft has 30% women (according to womengamers.com) Conclusion: – We don’t really understand why...Report of the National Academies on Informal Learning • Infancy - late adulthood: Learn about the world & develop important skills for science...Education With Rigor and Vigor – Excitement, interest, and motivation to learn about phenomena in the natural and physical world . – Generate

The State of 21st Century Learning in the K-12 World of the United States: Online and Blended Learning Opportunities for American Elementary and Secondary Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Greene, Kimberly; Hale, William

2017-01-01

This paper is an examination of the current state of blended and online learning throughout the K-12 world in the United States. The analysis is predicated upon the potential of electronically-mediated learning (e-learning) to effectively prepare students for the demands of 21st century citizenship through the affordances of such learning…

What You Learn is What You See: Using Eye Movements to Study Infant Cross-Situational Word Learning

PubMed Central

Smith, Linda

2016-01-01

Recent studies show that both adults and young children possess powerful statistical learning capabilities to solve the word-to-world mapping problem. However, the underlying mechanisms that make statistical learning possible and powerful are not yet known. With the goal of providing new insights into this issue, the research reported in this paper used an eye tracker to record the moment-by-moment eye movement data of 14-month-old babies in statistical learning tasks. Various measures are applied to such fine-grained temporal data, such as looking duration and shift rate (the number of shifts in gaze from one visual object to the other) trial by trial, showing different eye movement patterns between strong and weak statistical learners. Moreover, an information-theoretic measure is developed and applied to gaze data to quantify the degree of learning uncertainty trial by trial. Next, a simple associative statistical learning model is applied to eye movement data and these simulation results are compared with empirical results from young children, showing strong correlations between these two. This suggests that an associative learning mechanism with selective attention can provide a cognitively plausible model of cross-situational statistical learning. The work represents the first steps to use eye movement data to infer underlying real-time processes in statistical word learning. PMID:22213894

A Cybernetic Design Methodology for 'Intelligent' Online Learning Support

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Quinton, Stephen R.

The World Wide Web (WWW) provides learners and knowledge workers convenient access to vast stores of information, so much that present methods for refinement of a query or search result are inadequate - there is far too much potentially useful material. The problem often encountered is that users usually do not recognise what may be useful until they have progressed some way through the discovery, learning, and knowledge acquisition process. Additional support is needed to structure and identify potentially relevant information, and to provide constructive feedback. In short, support for learning is needed. The learning envisioned here is not simply the capacity to recall facts or to recognise objects. The focus is on learning that results in the construction of knowledge. Although most online learning platforms are efficient at delivering information, most do not provide tools that support learning as envisaged in this chapter. It is conceivable that Web-based learning environments can incorporate software systems that assist learners to form new associations between concepts and synthesise information to create new knowledge. This chapter details the rationale and theory behind a research study that aims to evolve Web-based learning environments into 'intelligent thinking' systems that respond to natural language human input. Rather than functioning simply as a means of delivering information, it is argued that online learning solutions will 1 day interact directly with students to support their conceptual thinking and cognitive development.

Mere exposure alters category learning of novel objects.

PubMed

Folstein, Jonathan R; Gauthier, Isabel; Palmeri, Thomas J

2010-01-01

We investigated how mere exposure to complex objects with correlated or uncorrelated object features affects later category learning of new objects not seen during exposure. Correlations among pre-exposed object dimensions influenced later category learning. Unlike other published studies, the collection of pre-exposed objects provided no information regarding the categories to be learned, ruling out unsupervised or incidental category learning during pre-exposure. Instead, results are interpreted with respect to statistical learning mechanisms, providing one of the first demonstrations of how statistical learning can influence visual object learning.

Mere Exposure Alters Category Learning of Novel Objects

PubMed Central

Folstein, Jonathan R.; Gauthier, Isabel; Palmeri, Thomas J.

2010-01-01

We investigated how mere exposure to complex objects with correlated or uncorrelated object features affects later category learning of new objects not seen during exposure. Correlations among pre-exposed object dimensions influenced later category learning. Unlike other published studies, the collection of pre-exposed objects provided no information regarding the categories to be learned, ruling out unsupervised or incidental category learning during pre-exposure. Instead, results are interpreted with respect to statistical learning mechanisms, providing one of the first demonstrations of how statistical learning can influence visual object learning. PMID:21833209

Bringing the Real World in: Reflection on Building a Virtual Learning Environment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mundkur, Anuradha; Ellickson, Cara

2012-01-01

We reflect on translating participatory and experiential learning methodologies into an online teaching environment through a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) that simulates the "real-world" contexts of international development in order to develop an applied critical understanding of gender analysis and gender mainstreaming. Rather than being…

"Being in the World": The Event of Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Papadopoulou, Marianna; Birch, Roy

2009-01-01

This paper employs an eclectic mix of paradigms in order to discuss constituting characteristics of young children's learning experiences. Drawing upon a phenomenological perspective it examines learning as a form of "Being" and as the result of learners' engagement with the world in their own, unique, intentional manners. The learners' intentions…

Investigating Functions Using Real-World Data

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Arnold, Stephen

2006-01-01

The possibilities for using graphic calculators to enhance the teaching and learning of mathematics are great. However, the boundaries explode when these powerful tools for learning are connected to data logging devices: a whole new approach to mathematics learning becomes possible. Using real world data to introduce the main functions (which are…

Project-based introduction to aerospace engineering course: A model rocket

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jayaram, Sanjay; Boyer, Lawrence; George, John; Ravindra, K.; Mitchell, Kyle

2010-05-01

In this paper, a model rocket project suitable for sophomore aerospace engineering students is described. This project encompasses elements of drag estimation, thrust determination and analysis using digital data acquisition, statistical analysis of data, computer aided drafting, programming, team work and written communication skills. The student built rockets are launched in the university baseball field with the objective of carrying a specific amount of payload so that the rocket achieves a specific altitude before the parachute is deployed. During the course of the project, the students are introduced to real-world engineering practice through written report submission of their designs. Over the years, the project has proven to enhance the learning objectives, yet cost effective and has provided good outcome measures.

World of intelligence defense object detection-machine learning (artificial intelligence)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gupta, Anitya; Kumar, Akhilesh; Bhushan, Vinayak

2018-04-01

This paper proposes a Quick Locale based Convolutional System strategy (Quick R-CNN) for question recognition. Quick R-CNN expands on past work to effectively characterize ob-ject recommendations utilizing profound convolutional systems. Com-pared to past work, Quick R-CNN utilizes a few in-novations to enhance preparing and testing speed while likewise expanding identification precision. Quick R-CNN trains the profound VGG16 arrange 9 quicker than R-CNN, is 213 speedier at test-time, and accomplishes a higher Guide on PASCAL VOC 2012. Contrasted with SPPnet, Quick R-CNN trains VGG16 3 quicker, tests 10 speedier, and is more exact. Quick R-CNN is actualized in Python and C++ (utilizing Caffe) and is accessible under the open-source MIT Permit.

Efficiency of goal-oriented communicating agents in different graph topologies: A study with Internet crawlers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lőrincz, András; Lázár, Katalin A.; Palotai, Zsolt

2007-05-01

To what extent does the communication make a goal-oriented community efficient in different topologies? In order to gain insight into this problem, we study the influence of learning method as well as that of the topology of the environment on the communication efficiency of crawlers in quest of novel information in different topics on the Internet. Individual crawlers employ selective learning, function approximation-based reinforcement learning (RL), and their combination. Selective learning, in effect, modifies the starting URL lists of the crawlers, whilst RL alters the URL orderings. Real data have been collected from the web and scale-free worlds, scale-free small world (SFSW), and random world environments (RWEs) have been created by link reorganization. In our previous experiments [ Zs. Palotai, Cs. Farkas, A. Lőrincz, Is selection optimal in scale-free small worlds?, ComPlexUs 3 (2006) 158-168], the crawlers searched for novel, genuine documents and direct communication was not possible. Herein, our finding is reproduced: selective learning performs the best and RL the worst in SFSW, whereas the combined, i.e., selective learning coupled with RL is the best-by a slight margin-in scale-free worlds. This effect is demonstrated to be more pronounced when the crawlers search for different topic-specific documents: the relative performance of the combined learning algorithm improves in all worlds, i.e., in SFSW, in SFW, and in RWE. If the tasks are more complex and the work sharing is enforced by the environment then the combined learning algorithm becomes at least equal, even superior to both the selective and the RL algorithms in most cases, irrespective of the efficiency of communication. Furthermore, communication improves the performance by a large margin and adaptive communication is advantageous in the majority of the cases.

Modellus: Learning Physics with Mathematical Modelling

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Teodoro, Vitor

Computers are now a major tool in research and development in almost all scientific and technological fields. Despite recent developments, this is far from true for learning environments in schools and most undergraduate studies. This thesis proposes a framework for designing curricula where computers, and computer modelling in particular, are a major tool for learning. The framework, based on research on learning science and mathematics and on computer user interface, assumes that: 1) learning is an active process of creating meaning from representations; 2) learning takes place in a community of practice where students learn both from their own effort and from external guidance; 3) learning is a process of becoming familiar with concepts, with links between concepts, and with representations; 4) direct manipulation user interfaces allow students to explore concrete-abstract objects such as those of physics and can be used by students with minimal computer knowledge. Physics is the science of constructing models and explanations about the physical world. And mathematical models are an important type of models that are difficult for many students. These difficulties can be rooted in the fact that most students do not have an environment where they can explore functions, differential equations and iterations as primary objects that model physical phenomena--as objects-to-think-with, reifying the formal objects of physics. The framework proposes that students should be introduced to modelling in a very early stage of learning physics and mathematics, two scientific areas that must be taught in very closely related way, as they were developed since Galileo and Newton until the beginning of our century, before the rise of overspecialisation in science. At an early stage, functions are the main type of objects used to model real phenomena, such as motions. At a later stage, rates of change and equations with rates of change play an important role. This type of equations--differential equations--are the most important mathematical objects used for modelling Natural phenomena. In traditional approaches, they are introduced only at advanced level, because it takes a long time for students to be introduced to the fundamental principles of Calculus. With the new proposed approach, rates of change can be introduced also at early stages on learning if teachers stress semi-quantitative reasoning and use adequate computer tools. In this thesis, there is also presented Modellus, a computer tool for modelling and experimentation. This computer tool has a user interface that allows students to start doing meaningful conceptual and empirical experiments without the need to learn new syntax, as is usual with established tools. The different steps in the process of constructing and exploring models can be done with Modellus, both from physical points of view and from mathematical points of view. Modellus activities show how mathematics and physics have a unity that is very difficult to see with traditional approaches. Mathematical models are treated as concrete-abstract objects: concrete in the sense that they can be manipulated directly with a computer and abstract in the sense that they are representations of relations between variables. Data gathered from two case studies, one with secondary school students and another with first year undergraduate students support the main ideas of the thesis. Also data gathered from teachers (from college and secondary schools), mainly through an email structured questionnaire, shows that teachers agree on the potential of modelling in the learning of physics (and mathematics) and of the most important aspects of the proposed framework to integrate modelling as an essential component of the curriculum. Schools, as all institutions, change at a very slow rate. There are a multitude of reasons for this. And traditional curricula, where the emphasis is on rote learning of facts, can only be changed if schools have access to new and powerful views of learning and to new tools, that support meaningful conceptual learning and are as common and easy to use as pencil and paper.

Object Classification With Joint Projection and Low-Rank Dictionary Learning.

PubMed

Foroughi, Homa; Ray, Nilanjan; Hong Zhang

2018-02-01

For an object classification system, the most critical obstacles toward real-world applications are often caused by large intra-class variability, arising from different lightings, occlusion, and corruption, in limited sample sets. Most methods in the literature would fail when the training samples are heavily occluded, corrupted or have significant illumination or viewpoint variations. Besides, most of the existing methods and especially deep learning-based methods, need large training sets to achieve a satisfactory recognition performance. Although using the pre-trained network on a generic large-scale data set and fine-tune it to the small-sized target data set is a widely used technique, this would not help when the content of base and target data sets are very different. To address these issues simultaneously, we propose a joint projection and low-rank dictionary learning method using dual graph constraints. Specifically, a structured class-specific dictionary is learned in the low-dimensional space, and the discrimination is further improved by imposing a graph constraint on the coding coefficients, that maximizes the intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. We enforce structural incoherence and low-rank constraints on sub-dictionaries to reduce the redundancy among them, and also make them robust to variations and outliers. To preserve the intrinsic structure of data, we introduce a supervised neighborhood graph into the framework to make the proposed method robust to small-sized and high-dimensional data sets. Experimental results on several benchmark data sets verify the superior performance of our method for object classification of small-sized data sets, which include a considerable amount of different kinds of variation, and may have high-dimensional feature vectors.

A Fuzzy Logic-Based Quality Function Deployment for Selection of E-Learning Provider

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kazancoglu, Yigit; Aksoy, Murat

2011-01-01

According to the Internet World Stats (2010), the growth rate of internet usage in the world is 444.8 % from 2000 to 2010. Since the number of internet users is rapidly increasing with each passed year, e-learning is often identified with web-based learning. The institutions, which deliver e-learning service via the use of computer and internet,…

Ethical Issues in E-Learning: Insights from the Application of Stakeholder Analysis in Three E-Learning Cases.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chozos, Polyneikis; Lytras, Miltos; Pouloudi, Nancy

The application of emerging digital technologies such as e-mail, the World Wide Web and the Internet in the educational setting has received wide acceptance all over the world. Both corporate and academic agendas have recognized the potential advantages of e-learning; however, as a new field, e-learning courses comes with important issues that…

E-Learn 2002 World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, & Higher Education. Proceedings (7th, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, October 15-19, 2002).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Driscoll, Margaret, Ed.; Reeves, Thomas C., Ed.

The 7th annual E-Learn world conference on e-learning in corporate, government, healthcare, and higher education organized by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE) includes more than 600 papers. Papers from this proceedings come from contributors representing more than 50 countries, sharing their perspectives and…

An Examination of the Effects of Collaborative Scientific Visualization via Model-Based Reasoning on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Learning within an Immersive 3D World

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Soleimani, Ali

2013-01-01

Immersive 3D worlds can be designed to effectively engage students in peer-to-peer collaborative learning activities, supported by scientific visualization, to help with understanding complex concepts associated with learning science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Previous research studies have shown STEM learning benefits…

Field Learning: Experiential Learning through Participant Observation and Self-Reflection of Consumer Behavior at Sporting Events

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schaller, Tracey King

2018-01-01

As marketing educators, we can enhance student learning by providing experiences that go beyond the classroom and into the real world. In this way, we encourage students to become lifelong learners where they observe the world around them through the lens of what they have learned. This article describes a project used in an undergraduate-level…

A Janus-Faced Approach to Learning. A Critical Discussion of Habermas' Pragmatic Approach

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Italia, Salvatore

2017-01-01

A realist approach to learning is what I propose here. This is based on a non-epistemic dimension whose presence is a necessary assumption for a concept of learning of a life-world as complementary to learning within a life-world. I develop my approach in opposition to Jürgen Habermas' pragmatic approach, which seems to lack of something from a…

Learning through Real-World Problem Solving: The Power of Integrative Teaching.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nagel, Nancy G.

This book is based on the idea that curriculum development projects focused on integrated or interdisciplinary teaching within the context of real-world problem solving creates dynamics and meaningful learning experiences for students. The real-world, problem-solving units presented in this book were created by four intern teachers, their mentor…

Learning to Teach in the Figured World of Reform Mathematics: Negotiating New Models of Identity

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ma, Jasmine Y.; Singer-Gabella, Marcy

2011-01-01

Starting from the assertion that traditional and reform mathematics pedagogy constitute two distinct figured worlds of teaching and learning, the authors explore the initiation of prospective teachers into the figured world of reform mathematics pedagogy. To become successful teachers in reform-oriented classrooms, prospective teachers must learn…

Addressing Power in Conversation: Enhancing the Transformative Learning Capacities of the World Café

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lorenzetti, Liza A.; Azulai, Anna; Walsh, Christine A.

2016-01-01

The World Café (TWC), used as an effective conversational tool around the world, shares several tenets with other participatory approaches to learning and development. It has not been critiqued, however, for its insufficient attention to reflexivity, power differentials, and structural inequalities within its process, specifically in relation to…

Transformative World Language Learning: An Approach for Environmental and Cultural Sustainability and Economic and Political Security

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Goulah, Jason

2008-01-01

In this article, the author responds to the Modern Language Association's report, "Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World" (2007) by arguing for an explicit and interdisciplinary transformative world language learning approach toward environmental and cultural sustainability and economic and political…

Research Informing Practice--Practice Informing Research: Innovative Teaching Methologies for World Language Teachers. Research in Second Language Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schwarzer, David, Ed.; Petron, Mary, Ed.; Luke, Christopher, Ed.

2011-01-01

"Research Informing Practice--Practice Informing Research: Innovative Teaching Methodologies for World Language Educators" is an edited volume that focuses on innovative, nontraditional methods of teaching and learning world languages. Using teacher-research projects, each author in the volume guides readers through their own personal…

Investigating Various Application Areas of Three-Dimensional Virtual Worlds for Higher Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ghanbarzadeh, Reza; Ghapanchi, Amir Hossein

2018-01-01

Three-dimensional virtual world (3DVW) have been adopted extensively in the education sector worldwide, and there has been remarkable growth in the application of these environments for distance learning. A wide variety of universities and educational organizations across the world have utilized this technology for their regular learning and…

World Language Students' Ethnographic Investigations of Culture through Mobile Devices

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tuttle, Harry G.; Tuttle, Lori A.

2017-01-01

World language teachers can transform how their students learn culture through the use of mobile devices. When world language students use their mobile devices to access authentic current culture, they go from being passive receivers of culture to active cultural investigators. These students go from learning thin surface culture to exploring…

Transformative Learning Experience: Aim Higher, Gain More

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wilson, Brent G.; Parrish, Patrick E.

2011-01-01

A transformative learning experience (TLE) is an especially meaningful encounter that leaves a lasting impact on a person's sense of competence or place in the world. The construct of TLE is presented in transactional terms as an irreducible interplay between learner and the world (including the natural world, artifacts, and other people).…

Pre-Service Teachers Designing Virtual World Learning Environments

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jacka, Lisa; Booth, Kate

2012-01-01

Integrating Information Technology Communications in the classroom has been an important part of pre-service teacher education for over a decade. The advent of virtual worlds provides the pre-service teacher with an opportunity to study teaching and learning in a highly immersive 3D computer-based environment. Virtual worlds also provide a place…

Using Machine Learning to Predict MCNP Bias

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Grechanuk, Pavel Aleksandrovi

For many real-world applications in radiation transport where simulations are compared to experimental measurements, like in nuclear criticality safety, the bias (simulated - experimental k eff) in the calculation is an extremely important quantity used for code validation. The objective of this project is to accurately predict the bias of MCNP6 [1] criticality calculations using machine learning (ML) algorithms, with the intention of creating a tool that can complement the current nuclear criticality safety methods. In the latest release of MCNP6, the Whisper tool is available for criticality safety analysts and includes a large catalogue of experimental benchmarks, sensitivity profiles,more » and nuclear data covariance matrices. This data, coming from 1100+ benchmark cases, is used in this study of ML algorithms for criticality safety bias predictions.« less

Interoperability Gap Challenges for Learning Object Repositories & Learning Management Systems

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mason, Robert T.

2011-01-01

An interoperability gap exists between Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and Learning Object Repositories (LORs). Learning Objects (LOs) and the associated Learning Object Metadata (LOM) that is stored within LORs adhere to a variety of LOM standards. A common LOM standard found in LORs is the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM)…

Simulation-based learning: Just like the real thing

PubMed Central

Lateef, Fatimah

2010-01-01

Simulation is a technique for practice and learning that can be applied to many different disciplines and trainees. It is a technique (not a technology) to replace and amplify real experiences with guided ones, often “immersive” in nature, that evoke or replicate substantial aspects of the real world in a fully interactive fashion. Simulation-based learning can be the way to develop health professionals’ knowledge, skills, and attitudes, whilst protecting patients from unnecessary risks. Simulation-based medical education can be a platform which provides a valuable tool in learning to mitigate ethical tensions and resolve practical dilemmas. Simulation-based training techniques, tools, and strategies can be applied in designing structured learning experiences, as well as be used as a measurement tool linked to targeted teamwork competencies and learning objectives. It has been widely applied in fields such aviation and the military. In medicine, simulation offers good scope for training of interdisciplinary medical teams. The realistic scenarios and equipment allows for retraining and practice till one can master the procedure or skill. An increasing number of health care institutions and medical schools are now turning to simulation-based learning. Teamwork training conducted in the simulated environment may offer an additive benefit to the traditional didactic instruction, enhance performance, and possibly also help reduce errors. PMID:21063557

Simulation-based learning: Just like the real thing.

PubMed

Lateef, Fatimah

2010-10-01

Simulation is a technique for practice and learning that can be applied to many different disciplines and trainees. It is a technique (not a technology) to replace and amplify real experiences with guided ones, often "immersive" in nature, that evoke or replicate substantial aspects of the real world in a fully interactive fashion. Simulation-based learning can be the way to develop health professionals' knowledge, skills, and attitudes, whilst protecting patients from unnecessary risks. Simulation-based medical education can be a platform which provides a valuable tool in learning to mitigate ethical tensions and resolve practical dilemmas. Simulation-based training techniques, tools, and strategies can be applied in designing structured learning experiences, as well as be used as a measurement tool linked to targeted teamwork competencies and learning objectives. It has been widely applied in fields such aviation and the military. In medicine, simulation offers good scope for training of interdisciplinary medical teams. The realistic scenarios and equipment allows for retraining and practice till one can master the procedure or skill. An increasing number of health care institutions and medical schools are now turning to simulation-based learning. Teamwork training conducted in the simulated environment may offer an additive benefit to the traditional didactic instruction, enhance performance, and possibly also help reduce errors.

World Wide Web Pages--Tools for Teaching and Learning.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Beasley, Sarah; Kent, Jean

Created to help educators incorporate World Wide Web pages into teaching and learning, this collection of Web pages presents resources, materials, and techniques for using the Web. The first page focuses on tools for teaching and learning via the Web, providing pointers to sites containing the following: (1) course materials for both distance and…

Changing Relations between Learning and Work

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jefferson, Anne L.; Levitan, Barbara

2006-01-01

The change in technology, in communications and in the dynamics of human and institutional interactions has created a need to shift relations between the world of learning and the world of work. New levers need to be added to those currently relied on. Consequently the learning-work relationship that exists between tertiary education institutions…

Developing Management Student Cultural Fluency for the Real World: A Situated Cultural Learning Approach

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zhu, Yunxia; Okimoto, Tyler G.; Roan, Amanda; Xu, Henry

2017-01-01

Purpose: To connect students with the real world of management practice, the purpose of this paper is to extend and operationalize the situated cultural learning approach (SiCuLA) through five learning processes occurring within communities of practice. These include integration of cultural contexts, authentic activities, reflections,…

Creative Writing, Problem-Based Learning, and Game-Based Learning Principles

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Trekles, Anastasia M.

2012-01-01

This paper examines how virtual worlds and other advanced social media can be married with problem-based learning to encourage creativity and critical thinking in the English/Language Arts classroom, particularly for middle school, high school, and undergraduate college education. Virtual world experiences such as "Second Life," Jumpstart.com, and…

Understanding Presence, Affordance and the Time/Space Dimensions for Language Learning in Virtual Worlds

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nocchi, Susanna; Blin, Françoise

2013-01-01

Notwithstanding their potential for novel approaches to language teaching and learning, Virtual Worlds (VWs) present numerous technological and pedagogical challenges that require new paradigms if the language learning experience and outcomes are to be successful. In this presentation, we argue that the notions of presence and affordance, together…

"The Evolution of e-Learning in the Context of 3D Virtual Worlds"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kotsilieris, Theodore; Dimopoulou, Nikoletta

2013-01-01

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) offer new approaches towards knowledge acquisition and collaboration through distance learning processes. Web-based Learning Management Systems (LMS) have transformed the way that education is conducted nowadays. At the same time, the adoption of Virtual Worlds in the educational process is of great…

An Interactive Concept Map Approach to Supporting Mobile Learning Activities for Natural Science Courses

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hwang, Gwo-Jen; Wu, Po-Han; Ke, Hui-Ru

2011-01-01

Mobile and wireless communication technologies not only enable anytime and anywhere learning, but also provide the opportunity to develop learning environments that combine real-world and digital-world resources. Nevertheless, researchers have indicated that, without effective tools for helping students organize their observations in the field,…

The Next Step for Literacy

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Comings, John P.

2017-01-01

The world community committed to support universal access to basic education in 1990. Since then, schools have been built and teachers hired and trained. Twenty years later, many more students were in primary school, but learning assessments showed that most were not learning how to read well enough to use reading to learn. The world community…

Learning to Map and Mapping to Learn Our Students' Worlds

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rubel, Laurie H.; Chu, Haiwen; Shookhoff, Lauren

2011-01-01

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), through its Connections Standard, highlights the importance of "the opportunity for students to experience mathematics in a context." Seeing how mathematics can be used to describe real-world phenomena can motivate students to learn more mathematics. Connecting mathematics to the real world…

Active Learning Strategies and Assessment in World Geography Classes

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Klein, Phil

2003-01-01

Active learning strategies include a variety of methods, such as inquiry and discovery, in which students are actively engaged in the learning process. This article describes several strategies that can be used in secondary-or college-level world geography courses. The goal of these activities is to foster development of a spatial perspective in…

Striatal and Hippocampal Entropy and Recognition Signals in Category Learning: Simultaneous Processes Revealed by Model-Based fMRI

PubMed Central

Davis, Tyler; Love, Bradley C.; Preston, Alison R.

2012-01-01

Category learning is a complex phenomenon that engages multiple cognitive processes, many of which occur simultaneously and unfold dynamically over time. For example, as people encounter objects in the world, they simultaneously engage processes to determine their fit with current knowledge structures, gather new information about the objects, and adjust their representations to support behavior in future encounters. Many techniques that are available to understand the neural basis of category learning assume that the multiple processes that subserve it can be neatly separated between different trials of an experiment. Model-based functional magnetic resonance imaging offers a promising tool to separate multiple, simultaneously occurring processes and bring the analysis of neuroimaging data more in line with category learning’s dynamic and multifaceted nature. We use model-based imaging to explore the neural basis of recognition and entropy signals in the medial temporal lobe and striatum that are engaged while participants learn to categorize novel stimuli. Consistent with theories suggesting a role for the anterior hippocampus and ventral striatum in motivated learning in response to uncertainty, we find that activation in both regions correlates with a model-based measure of entropy. Simultaneously, separate subregions of the hippocampus and striatum exhibit activation correlated with a model-based recognition strength measure. Our results suggest that model-based analyses are exceptionally useful for extracting information about cognitive processes from neuroimaging data. Models provide a basis for identifying the multiple neural processes that contribute to behavior, and neuroimaging data can provide a powerful test bed for constraining and testing model predictions. PMID:22746951

A New Approach to Teaching Biomechanics Through Active, Adaptive, and Experiential Learning.

PubMed

Singh, Anita

2017-07-01

Demand of biomedical engineers continues to rise to meet the needs of healthcare industry. Current training of bioengineers follows the traditional and dominant model of theory-focused curricula. However, the unmet needs of the healthcare industry warrant newer skill sets in these engineers. Translational training strategies such as solving real world problems through active, adaptive, and experiential learning hold promise. In this paper, we report our findings of adding a real-world 4-week problem-based learning unit into a biomechanics capstone course for engineering students. Surveys assessed student perceptions of the activity and learning experience. While students, across three cohorts, felt challenged to solve a real-world problem identified during the simulation lab visit, they felt more confident in utilizing knowledge learned in the biomechanics course and self-directed research. Instructor evaluations indicated that the active and experiential learning approach fostered their technical knowledge and life-long learning skills while exposing them to the components of adaptive learning and innovation.

Analyse d'un programme d'electromecanique en ses concepts et principes physiques: Methode et application

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gagnon, Richard; Besançon, Jacques; Jean, Pascale

1989-09-01

In many Western countries there is growing interest in the usefulness of scientific knowledge in vocational and technical training. Moreover, there is an increasing tendency in these countries to formulate objectives within teaching programmes, in order to come closer to the real tasks of the world of work. To determine what knowledge is required, a general method of analysing objective-based vocational training programmes was developed. This allows the identification of the minimum scientific and mathematical concepts and principles which are necessary to reach the learning objectives, and the establishment of their relative significance and the requisite level of detail. It has been used to determine the essential physical concepts of the industrial mechanics section (625 hours) of a programme on the electromechanics of automated systems. The results reveal the existence of 41 concepts needed for a total of 2,452.5 hours. A limited group of these is of particular importance.

Design and Implementation of a 3D Multi-User Virtual World for Language Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ibanez, Maria Blanca; Garcia, Jose Jesus; Galan, Sergio; Maroto, David; Morillo, Diego; Kloos, Carlos Delgado

2011-01-01

The best way to learn is by having a good teacher and the best language learning takes place when the learner is immersed in an environment where the language is natively spoken. 3D multi-user virtual worlds have been claimed to be useful for learning, and the field of exploiting them for education is becoming more and more active thanks to the…

Working and Learning with Knowledge in the Lobes of a Humanoid's Mind

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Ambrose, Robert; Savely, Robert; Bluethmann, William; Kortenkamp, David

2003-01-01

Humanoid class robots must have sufficient dexterity to assist people and work in an environment designed for human comfort and productivity. This dexterity, in particular the ability to use tools, requires a cognitive understanding of self and the world that exceeds contemporary robotics. Our hypothesis is that the sense-think-act paradigm that has proven so successful for autonomous robots is missing one or more key elements that will be needed for humanoids to meet their full potential as autonomous human assistants. This key ingredient is knowledge. The presented work includes experiments conducted on the Robonaut system, a NASA and the Defense Advanced research Projects Agency (DARPA) joint project, and includes collaborative efforts with a DARPA Mobile Autonomous Robot Software technical program team of researchers at NASA, MIT, USC, NRL, UMass and Vanderbilt. The paper reports on results in the areas of human-robot interaction (human tracking, gesture recognition, natural language, supervised control), perception (stereo vision, object identification, object pose estimation), autonomous grasping (tactile sensing, grasp reflex, grasp stability) and learning (human instruction, task level sequences, and sensorimotor association).

Active learning in camera calibration through vision measurement application

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Li, Xiaoqin; Guo, Jierong; Wang, Xianchun; Liu, Changqing; Cao, Binfang

2017-08-01

Since cameras are increasingly more used in scientific application as well as in the applications requiring precise visual information, effective calibration of such cameras is getting more important. There are many reasons why the measurements of objects are not accurate. The largest reason is that the lens has a distortion. Another detrimental influence on the evaluation accuracy is caused by the perspective distortions in the image. They happen whenever we cannot mount the camera perpendicularly to the objects we want to measure. In overall, it is very important for students to understand how to correct lens distortions, that is camera calibration. If the camera is calibrated, the images are rectificated, and then it is possible to obtain undistorted measurements in world coordinates. This paper presents how the students should develop a sense of active learning for mathematical camera model besides the theoretical scientific basics. The authors will present the theoretical and practical lectures which have the goal of deepening the students understanding of the mathematical models of area scan cameras and building some practical vision measurement process by themselves.

Predicting Virtual World User Population Fluctuations with Deep Learning

PubMed Central

Park, Nuri; Zhang, Qimeng; Kim, Jun Gi; Kang, Shin Jin; Kim, Chang Hun

2016-01-01

This paper proposes a system for predicting increases in virtual world user actions. The virtual world user population is a very important aspect of these worlds; however, methods for predicting fluctuations in these populations have not been well documented. Therefore, we attempt to predict changes in virtual world user populations with deep learning, using easily accessible online data, including formal datasets from Google Trends, Wikipedia, and online communities, as well as informal datasets collected from online forums. We use the proposed system to analyze the user population of EVE Online, one of the largest virtual worlds. PMID:27936009

Predicting Virtual World User Population Fluctuations with Deep Learning.

PubMed

Kim, Young Bin; Park, Nuri; Zhang, Qimeng; Kim, Jun Gi; Kang, Shin Jin; Kim, Chang Hun

2016-01-01

This paper proposes a system for predicting increases in virtual world user actions. The virtual world user population is a very important aspect of these worlds; however, methods for predicting fluctuations in these populations have not been well documented. Therefore, we attempt to predict changes in virtual world user populations with deep learning, using easily accessible online data, including formal datasets from Google Trends, Wikipedia, and online communities, as well as informal datasets collected from online forums. We use the proposed system to analyze the user population of EVE Online, one of the largest virtual worlds.

Information-theoretic approach to interactive learning

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Still, S.

2009-01-01

The principles of statistical mechanics and information theory play an important role in learning and have inspired both theory and the design of numerous machine learning algorithms. The new aspect in this paper is a focus on integrating feedback from the learner. A quantitative approach to interactive learning and adaptive behavior is proposed, integrating model- and decision-making into one theoretical framework. This paper follows simple principles by requiring that the observer's world model and action policy should result in maximal predictive power at minimal complexity. Classes of optimal action policies and of optimal models are derived from an objective function that reflects this trade-off between prediction and complexity. The resulting optimal models then summarize, at different levels of abstraction, the process's causal organization in the presence of the learner's actions. A fundamental consequence of the proposed principle is that the learner's optimal action policies balance exploration and control as an emerging property. Interestingly, the explorative component is present in the absence of policy randomness, i.e. in the optimal deterministic behavior. This is a direct result of requiring maximal predictive power in the presence of feedback.

Optimal control in microgrid using multi-agent reinforcement learning.

PubMed

Li, Fu-Dong; Wu, Min; He, Yong; Chen, Xin

2012-11-01

This paper presents an improved reinforcement learning method to minimize electricity costs on the premise of satisfying the power balance and generation limit of units in a microgrid with grid-connected mode. Firstly, the microgrid control requirements are analyzed and the objective function of optimal control for microgrid is proposed. Then, a state variable "Average Electricity Price Trend" which is used to express the most possible transitions of the system is developed so as to reduce the complexity and randomicity of the microgrid, and a multi-agent architecture including agents, state variables, action variables and reward function is formulated. Furthermore, dynamic hierarchical reinforcement learning, based on change rate of key state variable, is established to carry out optimal policy exploration. The analysis shows that the proposed method is beneficial to handle the problem of "curse of dimensionality" and speed up learning in the unknown large-scale world. Finally, the simulation results under JADE (Java Agent Development Framework) demonstrate the validity of the presented method in optimal control for a microgrid with grid-connected mode. Copyright © 2012 ISA. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Curiosity driven reinforcement learning for motion planning on humanoids

PubMed Central

Frank, Mikhail; Leitner, Jürgen; Stollenga, Marijn; Förster, Alexander; Schmidhuber, Jürgen

2014-01-01

Most previous work on artificial curiosity (AC) and intrinsic motivation focuses on basic concepts and theory. Experimental results are generally limited to toy scenarios, such as navigation in a simulated maze, or control of a simple mechanical system with one or two degrees of freedom. To study AC in a more realistic setting, we embody a curious agent in the complex iCub humanoid robot. Our novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework consists of a state-of-the-art, low-level, reactive control layer, which controls the iCub while respecting constraints, and a high-level curious agent, which explores the iCub's state-action space through information gain maximization, learning a world model from experience, controlling the actual iCub hardware in real-time. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first ever embodied, curious agent for real-time motion planning on a humanoid. We demonstrate that it can learn compact Markov models to represent large regions of the iCub's configuration space, and that the iCub explores intelligently, showing interest in its physical constraints as well as in objects it finds in its environment. PMID:24432001

A Wittgenstein Approach to the Learning of OO-modeling

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Holmboe, Christian

2004-12-01

The paper uses Ludwig Wittgenstein's theories about the relationship between thought, language, and objects of the world to explore the assumption that OO-thinking resembles natural thinking. The paper imports from research in linguistic philosophy to computer science education research. I show how UML class diagrams (i.e., an artificial context-free language) correspond to the logically perfect languages described in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein disputes his previous theories by showing that natural languages are not constructed by rules of mathematical logic, but are language games where the meaning of a word is constructed through its use in social contexts. Contradicting the claim that OO-thinking is easy to learn because of its similarity to natural thinking, I claim that OO-thinking is difficult to learn because of its differences from natural thinking. The nature of these differences is not currently well known or appreciated. I suggest how explicit attention to the nature and implications of different language games may improve the teaching and learning of OO-modeling as well as programming.

Future Game Developers within a Virtual World: Learner Archetypes and Team Leader Attributes

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Franetovic, Marija

2016-01-01

This case study research sought to understand a subset of the next generation in reference to virtual world learning within a game development course. The students completed an ill-structured team project which was facilitated using authentic learning strategies within a virtual world over a period of seven weeks. Research findings emerged from…

World War II Memorial Learning Activities.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tennessee State Dept. of Education, Nashville.

These learning activities can help students get the most out of a visit to the Tennessee World War II Memorial, a group of ten pylons located in Nashville (Tennessee). Each pylon contains informational text about the events of World War II. The ten pylons are listed as: (1) "Pylon E-1--Terror: America Enters the War against Fascism, June…

A World-Class Education: Learning from International Models of Excellence and Innovation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stewart, Vivien

2012-01-01

Typical comparisons of schools in the United States to those in other countries ignore critical factors and overlook potential lessons learned. But here's a book that reveals what the best schools from around the world are doing to educate students for a rapidly changing innovation-based world. Find out that American education has not "gotten…

Designing and Developing Game-Like Learning Experience in Virtual Worlds: Challenges and Design Decisions of Novice Instructional Designers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yilmaz, Turkan Karakus; Cagiltay, Kursat

2016-01-01

Many virtual worlds have been adopted for implementation within educational settings because they are potentially useful for building effective learning environments. Since the flexibility of virtual worlds challenges to obtain effective and efficient educational outcomes, the design of such platforms need more attention. In the present study, the…

Changing the Landscape of Learning: Critical Factors in Open and Distance Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Oyeleke, Oluniyi; Olugbenga, Foluso Aribaba; Oluwayemi, Olagunju Elizabeth; Sunday, Ayamolowo Joseph

2015-01-01

Technology is changing our world. The advancement in science and technology has propelled a drastic change in nature and structure of the modern world. Events that look weird or impossible years back are part of "normal" things in our contemporary world. Education has had its share of the paradigm shift in the anal of technological…

Exploring Factors of Media Characteristic Influencing Flow in Learning through Virtual Worlds

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Choi, Beomkyu; Baek, Youngkyun

2011-01-01

This study aims to find out factors of media characteristic which are considered to influence flow in learning through virtual worlds. One hundred ninety eight elementary students who are eleven to twelve years old participated in this study. After the exploratory factor analysis, to extract media characteristics of virtual worlds, seventy-eight…

Auroras and Space Weather Celebrating the International Heliophysics Year in Classroom

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Craig, N.; Peticolas, L. M.; Angelopoulos, V.; Thompson, B.

2007-05-01

2007 Celebrates the International Heliophysics year and its outreach has a primary objective, to "demonstrate the beauty, relevance and significance of Space and Earth Science to the world." NASA's first five-satellite mission, THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms), was launched on February 17, 2007 and is to investigate a key mystery surrounding the dynamics of the auroras- when, where, and how are they triggered? When the five probes align perfectly over the North American continent- every four days - and with 20 ground stations in Northern Canada and Alaska with automated, all-sky cameras will document the auroras from Earth. To monitor the large-scale local effects of the currents in space, THEMIS Education and Outreach program has installed 10 ground magnetometers, instruments that measure Earth's magnetic field, in competitively selected rural schools around the country and receive data. The THEMIS Education and Outreach Program shares the IHY objective by bringing in this live local space weather data in the classrooms and engaging the teachers and students on authentic research in the classroom. The data are displayed on the school computer monitors as well as on the THEMIS E/PO website providing the local data to the science mission as well as schools. Teachers use the data to teach about the aurora not only in math and science, but also in Earth science, history and art. These students and their teachers are our ambassadors to rural America and share the excitement of learning and teaching with their regional teachers. We will share how authentic space science data related to Earth's magnetic field and auroras can be understood, researched, predicted and shared via the internet to any school around the globe that wished to be part of tracking solar storms. Complimenting IHY, World Space Week will take place from October 4-10th and this year. World Space week is "an international celebration of science and technology, and their contribution to the betterment of the human condition." THEMIS will take part in World Space Week as a feature science mission with its education program contributing materials to the project so that students around the world can learn more about Earth's magnetic field, magnetic storms and substorms, and beautiful auroras. To facilitate the use of some of our magnetism materials around the world, we will provide some of our activities in German and Spanish on the web.

CaseWorld™: Interactive, media rich, multidisciplinary case based learning.

PubMed

Gillham, David; Tucker, Katie; Parker, Steve; Wright, Victoria; Kargillis, Christina

2015-11-01

Nurse educators are challenged to keep up with highly specialised clinical practice, emerging research evidence, regulation requirements and rapidly changing information technology while teaching very large numbers of diverse students in a resource constrained environment. This complex setting provides the context for the CaseWorld project, which aims to simulate those aspects of clinical practice that can be represented by e-learning. This paper describes the development, implementation and evaluation of CaseWorld, a simulated learning environment that supports case based learning. CaseWorld provides nursing students with the opportunity to view unfolding authentic cases presented in a rich multimedia context. The first round of comprehensive summative evaluation of CaseWorld is discussed in the context of earlier formative evaluation, reference group input and strategies for integration of CaseWorld with subject content. This discussion highlights the unique approach taken in this project that involved simultaneous prototype development and large scale implementation, thereby necessitating strong emphasis on staff development, uptake and engagement. The lessons learned provide an interesting basis for further discussion of broad content sharing across disciplines and universities, and the contribution that local innovations can make to global education advancement. Crown Copyright © 2015. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

77 FR 7655 - Culturally Significant Objects Imported for Exhibition Determinations: “Inventing the Modern...

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2012-02-13

... DEPARTMENT OF STATE [Public Notice 7795] Culturally Significant Objects Imported for Exhibition Determinations: ``Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World's Fairs, 1851-1939'' SUMMARY: Notice... objects to be included in the exhibition ``Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World's...

An international virtual medical school (IVIMEDS): the future for medical education?

PubMed

Harden, R M; Hart, I R

2002-05-01

The introduction of new learning technologies, the exponential growth of Internet usage and the advent of the World Wide Web have the potential of changing the face of higher education. There are also demands in medical education for greater globalization, for the development of a common core curriculum, for improving access to training, for more flexible and student-centred training programmes including programmes with multi-professional elements and for maintaining quality while increasing student numbers and working within financial constraints. An international virtual medical school (IVIMEDS) with a high-quality education programme embodying a hybrid model of a blended curriculum of innovative e-learning approaches and the best of traditional face-to-face teaching is one response to these challenges. Fifty leading international medical schools and institutions are participating in a feasibility study. This is exploring: innovative thinking and approaches to the new learning technologies including e-learning and virtual reality; new approaches to curriculum planning and mapping and advanced instructional design based on the use of 'reusable learning objects'; an international perspective on medical education which takes into account the trend to globalization; a flexible curriculum which meets the needs of different students and has the potential of increasing access to medicine.

Constrained Low-Rank Learning Using Least Squares-Based Regularization.

PubMed

Li, Ping; Yu, Jun; Wang, Meng; Zhang, Luming; Cai, Deng; Li, Xuelong

2017-12-01

Low-rank learning has attracted much attention recently due to its efficacy in a rich variety of real-world tasks, e.g., subspace segmentation and image categorization. Most low-rank methods are incapable of capturing low-dimensional subspace for supervised learning tasks, e.g., classification and regression. This paper aims to learn both the discriminant low-rank representation (LRR) and the robust projecting subspace in a supervised manner. To achieve this goal, we cast the problem into a constrained rank minimization framework by adopting the least squares regularization. Naturally, the data label structure tends to resemble that of the corresponding low-dimensional representation, which is derived from the robust subspace projection of clean data by low-rank learning. Moreover, the low-dimensional representation of original data can be paired with some informative structure by imposing an appropriate constraint, e.g., Laplacian regularizer. Therefore, we propose a novel constrained LRR method. The objective function is formulated as a constrained nuclear norm minimization problem, which can be solved by the inexact augmented Lagrange multiplier algorithm. Extensive experiments on image classification, human pose estimation, and robust face recovery have confirmed the superiority of our method.

Intelligent Discovery for Learning Objects Using Semantic Web Technologies

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hsu, I-Ching

2012-01-01

The concept of learning objects has been applied in the e-learning field to promote the accessibility, reusability, and interoperability of learning content. Learning Object Metadata (LOM) was developed to achieve these goals by describing learning objects in order to provide meaningful metadata. Unfortunately, the conventional LOM lacks the…

Sociomateriality in medical practice and learning: attuning to what matters.

PubMed

Fenwick, Tara

2014-01-01

In current debates about professional practice and education, increasing emphasis is placed on understanding learning as a process of ongoing participation rather than one of acquiring knowledge and skills. However, although this socio-cultural view is important and useful, issues have emerged in studies of practice-based learning that point to certain oversights. Three issues are described here: (i) the limited attention paid to the importance of materiality - objects, technologies, nature, etc.-- in questions of learning; (ii) the human-centric view of practice that fails to note the relations among social and material forces, and (iii) the conflicts between ideals of evidence-based standardised models and the sociomaterial contingencies of clinical practice. It is argued here that a socio-material approach to practice and learning offers important insights for medical education. This view is in line with a growing field of research in the materiality of everyday life, which embraces wide-ranging families of theory that can be only briefly mentioned in this short paper. The main premise they share is that social and material forces, culture, nature and technology, are enmeshed in everyday practice. Objects and humans act upon one another in ways that mutually transform their characteristics and activity. Examples from research in medical practice show how materials actively influence clinical practice, how learning itself is a material matter, how protocols are in fact temporary sociomaterial achievements, and how practices form unique and sometimes conflicting sociomaterial worlds, with diverse diagnostic and treatment approaches for the same thing. This discussion concludes with implications for learning in practice. What is required is a shift from an emphasis on acquiring knowledge to participating more wisely in particular situations. This focus is on learning how to attune to minor material fluctuations and surprises, how to track one's own and others' effects on 'intra-actions' and emerging effects, and how to improvise solutions. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

The effectiveness of using WebCT in distance learning programmes in MACE, the University of Manchester

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ahmad, Rosman

The World Wide Web impacted the educational model and became part of distance education early in this century. There were many changes taking place in higher education for political, economic and educational reasons." New goals and educational objectives were being set within educational institutions. There were particular emphases to produce a more effective delivery of learning methods for distance learning students. The use of Internet was seen as an important issue in the development of an understanding of the complex process of instilling knowledge to post graduates students. Well-established universities were re-examining their missions and looking for different ways of providing lifelong education. The School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering (MACE) was particularly keen to increase the use of web-based learning in its courses, which will increase the amount of students enrolled into these programmes and help them learn in a flexible and workable manner. This approach was reinforced by responses from a survey of MSc. degree students which suggested that the current distance learning programme were not being operated efficiently and did not develop adequate personal skills in relation to the requirements of prospective employers. One way of improving these programmes was to make use of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). A study was made and WebCT was found to be suitable. Five WebCT units were initially produced. The experience of designing and running the units was very useful in determining the effective use of the WebCT. From the analysis of students and staff surveys it has been demonstrated that these WebCT units are much more effective in achieving the project objectives in a wide number of areas which relate to students satisfaction, skills development and enhancing their interest into learning experience. The success of the WebCT units has stimulated interest in overseas establishments. It is hope that the success will follow in the author's home country, Malaysia.

Integrating machine learning techniques and high-resolution imagery to generate GIS-ready information for urban water consumption studies

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wolf, Nils; Hof, Angela

2012-10-01

Urban sprawl driven by shifts in tourism development produces new suburban landscapes of water consumption on Mediterranean coasts. Golf courses, ornamental, 'Atlantic' gardens and swimming pools are the most striking artefacts of this transformation, threatening the local water supply systems and exacerbating water scarcity. In the face of climate change, urban landscape irrigation is becoming increasingly important from a resource management point of view. This paper adopts urban remote sensing towards a targeted mapping approach using machine learning techniques and highresolution satellite imagery (WorldView-2) to generate GIS-ready information for urban water consumption studies. Swimming pools, vegetation and - as a subgroup of vegetation - turf grass are extracted as important determinants of water consumption. For image analysis, the complex nature of urban environments suggests spatial-spectral classification, i.e. the complementary use of the spectral signature and spatial descriptors. Multiscale image segmentation provides means to extract the spatial descriptors - namely object feature layers - which can be concatenated at pixel level to the spectral signature. This study assesses the value of object features using different machine learning techniques and amounts of labeled information for learning. The results indicate the benefit of the spatial-spectral approach if combined with appropriate classifiers like tree-based ensembles or support vector machines, which can handle high dimensionality. Finally, a Random Forest classifier was chosen to deliver the classified input data for the estimation of evaporative water loss and net landscape irrigation requirements.

Imagination and Meta-Linguistic Awareness in the Development of Literacy

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Herriman, Michael

2005-01-01

In this essay I argue that when children come to school they are confronted by an intervention in their learning, and comprehension of the world in general, that contrasts with the experiences of learning that they have generated previously to make sense of their world. Prior to schooling, where learning is directed from outside, children have…

E-Strategies to Support Rural Education in India

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Misra, Pradeep Kumar

2006-01-01

The World Declaration on Education for All in 1990 and the World Education Forum in Dakar in 2000 reaffirmed the right to learn and a commitment to meet the basic learning needs of all people by expanding learning opportunities and working for a fully literate society. In the Indian context, especially in rural India, it is still a cherished…

Impacts of Integrating the Repertory Grid into an Augmented Reality-Based Learning Design on Students' Learning Achievements, Cognitive Load and Degree of Satisfaction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wu, Po-Han; Hwang, Gwo-Jen; Yang, Mei-Ling; Chen, Chih-Hung

2018-01-01

Augmented reality (AR) offers potential advantages for intensifying environmental context awareness and augmenting students' experiences in real-world environments by dynamically overlapping digital materials with a real-world environment. However, some challenges to AR learning environments have been described, such as participants' cognitive…

Unleashing the Power of Science in Early Childhood: A Foundation for High-Quality Interactions and Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Greenfield, Daryl B.; Alexander, Alexandra; Frechette, Elizabeth

2017-01-01

When science is integrated into early childhood learning experiences, it becomes a critical area supporting young children's development. Young children are natural scientists, curious about their world, and they engage in scientific practices to learn about and explore their world. This article describes how the K-12 Framework for Science…

Problem-Based Learning Pedagogies: Psychological Processes and Enhancement of Intelligences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tan, Oon-Seng

2007-01-01

Education in this 21st century is concerned with developing intelligences. Problem solving in real-world contexts involves multiple ways of knowing and learning. Intelligence in the real world involves not only learning how to do things effectively but also more importantly the ability to deal with novelty and growing our capacity to adapt, select…

Web-Based English Language Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sarica, Gulcin Nagehan; Cavus, Nadire

2008-01-01

Knowledge of another language is an advantage and it gives people to look at the world and in particular to the world's cultures with a broader perspective. Learning English as a second language is the process by which students learn it in addition to their native language. Today, internet is an important part of our lives as English. For this…

GEARS a 3D Virtual Learning Environment and Virtual Social and Educational World Used in Online Secondary Schools

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Barkand, Jonathan; Kush, Joseph

2009-01-01

Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) are becoming increasingly popular in online education environments and have multiple pedagogical advantages over more traditional approaches to education. VLEs include 3D worlds where students can engage in simulated learning activities such as Second Life. According to Claudia L'Amoreaux at Linden Lab, "at…

Teaching and Learning Logic Programming in Virtual Worlds Using Interactive Microworld Representations

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vosinakis, Spyros; Anastassakis, George; Koutsabasis, Panayiotis

2018-01-01

Logic Programming (LP) follows the declarative programming paradigm, which novice students often find hard to grasp. The limited availability of visual teaching aids for LP can lead to low motivation for learning. In this paper, we present a platform for teaching and learning Prolog in Virtual Worlds, which enables the visual interpretation and…

Public Participation, Education, and Engagement in Drought Planning

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bathke, D. J.; Wall, N.; Haigh, T.; Smith, K. H.; Bernadt, T.

2014-12-01

Drought is a complex problem that typically goes beyond the capacity, resources, and jurisdiction of any single person, program, organization, political boundary, or sector. Thus, by nature, monitoring, planning for, and reducing drought risk must be a collaborative process. The National Drought Mitigation Center, in partnership with the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) Program Office and others, provides active engagement and education drought professionals, stakeholders, and the general public about managing drought-related risks through resilience planning, monitoring, and education. Using case studies, we discuss recruitment processes, network building, participation techniques, and educational methods as they pertain to a variety of unique audiences with distinct objectives. Examples include collaborative decision-making at a World Meteorological Organization conference; planning, and peer-learning among drought professionals in a community of practice; drought condition monitoring through citizen science networks; research and education dissemination with stakeholder groups; and informal learning activities for all ages. Finally, we conclude with evaluation methods, indicators of success, and lessons learned for increasing the effectiveness of our programs in increasing drought resilience.

MO-B-16A-02: In Memoriam of Donald D. Tolbert: Surviving the Politics of Radiation Therapy

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Bayouth, J; Limmer, J

Today's healthcare work environment is ever-changing and without a doubt will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. How physicists are employed, evaluated, and valued are important aspects of our careers. With increasing demands and challenges being placed on the medical physics workforce, it is important to have the skills and knowledge to prepare for potential challenges to the status-quo of our employment status. Surviving in a world of change, consolidation, increased workload, and financial constraints is not a given, and preparing for those changes and challenges will benefit individuals as well as the medical physics community at large.more » Learning Objectives: Understand the challenges of succeeding in different work environments. Learn strategies to help define the role of a medical physicist to various administrators, physicians, and department staff and directors. Learn how to successfully communicate and interact with University, Hospital, and Department administrators.« less

Using immersive healthcare simulation for physiology education: initial experience in high school, college, and graduate school curricula.

PubMed

Oriol, Nancy E; Hayden, Emily M; Joyal-Mowschenson, Julie; Muret-Wagstaff, Sharon; Faux, Russell; Gordon, James A

2011-09-01

In the natural world, learning emerges from the joy of play, experimentation, and inquiry as part of everyday life. However, this kind of informal learning is often difficult to integrate within structured educational curricula. This report describes an educational program that embeds naturalistic learning into formal high school, college, and graduate school science class work. Our experience is based on work with hundreds of high school, college, and graduate students enrolled in traditional science classes in which mannequin simulators were used to teach physiological principles. Specific case scenarios were integrated into the curriculum as problem-solving exercises chosen to accentuate the basic science objectives of the course. This report also highlights the historic and theoretical basis for the use of mannequin simulators as an important physiology education tool and outlines how the authors' experience in healthcare education has been effectively translated to nonclinical student populations. Particular areas of focus include critical-thinking and problem-solving behaviors and student reflections on the impact of the teaching approach.

EFL/ESL Textbook Selection in Korea and East Asia - Relevant Issues and Literature Review

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Meurant, Robert C.

EFL/ESL departments periodically face the problem of textbook selection. Cogent issues are that non-native speakers will use L2 English mainly to communicate with other non-native English speakers, so an American accent is becoming less important. L2 English will mainly be used in computer-mediated communication, hence the importance of L2 Digital Literacy. The convergence of Information Communication Technologies is radically impacting Second Language Acquisition, which is integrating web-hosted Assessment and Learning Management Systems. EFL/ESL textbooks need to be compatible with blended learning, prepare students for a globalized world, and foster autonomous learning. I summarize five papers on EFL/ESL textbook evaluation and selection, and include relevant material for adaptation. Textbooks are major sources of contact with the target language, so selection is an important decision. Educators need to be systematic and objective in their approach, adopting a selection process that is open, transparent, accountable, participatory, informed and rigorous.

Assessing Learning, Quality and Engagement in Learning Objects: The Learning Object Evaluation Scale for Students (LOES-S)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kay, Robin H.; Knaack, Liesel

2009-01-01

Learning objects are interactive web-based tools that support the learning of specific concepts by enhancing, amplifying, and/or guiding the cognitive processes of learners. Research on the impact, effectiveness, and usefulness of learning objects is limited, partially because comprehensive, theoretically based, reliable, and valid evaluation…

Liberating Learning Object Design from the Learning Style of Student Instructional Designers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Akpinar, Yavuz

2007-01-01

Learning objects are a new form of learning resource, and the design of these digital environments has many facets. To investigate senior instructional design students' use of reflection tools in designing learning objects, a series of studies was conducted using the Reflective Action Instructional Design and Learning Object Review Instrument…

Digital Natives: Back to the Future of Microworlds in a Corporate Learning Organization

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cabanero-Johnson, Paz Susan; Berge, Zane

2009-01-01

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide description and an analysis of two worlds colliding where real-world roles or ideas play out in a virtual dimension. Inhabited by digital natives, the virtual world in a learning organization is a journey back to the future of microworlds where the only limitation is one's imagination.…

Learning Objects and Gerontology

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Weinreich, Donna M.; Tompkins, Catherine J.

2006-01-01

Virtual AGE (vAGE) is an asynchronous educational environment that utilizes learning objects focused on gerontology and a learning anytime/anywhere philosophy. This paper discusses the benefits of asynchronous instruction and the process of creating learning objects. Learning objects are "small, reusable chunks of instructional media" Wiley…

Spatial learning while navigating with severely degraded viewing: The role of attention and mobility monitoring

PubMed Central

Rand, Kristina M.; Creem-Regehr, Sarah H.; Thompson, William B.

2015-01-01

The ability to navigate without getting lost is an important aspect of quality of life. In five studies, we evaluated how spatial learning is affected by the increased demands of keeping oneself safe while walking with degraded vision (mobility monitoring). We proposed that safe low-vision mobility requires attentional resources, providing competition for those needed to learn a new environment. In Experiments 1 and 2 participants navigated along paths in a real-world indoor environment with simulated degraded vision or normal vision. Memory for object locations seen along the paths was better with normal compared to degraded vision. With degraded vision, memory was better when participants were guided by an experimenter (low monitoring demands) versus unguided (high monitoring demands). In Experiments 3 and 4, participants walked while performing an auditory task. Auditory task performance was superior with normal compared to degraded vision. With degraded vision, auditory task performance was better when guided compared to unguided. In Experiment 5, participants performed both the spatial learning and auditory tasks under degraded vision. Results showed that attention mediates the relationship between mobility-monitoring demands and spatial learning. These studies suggest that more attention is required and spatial learning is impaired when navigating with degraded viewing. PMID:25706766

Applying Organ Clearance Concepts in a Clinical Setting

PubMed Central

2008-01-01

Objective To teach doctor of pharmacy (PharmD) students how to apply organ clearance concepts in a clinical setting in order to optimize dose management, select the right drug product, and promote better patient-centered care practices. Design A student-focused 5-hour topic entitled "Organ Clearance Concepts: Modeling and Clinical Applications" was developed and delivered to second-year PharmD students. Active-learning techniques, such as reading assignments and thought-provoking questions, and collaborative learning techniques, such as small groups, were used. Student learning was assessed using application cards and a minute paper. Assessment Overall student responses to topic presentation were overwhelmingly positive. The teaching strategies here discussed allowed students to play an active role in their own learning process and provided the necessary connection to keep them motivated, as mentioned in the application cards and minute paper assessments. Students scored an average of 88% on the examination given at the end of the course. Conclusion By incorporating active-learning and collaborative-learning techniques in presenting material on organ clearance concept, students gained a more thorough knowledge of dose management and drug-drug interactions than if the concepts had been presented using a traditional lecture format. This knowledge will help students in solving critical patient situations in a real-world context. PMID:19214275

Multiuser virtual worlds in healthcare education: A systematic review.

PubMed

Liaw, Sok Ying; Carpio, Guiller Augustin C; Lau, Ying; Tan, Seng Chee; Lim, Wee Shiong; Goh, Poh Sun

2018-06-01

The use of multiuser virtual worlds (MUVWs) for collaborative learning has generated interest among healthcare educators. Published evidence to support its use is growing, but none has synthesized the evidence to guide future work. This study sought to provide a comprehensive and systematic evaluation of MUVWs in healthcare education. A systematic review METHODS: A systematic search of five databases including CINAHL, Cochrane library, EMBASE, PubMed, and Scopus, was conducted from inception up to January 2017. Two independent researchers selected studies that met the inclusion criteria and assessed for methodological quality using the Medical Education Research Study Quality Instrument (MERSQI). A total of 18 studies were reviewed and their data were synthesized narratively using a 3-P model (presage-process-product). Average scores in the MERSQI for methodological quality are 10/18, which is modest. A rally by the government or professional bodies towards more collaborative working among healthcare professionals is a key driver behind implementing MUVWs. Funding is important for its development and evaluation. Team training in acute care and communication training were the most frequent learning objectives, and predominant learning activities include practice on simulation scenario and debriefing. Two-thirds of the studies did not explain their theoretical framework that underpinned their design and implementation of MUVWs. While MUVWs in healthcare education is generally well-received, learning outcomes remain inconclusive. Despite a growth of studies on the use of MUVW in healthcare education, there is a need for more understanding of the application of theories to inform the learning activities. Therefore, we suggest educators to incorporate a theoretical model to explain the learning processes behind MUVWs. To improve the quality of evidence, we call for researchers to employ a more rigorous and broader approach to evaluation that explicates longer-term outcomes, including cost benefit analyses. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Inferring difficulty: Flexibility in the real-time processing of disfluency

PubMed Central

Heller, Daphna; Arnold, Jennifer E.; Klein, Natalie M.; Tanenhaus, Michael K.

2015-01-01

Upon hearing a disfluent referring expression, listeners expect the speaker to refer to an object that is previously-unmentioned, an object that does not have a straightforward label, or an object that requires a longer description. Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments examined whether listeners directly associate disfluency with these properties of objects, or whether disfluency attribution is more flexible and involves situation-specific inferences. Since in natural situations reference to objects that do not have a straightforward label or that require a longer description is correlated with both production difficulty and with disfluency, we used a mini artificial lexicon to dissociate difficulty from these properties, building on the fact that recently-learned names take longer to produce than existing words in one’s mental lexicon. The results demonstrate that disfluency attribution involves situation-specific inferences; we propose that in new situations listeners spontaneously infer what may cause production difficulty. However, the results show that these situation-specific inferences are limited in scope: listeners assessed difficulty relative to their own experience with the artificial names, and did not adapt to the assumed knowledge of the speaker. PMID:26677642

On the Changing Nature of Learning Context: Anticipating the Virtual Extensions of the World

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Westera, Wim

2011-01-01

Contextual learning starts from the premise that learning cannot take place in a vacuum, but should somehow be connected with real world attributes to make sense to learners. Today, digital media tend to bring about new dimensions of context: internet connections and mobile devices enable learners to overcome restrictions of time and location, and…

Unpacking Frames of Reference to Inform the Design of Virtual World Learning in Higher Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wimpenny, Katherine; Savin-Baden, Maggi; Mawer, Matt; Steils, Nicole; Tombs, Gemma

2012-01-01

In the changing context of globalised higher education, a series of pedagogical shifts have occurred, and with them, a number of interactive learning approaches have emerged. This article reports on findings taken from a large-scale study that explored the socio-political impact of virtual world learning on higher education in the UK, specifically…

Effects of Learning Style and Training Method on Computer Attitude and Performance in World Wide Web Page Design Training.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chou, Huey-Wen; Wang, Yu-Fang

1999-01-01

Compares the effects of two training methods on computer attitude and performance in a World Wide Web page design program in a field experiment with high school students in Taiwan. Discusses individual differences, Kolb's Experiential Learning Theory and Learning Style Inventory, Computer Attitude Scale, and results of statistical analyses.…

Cases on Successful E-Learning Practices in the Developed and Developing World: Methods for the Global Information Economy

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Olaniran, Bolanle A., Ed.

2010-01-01

E-learning has become a significant aspect of training and education in the worldwide information economy as an attempt to create and facilitate a competent global work force. "Cases on Successful E-Learning Practices in the Developed and Developing World: Methods for the Global Information Economy" provides eclectic accounts of case…

Service-Learning and Student Diversity Outcomes: Existing Evidence and Directions for Future Research

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Holsapple, Matthew A.

2012-01-01

As today's business world and society become more diverse, it is essential for colleges and universities to prepare students to work and live in that diverse world, and service-learning is one tool for that education. This study presents a critical review of 55 studies of the impact of service-learning participation on students' diversity…

From Authoritative Discourse to Internally Persuasive Discourse: Discursive Evolution in Teaching and Learning the Language of Science

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hsu, Pei-Ling; Roth, Wolff-Michael

2014-01-01

Learning science interpreted in existing theoretical frameworks often means that students are assimilated, accommodated or enculturated from the entity of the vernacular world to the entity of the scientific world. However, there are some unsolved questions as to how students can best learn purely a new language or new knowledge of science. The…

A Distance Learning Review--The Communicational Module "Learning on Demand--Anywhere at Any Time"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tatkovic, Nevenka; Ruzic, Maja

2004-01-01

The society of knowledge refers to the society marked with the principle which requires that knowledge, information and life-time learning hold a key to success in the world of IT technology. Internet, World Wide Web, Web Based Education and ever so growing speed of IT and communicational technologies have enabled the application of new modes,…

GIS learning tool for world's largest earthquakes and their causes

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chatterjee, Moumita

The objective of this thesis is to increase awareness about earthquakes among people, especially young students by showing the five largest and two most predictable earthquake locations in the world and their plate tectonic settings. This is a geographic based interactive tool which could be used for learning about the cause of great earthquakes in the past and the safest places on the earth in order to avoid direct effect of earthquakes. This approach provides an effective way of learning for the students as it is very user friendly and more aligned to the interests of the younger generation. In this tool the user can click on the various points located on the world map which will open a picture and link to the webpage for that point, showing detailed information of the earthquake history of that place including magnitude of quake, year of past quakes and the plate tectonic settings that made this place earthquake prone. Apart from knowing the earthquake related information students will also be able to customize the tool to suit their needs or interests. Students will be able to add/remove layers, measure distance between any two points on the map, select any place on the map and know more information for that place, create a layer from this set to do a detail analysis, run a query, change display settings, etc. At the end of this tool the user has to go through the earthquake safely guidelines in order to be safe during an earthquake. This tool uses Java as programming language and uses Map Objects Java Edition (MOJO) provided by ESRI. This tool is developed for educational purpose and hence its interface has been kept simple and easy to use so that students can gain maximum knowledge through it instead of having a hard time to install it. There are lots of details to explore which can help more about what a GIS based tool is capable of. Only thing needed to run this tool is latest JAVA edition installed in their machine. This approach makes study more fun and interactive while educating students about a very important natural disaster which has been threatening us in recent years. This tool has been developed to increase awareness of the cause and effect of earthquake and how to be safe if that kind of disaster happens.

Toddlers' word learning and transfer from electronic and print books.

PubMed

Strouse, Gabrielle A; Ganea, Patricia A

2017-04-01

Transfer from symbolic media to the real world can be difficult for young children. A sample of 73 toddlers aged 17 to 23months were read either an electronic book displayed on a touchscreen device or a traditional print book in which a novel object was paired with a novel label. Toddlers in both conditions learned the label within the context of the book. However, only those who read the traditional format book generalized and transferred the label to other contexts. An older group of 28 toddlers aged 24 to 30months did generalize and transfer from the electronic book. Across ages, those children who primarily used screens to watch prerecorded video at home transferred less from the electronic book than those with more diverse home media experiences. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Semantic guidance of eye movements in real-world scenes

PubMed Central

Hwang, Alex D.; Wang, Hsueh-Cheng; Pomplun, Marc

2011-01-01

The perception of objects in our visual world is influenced by not only their low-level visual features such as shape and color, but also their high-level features such as meaning and semantic relations among them. While it has been shown that low-level features in real-world scenes guide eye movements during scene inspection and search, the influence of semantic similarity among scene objects on eye movements in such situations has not been investigated. Here we study guidance of eye movements by semantic similarity among objects during real-world scene inspection and search. By selecting scenes from the LabelMe object-annotated image database and applying Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to the object labels, we generated semantic saliency maps of real-world scenes based on the semantic similarity of scene objects to the currently fixated object or the search target. An ROC analysis of these maps as predictors of subjects’ gaze transitions between objects during scene inspection revealed a preference for transitions to objects that were semantically similar to the currently inspected one. Furthermore, during the course of a scene search, subjects’ eye movements were progressively guided toward objects that were semantically similar to the search target. These findings demonstrate substantial semantic guidance of eye movements in real-world scenes and show its importance for understanding real-world attentional control. PMID:21426914

Semantic guidance of eye movements in real-world scenes.

PubMed

Hwang, Alex D; Wang, Hsueh-Cheng; Pomplun, Marc

2011-05-25

The perception of objects in our visual world is influenced by not only their low-level visual features such as shape and color, but also their high-level features such as meaning and semantic relations among them. While it has been shown that low-level features in real-world scenes guide eye movements during scene inspection and search, the influence of semantic similarity among scene objects on eye movements in such situations has not been investigated. Here we study guidance of eye movements by semantic similarity among objects during real-world scene inspection and search. By selecting scenes from the LabelMe object-annotated image database and applying latent semantic analysis (LSA) to the object labels, we generated semantic saliency maps of real-world scenes based on the semantic similarity of scene objects to the currently fixated object or the search target. An ROC analysis of these maps as predictors of subjects' gaze transitions between objects during scene inspection revealed a preference for transitions to objects that were semantically similar to the currently inspected one. Furthermore, during the course of a scene search, subjects' eye movements were progressively guided toward objects that were semantically similar to the search target. These findings demonstrate substantial semantic guidance of eye movements in real-world scenes and show its importance for understanding real-world attentional control. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Design Learning of Teaching Factory in Mechanical Engineering

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Putra, R. C.; Kusumah, I. H.; Komaro, M.; Rahayu, Y.; Asfiyanur, E. P.

2018-02-01

The industrial world that is the target of the process and learning outcomes of vocational high school (SMK) has its own character and nuance. Therefore, vocational education institutions in the learning process should be able to make the appropriate learning approach and in accordance with the industrial world. One approach to learning that is based on production and learning in the world of work is by industry-based learning or known as Teaching Factory, where in this model apply learning that involves direct students in goods or service activities are expected to have the quality so it is worth selling and accepted by consumers. The method used is descriptive approach. The purpose of this research is to get the design of the teaching factory based on the competency requirements of the graduates of the spouse industry, especially in the engineering department. The results of this study is expected to be one of the choice of model factory teaching in the field of machinery engineering in accordance with the products and competencies of the graduates that the industry needs.

Earth's Systems as Models of Ethical Behavior: The Basis for an Ethic of Sustainability

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lutz, T. M.

2014-12-01

The enormous advances in scientific understanding of the earth in the last 400 years led to a remarkable flourishing of humanity, but it also resulted in the disruption of critical systems on which we depend. Around the world, soil is lost faster than it forms; groundwater is withdrawn faster than it recharges; biodiversity and biocapacity are crashing; fossil fuels are 87% of our primary energy sources despite their many problems, including steadily rising emissions of CO2. Since 1600, science has honed an ethic of objectivity that insists that facts and values - scientific work and its real world outcomes - remain separate. As a result, our economy and society applaud as loudly when our graduates land jobs that further damage earth systems as when they seek to preserve them. Geoethics aims at the idea that balancing human action with the capacity of planetary systems is the primary "good." Without healthy systems, we cannot thrive. Period. Ethical systems developed to mediate human relations are inadequate to find this balance: they implicitly acknowledge a rationality that places the highest value on short-term growth and efficiency, not on living sustainably in the long run. The best paragon of sustainability is the co-evolution of life and other systems on our planet over 3.5 billion years. This presentation explores the contributions of Gregory Bateson and other scientists to understanding systems in cybernetic terms. Bateson suggested that "What we believe ourselves to be should be compatible with what we believe of the world around us." In other words, the path to a sustainable geoethics begins by re-internalizing lessons that humans alone in the biotic community seem to have forgotten. What are the "rules" by which systems sustain themselves? What do self-sustaining systems "value?" How can we help ourselves and our students learn them? I suggest that paying attention to the process of learning itself is an effective first step, and describe the use of a learning cycle model based on system cybernetics. The model provides a structure in which we and our students can reflect on our connections with the world and the limitations on what we can learn about it. I also show how to use campus and other landscapes to clarify the gap between human ethics and a sustainable geoethics.

Setting priorities for teaching and learning: an innovative needs assessment for a new family medicine program in Lao PDR.

PubMed

Kanashiro, Jeanie; Hollaar, Gwen; Wright, Bruce; Nammavongmixay, Khamphong; Roff, Sue

2007-03-01

Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) is a small, tropical, landlocked country in southeast Asia. It is one of the least developed countries in the region, and its socioeconomic indicators are among the lowest 25% in the world. The World Health Organization has long called for increased equity in primary health care access around the world. To meet this need in Lao PDR, the Family Medicine Specialist Program was developed, a Lao-generated postgraduate training program designed to produce community-oriented primary care practitioners to serve the rural, remote areas of Lao PDR, where 80% of the population lives. An innovative method of needs assessment was required to determine the health care priorities to be met by this new program. Through the use of a modified Delphi technique, local key leaders in medical education, clinical specialists, and teachers were consulted to develop prioritized objectives for the hospital-based curriculum of the program. By setting priorities for teaching and learning in the unique and needy circumstances of Lao PDR, a novel approach to curriculum planning in a low-income country was explored and ultimately formed the foundation of the new curriculum. This process served to direct the allocation of scarce resources during implementation of this groundbreaking program. More importantly, this model of needs assessment could potentially be used to customize medical curricula in other low-income countries facing challenges similar to those in Lao PDR.

Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation Training by Avatars: A Qualitative Study of Medical Students' Experiences Using a Multiplayer Virtual World.

PubMed

Creutzfeldt, Johan; Hedman, Leif; Felländer-Tsai, Li

2016-12-16

Emergency medical practices are often team efforts. Training for various tasks and collaborations may be carried out in virtual environments. Although promising results exist from studies of serious games, little is known about the subjective reactions of learners when using multiplayer virtual world (MVW) training in medicine. The objective of this study was to reach a better understanding of the learners' reactions and experiences when using an MVW for team training of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Twelve Swedish medical students participated in semistructured focus group discussions after CPR training in an MVW with partially preset options. The students' perceptions and feelings related to use of this educational tool were investigated. Using qualitative methodology, discussions were analyzed by a phenomenological data-driven approach. Quality measures included negotiations, back-and-forth reading, triangulation, and validation with the informants. Four categories characterizing the students' experiences could be defined: (1) Focused Mental Training, (2) Interface Diverting Focus From Training, (3) Benefits of Practicing in a Group, and (4) Easy Loss of Focus When Passive. We interpreted the results, compared them to findings of others, and propose advantages and risks of using virtual worlds for learning. Beneficial aspects of learning CPR in a virtual world were confirmed. To achieve high participant engagement and create good conditions for training, well-established procedures should be practiced. Furthermore, students should be kept in an active mode and frequent feedback should be utilized. It cannot be completely ruled out that the use of virtual training may contribute to erroneous self-beliefs that can affect later clinical performance. ©Johan Creutzfeldt, Leif Hedman, Li Felländer-Tsai. Originally published in JMIR Serious Games (http://games.jmir.org), 16.12.2016.

Issues and Challenges of Teaching and Learning in 3D Virtual Worlds: Real Life Case Studies

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pfeil, Ulrike; Ang, Chee Siang; Zaphiris, Panayiotis

2009-01-01

We aimed to study the characteristics and usage patterns of 3D virtual worlds in the context of teaching and learning. To achieve this, we organised a full-day workshop to explore, discuss and investigate the educational use of 3D virtual worlds. Thirty participants took part in the workshop. All conversations were recorded and transcribed for…

World History and Global Consciousness: A Case Study in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Quirin, James A.

2009-01-01

World history has become part of the "revolution in historical studies" since the 1960s, and a fast-growing area of college teaching in recent years. This article reports the author's research on his own world history-based course at Fisk University under the rubric of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). This SoTL research suggests…

Affordances and Constraints of Scaffolded Learning in a Virtual World for Young Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Black, Rebecca W.; Reich, Stephanie M.

2011-01-01

In recent years there has been a marked increase in the number of virtual worlds aimed at populations between the ages of 6 to14 years. This article examines the content and design of one such site, Webkinz World, as a sociocultural context for informal learning. Focusing on the design and activities of this site sheds light on the ways in which…

An Investigation on the Correlation of Learner Styles and Learning Objects Characteristics in a Proposed Learning Objects Management Model (LOMM)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wanapu, Supachanun; Fung, Chun Che; Kerdprasop, Nittaya; Chamnongsri, Nisachol; Niwattanakul, Suphakit

2016-01-01

The issues of accessibility, management, storage and organization of Learning Objects (LOs) in education systems are a high priority of the Thai Government. Incorporating personalized learning or learning styles in a learning object management system to improve the accessibility of LOs has been addressed continuously in the Thai education system.…

A real-world size organization of object responses in occipito-temporal cortex

PubMed Central

Konkle, Talia; Oliva, Aude

2012-01-01

SUMMARY While there are selective regions of occipito-temporal cortex that respond to faces, letters, and bodies, the large-scale neural organization of most object categories remains unknown. Here we find that object representations can be differentiated along the ventral temporal cortex by their real-world size. In a functional neuroimaging experiment, observers were shown pictures of big and small real-world objects (e.g. table, bathtub; paperclip, cup), presented at the same retinal size. We observed a consistent medial-to-lateral organization of big and small object preferences in the ventral temporal cortex, mirrored along the lateral surface. Regions in the lateral-occipital, infero-temporal, and parahippocampal cortices showed strong peaks of differential real-world size selectivity, and maintained these preferences over changes in retinal size and in mental imagery. These data demonstrate that the real-world size of objects can provide insight into the spatial topography of object representation. PMID:22726840

Implementing Courseware to Support Learning through Real-World Erroneous Examples: Students' Perceptions of Tertiary Courseware and Obstacles to Implementing Effective Delivery through VLE

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Monthienvichienchai, Rachada; Melis, Erica

2006-01-01

This paper presents a study in a UK university that investigated how first-year (freshman) Information Systems undergraduates perceive learning through courseware containing real-world erroneous examples derived from their peers and what obstacles had to be overcome to implement effective e-Learning support for using and creating such courseware.…

Facilitating Workplace Learning and Change: Lessons Learned from the Lectores in Pre-War Cigar Factories

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Germain, Marie-Line; Grenier, Robin S.

2015-01-01

Purpose: This study aims to describe the lectores (readers) who read the world news and works of literature to workers in pre-World War II cigar factories in Tampa, Florida, and in New York City. The paper addresses the need for more examination of some neglected aspects of workplace learning by presenting a more critical approach to workplace…

Second Life for Distance Language Learning: A Framework for Native/Non-Native Speaker Interactions in a Virtual World

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tusing, Jennifer; Berge, Zane L.

2010-01-01

This paper examines a number of theoretical principles governing second language teaching and learning and the ways in which these principles are being applied in 3D virtual worlds such as Second Life. Also examined are the benefits to language learning afforded by the Second Life interface, including access, the availability of native speakers of…

Emerging technologies in education and training: applications for the laboratory animal science community.

PubMed

Ketelhut, Diane Jass; Niemi, Steven M

2007-01-01

This article examines several new and exciting communication technologies. Many of the technologies were developed by the entertainment industry; however, other industries are adopting and modifying them for their own needs. These new technologies allow people to collaborate across distance and time and to learn in simulated work contexts. The article explores the potential utility of these technologies for advancing laboratory animal care and use through better education and training. Descriptions include emerging technologies such as augmented reality and multi-user virtual environments, which offer new approaches with different capabilities. Augmented reality interfaces, characterized by the use of handheld computers to infuse the virtual world into the real one, result in deeply immersive simulations. In these simulations, users can access virtual resources and communicate with real and virtual participants. Multi-user virtual environments enable multiple participants to simultaneously access computer-based three-dimensional virtual spaces, called "worlds," and to interact with digital tools. They allow for authentic experiences that promote collaboration, mentoring, and communication. Because individuals may learn or train differently, it is advantageous to combine the capabilities of these technologies and applications with more traditional methods to increase the number of students who are served by using current methods alone. The use of these technologies in animal care and use programs can create detailed training and education environments that allow students to learn the procedures more effectively, teachers to assess their progress more objectively, and researchers to gain insights into animal care.

Virtual Workshop Environment (VWE): A Taxonomy and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Framework for Modularized Virtual Learning Environments (VLE)--Applying the Learning Object Concept to the VLE

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Paulsson, Fredrik; Naeve, Ambjorn

2006-01-01

Based on existing Learning Object taxonomies, this article suggests an alternative Learning Object taxonomy, combined with a general Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) framework, aiming to transfer the modularized concept of Learning Objects to modularized Virtual Learning Environments. The taxonomy and SOA-framework exposes a need for a clearer…

Using artificial intelligence to bring evidence-based medicine a step closer to making the individual difference.

PubMed

Sissons, B; Gray, W A; Bater, A; Morrey, D

2007-03-01

The vision of evidence-based medicine is that of experienced clinicians systematically using the best research evidence to meet the individual patient's needs. This vision remains distant from clinical reality, as no complete methodology exists to apply objective, population-based research evidence to the needs of an individual real-world patient. We describe an approach, based on techniques from machine learning, to bridge this gap between evidence and individual patients in oncology. We examine existing proposals for tackling this gap and the relative benefits and challenges of our proposed, k-nearest-neighbour-based, approach.

Barriers and Enablers to the Use of Virtual Worlds in Higher Education: An Exploration of Educator Perceptions, Attitudes and Experiences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gregory, Sue; Scutter, Sheila; Jacka, Lisa; McDonald, Marcus; Farley, Helen; Newman, Chris

2015-01-01

Three-dimensional (3D) virtual worlds have been used for more than a decade in higher education for teaching and learning. Since the 1980s, academics began using virtual worlds as an exciting and innovative new technology to provide their students with new learning experiences that were difficult to provide any other way. But since that time,…

Building a Global Learning Organization: Lessons from the World's Top Corporations.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Marquardt, Michael J.

1995-01-01

Research on 50 organizations elicited 19 attributes of learning organizations: individual learning, group learning, streamlined structure, corporate learning culture, empowerment, environmental scanning, knowledge creation/transfer, learning technology, quality, learning strategy, supportive atmosphere, teamwork/networking, vision, acculturation,…

Using Smartphones and Machine Learning to Quantify Parkinson Disease Severity: The Mobile Parkinson Disease Score.

PubMed

Zhan, Andong; Mohan, Srihari; Tarolli, Christopher; Schneider, Ruth B; Adams, Jamie L; Sharma, Saloni; Elson, Molly J; Spear, Kelsey L; Glidden, Alistair M; Little, Max A; Terzis, Andreas; Dorsey, E Ray; Saria, Suchi

2018-03-26

Current Parkinson disease (PD) measures are subjective, rater-dependent, and assessed in clinic. Smartphones can measure PD features, yet no smartphone-derived rating score exists to assess motor symptom severity in real-world settings. To develop an objective measure of PD severity and test construct validity by evaluating the ability of the measure to capture intraday symptom fluctuations, correlate with current standard PD outcome measures, and respond to dopaminergic therapy. This observational study assessed individuals with PD who remotely completed 5 tasks (voice, finger tapping, gait, balance, and reaction time) on the smartphone application. We used a novel machine-learning-based approach to generate a mobile Parkinson disease score (mPDS) that objectively weighs features derived from each smartphone activity (eg, stride length from the gait activity) and is scaled from 0 to 100 (where higher scores indicate greater severity). Individuals with and without PD additionally completed standard in-person assessments of PD with smartphone assessments during a period of 6 months. Ability of the mPDS to detect intraday symptom fluctuations, the correlation between the mPDS and standard measures, and the ability of the mPDS to respond to dopaminergic medication. The mPDS was derived from 6148 smartphone activity assessments from 129 individuals (mean [SD] age, 58.7 [8.6] years; 56 [43.4%] women). Gait features contributed most to the total mPDS (33.4%). In addition, 23 individuals with PD (mean [SD] age, 64.6 [11.5] years; 11 [48%] women) and 17 without PD (mean [SD] age 54.2 [16.5] years; 12 [71%] women) completed in-clinic assessments. The mPDS detected symptom fluctuations with a mean (SD) intraday change of 13.9 (10.3) points on a scale of 0 to 100. The measure correlated well with the Movement Disorder Society Unified Parkinson Disease's Rating Scale total (r = 0.81; P < .001) and part III only (r = 0.88; P < .001), the Timed Up and Go assessment (r = 0.72; P = .002), and the Hoehn and Yahr stage (r = 0.91; P < .001). The mPDS improved by a mean (SD) of 16.3 (5.6) points in response to dopaminergic therapy. Using a novel machine-learning approach, we created and demonstrated construct validity of an objective PD severity score derived from smartphone assessments. This score complements standard PD measures by providing frequent, objective, real-world assessments that could enhance clinical care and evaluation of novel therapeutics.

Kernel-aligned multi-view canonical correlation analysis for image recognition

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Su, Shuzhi; Ge, Hongwei; Yuan, Yun-Hao

2016-09-01

Existing kernel-based correlation analysis methods mainly adopt a single kernel in each view. However, only a single kernel is usually insufficient to characterize nonlinear distribution information of a view. To solve the problem, we transform each original feature vector into a 2-dimensional feature matrix by means of kernel alignment, and then propose a novel kernel-aligned multi-view canonical correlation analysis (KAMCCA) method on the basis of the feature matrices. Our proposed method can simultaneously employ multiple kernels to better capture the nonlinear distribution information of each view, so that correlation features learned by KAMCCA can have well discriminating power in real-world image recognition. Extensive experiments are designed on five real-world image datasets, including NIR face images, thermal face images, visible face images, handwritten digit images, and object images. Promising experimental results on the datasets have manifested the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Virtual reality, disability and rehabilitation.

PubMed

Wilson, P N; Foreman, N; Stanton, D

1997-06-01

Virtual reality, or virtual environment computer technology, generates simulated objects and events with which people can interact. Existing and potential applications for this technology in the field of disability and rehabilitation are discussed. The main benefits identified for disabled people are that they can engage in a range of activities in a simulator relatively free from the limitations imposed by their disability, and they can do so in safety. Evidence that the knowledge and skills acquired by disabled individuals in simulated environments can transfer to the real world is presented. In particular, spatial information and life skills learned in a virtual environment have been shown to transfer to the real world. Applications for visually impaired people are discussed, and the potential for medical interventions and the assessment and treatment of neurological damage are considered. Finally some current limitations of the technology, and ethical concerns in relation to disability, are discussed.

Understanding Learner Acceptance of Learning Objects: The Roles of Learning Object Characteristics and Individual Differences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lau, Siong-Hoe; Woods, Peter C.

2009-01-01

Many organisations and institutions have integrated learning objects into their e-learning systems to make the instructional resources more efficient. Like any other information systems, this trend has made user acceptance of learning objects an increasingly critical issue as a high level of learner satisfaction and acceptance reflects that the…

Spatiotemporal information during unsupervised learning enhances viewpoint invariant object recognition

PubMed Central

Tian, Moqian; Grill-Spector, Kalanit

2015-01-01

Recognizing objects is difficult because it requires both linking views of an object that can be different and distinguishing objects with similar appearance. Interestingly, people can learn to recognize objects across views in an unsupervised way, without feedback, just from the natural viewing statistics. However, there is intense debate regarding what information during unsupervised learning is used to link among object views. Specifically, researchers argue whether temporal proximity, motion, or spatiotemporal continuity among object views during unsupervised learning is beneficial. Here, we untangled the role of each of these factors in unsupervised learning of novel three-dimensional (3-D) objects. We found that after unsupervised training with 24 object views spanning a 180° view space, participants showed significant improvement in their ability to recognize 3-D objects across rotation. Surprisingly, there was no advantage to unsupervised learning with spatiotemporal continuity or motion information than training with temporal proximity. However, we discovered that when participants were trained with just a third of the views spanning the same view space, unsupervised learning via spatiotemporal continuity yielded significantly better recognition performance on novel views than learning via temporal proximity. These results suggest that while it is possible to obtain view-invariant recognition just from observing many views of an object presented in temporal proximity, spatiotemporal information enhances performance by producing representations with broader view tuning than learning via temporal association. Our findings have important implications for theories of object recognition and for the development of computational algorithms that learn from examples. PMID:26024454

Learning Languages through Technology

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hanson-Smith, Elizabeth, Ed.; Rilling, Sarah, Ed.

2007-01-01

While posing important questions about how learning proceeds with new technologies, this volume demonstrates how teachers captivate the imagination of learners, from schoolchildren to postgraduates, by providing real-world purposes for language. The authors are from educational institutions in many regions of the world, and describe technology use…

Interactive Algorithms for Unsupervised Machine Learning

DTIC Science & Technology

2015-06-01

committee members, Nina Balcan, Sanjoy Dasgupta, and John Langford. Nina’s unbounded energy and her passion for machine learning are qualities that I...52 3.3.2 Simulations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 3.3.3 Real World Experiments...80 4.4.1 Simulations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 4.4.2 Real World

Bridging STEM in a Real World Problem

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

English, Lyn D.; Mousoulides, Nicholas G.

2015-01-01

Engineering-based modeling activities provide a rich source of meaningful situations that capitalize on and extend students' routine learning. By integrating such activities within existing curricula, students better appreciate how their school learning in mathematics and science applies to problems in the outside world. Furthermore, modeling…

Learning from Metaphors

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lundegård, Iann

2015-01-01

Today an increasing number of countries around the world have acquired almost the same metaphorical speech about teaching and learning. These theories grown in the Western world are largely produced within the framework of psychology and individualistic oriented educational philosophy and fits with the ever-expanding financial growth paradigm.…