The Japanese index of the TEL Dictionary is now available

Thanks to the effort and commitment of Jun Oshima from the faculty of informatics of Shizuoka university, the Japanese index of the TEL Dictionary is now available. As in the case of other languages, Jun has met some problems with the meaning of words or even their existence in the Japanese lexicon. Together with his colleagues, Jun was for example much concerned with the difference in meanings between "epistemic" and "epistemological". It is actually a concern shared with several other translators in other languages. Now that we have a good corpus of translations, I suggest that we start exploring and understanding the impact of these linguistic issues which indeed goes beyond the words. The creation of the Japanese index is the result of a team work under Jun leadership, contributors include Ritsuko Oshima, Shizuoka University; Etsuji Yamaguchi, Kobe University; Hiroyuki Masukawa, Shizuoka University; Toshio Mochizuki, Senshu University; Takeshi Kitazawa, Tokyo Future University; Moegi Saito, University of Tokyo; Hiroki Oura, Washington University

"e-assessment", a new entry of the TEL Dictionary

Assessment is one of the key functions of a learning environment, be it formative or summative. I would even claim that implicitly or explicitly, consciously or not, it drives its design. The definition of e-assessment prepared by Valerie Shute and Yoon Jeon Kim for the TEL Dictionary reminds us the expectation that technology enhanced assessment would be more efficient than assessment, thanks to the power of the computer. I suggest to add: thanks to the possibility of getting more personalised and accurate information on the learner activity.

As a matter of fact, e-assessment, from a research perspective, might not be far from learner modelling, a term which is not mentioned as one of the related terms Valerie and Yoon enumerate. In your opinion, what ontological or semantic relation can be established between "e-assessment" and "learner modelling"?

The Russian version of the TEL Dictionary entries is now available

The Russian translation of the TEL Dictionary entries, prepared by Diana Bogdanova (Moscow State Railway's University), met some of the now classical problems of this very difficult exercise in spite of the excellent expertise of the translator. Some are solved in a way which preserves enough of the intended meaning, for example the translation of "Inquiry learning" into "Исследовательское обучение". But other are possibly more questionable, for example, the translation of "Educational affordance" into "Образовательная достижимость". As in all the other cases, this first release is tentative, we leave to the community of the Russian speakers to survey the proposal and make suggestions.

Ma thématique, la didactique, l'informatique aussi

Les mathématiques sont, pour la didactique de cette discipline, un objet d'étude sous les contraintes particulières des problématiques de l'apprentissage et de l'enseignement. Elles peuvent aussi être un outil pour la recherche en didactique, pour comprendre les enjeux de contenu et comme un outil de modélisation. C'est à ce point que l'informatique, en tant que science et technologie, apparait avec toute sa puissance, au-delà des rêves d'innovation qui souvent paraissent en constituer la justification.

Conférence donnée lors des 

Journées EducTICE Lyon, juin 2011

Le savant et l’ingénieur …

Billet initialement publié le 16 août 2006, sur le blog Opinion on TEL (site Kaleidoscope.org)

L’été est propice à des lectures dont les thèmes sont souvent très éloignés de nos préoccupations professionnelles. Quoi que… voici ce que je retiens de l’une d’entre elles :

« Et quand le savant a rencontré l’ingénieur, la mécanique analytique le chemin de fer, vers 1840, la croyance a prouvé son pouvoir, et put se prendre pour un savoir. On est alors passé de l’ère des sociétés chaudes, où contrairement aux sociétés froides, l’on consomme de l’événement pour produire du mouvement, à l’ère de la société industrielle, où l’on consomme des machines pour produire du mythe. » (Debray, cf ci-dessous)

Je me suis d’abord arrêté sur la première phrase pour repenser sous cet angle nos recherches sur les EIAH. Mais il me semble que la seconde mérite aussi notre réflexion. Ne poussons-nous pas la consommation de technologies pour nourrir des mythes sur l’éducation ? où en adoptant ces mythes comme justification puérile ou mondaine. Ces deux derniers attributs me sont suggérés par la relecture de Bachelard qui, dans ce contexte si éloigné de son exploration de la formation de l’esprit scientifique, peut peut-être encore nous inspirer :

 « … la tâche de la philosophie scientifique est très nette : psychanalyser l’intérêt, ruiner tout utilitarisme si déguisé qu’il soit, si élevé qu’il se prétende, tourner l’esprit du réel vers l’artificiel, du naturel vers l’humain, de la représentation vers l’abstraction. Jamais peut être plus qu’à notre époque, l’esprit scientifique n’a eu plus besoin d’être défendu, d’être illustré au sens même où du Bellay travaillait à la Défense et illustration de la langue française. Mais cette illustration ne peut se borner à une sublimation des aspirations communes les plus diverses. Elle doit être normative et cohérente. Elle doit rendre clairement conscient et actif le plaisir de l’excitation spirituelle dans la découverte du vrai. » (Bachelard, cf ci-dessous). 

Régis Debray, Supplique aux nouveaux progressistes du XXI° siècle. Paris : Gallimard, 2006. pp.36-7
Gaston Bachelard, La formation de l’esprit scientifique. Paris : Vrin, 1938, pp.9-10.

The iPhone shrinked to a point of the kinetic space

If creativity means the capacity to imagine a use or an object away from its natural niche, then this is an excellent creative example. There, the iPhone is no longer a phone nor a digital assistant, it is a multiple-sensors device and the tangible representation of a point in the kinetic space. The innovative proposition of Joël Chevrier and his team, have applications for the learning in physics and mechanic, but also one may imagine that it could become a  representation of oneself body in the space and be used with young learners. This innovative pedagogical proposition exploits just a few of the potential of the iPhone: the accelerometer and the magnetometer. Just a few, but already enough to foster creative learning with mobile technologies.

Did Scholar, the TEL environment of the 70s, involve adaptivity or personnalisation?

A recent discussion of the TEL Dictionary initiative LinkedIn group raised the question of the existence of a personnalisation or adaptivity objective in the design of SCHOLAR, one of the seminal TEL environments (Carbonell 1970 ). Indeed it is true that the whole objective was to adapt to the learner in a more flexible way than ever before. This effort was based on two principles.

1. the use of semantic networks ensures that the machine and the learner have similar knowledge structures (ibid. p.197), facilitating a kind of shared understanding.
2. "mixed-initiative dialogue" would allows a better adaptation of the interaction.

Hence we may think of a search for personalisation and adaptivity, although it might not have been the case. Or at least, not the case in these terms. This is well illustrated by the last words of an other report: "what we have tried to show in this paper is the fuzzy, ill-defined, uncertain nature of much of human knowledge and thinking. We want SCHOLAR to be just as fuzzy-thinking as we are." (Carbonell and Collins 1974). So, there is no evidence that the objective was personalisation. Actually after a close analysis of the types of learner's error (ibid. p.198), Carbonell develops a n argument in support of the claim that teachers are less interested in diagnostic than in allowing students to overcome errors. Interestingly enough, noticing that SCHOLAR at that point had limited diagnostic capacity, he writes: "The system could also ask for help when complicated diagnoses appear needed." (ibid. p.200). Unfortunately he died too early (1973) to develop SCHOLAR further, but I would suggest that he was following a different route than personalisation and adaptivity. An objective more related to the modelling of conversation with a knowledgeable other who identifies your errors and drive the conversation to correct them not necessarily diagnosing their origins or making sense of what he or she thought. That would be in line with the more general objective of Carbonell who viewed "the Scholar system as an environment to study natural semantics" (Carbonell and Collina 1974).

Illustration taken from Carbonell and Collins, 1970, "Mixed-initiative systems for training and decision-aid applications" (see the document there). 

Key reference: Carbonell, J. R. (1970). AI in CAI: An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Computer-Aided Instruction. IEEE Transactions on ManMachine Systems, 11, 190-202. IEEE.