Prescribed medication order and communication skills.pptx
A Wiki-Based Active Learning System
1. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
A wiki-based active learning system
how to enhance learning material in epistemology
of computer science and computer ethics
(cc) Federico Gobbo and Gaetano Aurelio Lanzarone
(federico.gobbo,gaetano.lanzarone)@uninsubria.it
Universit` dell’Insubria
a
Presented at FORMATEX 2006, November
6. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Epistemology of computer science
The goal of the new discipline
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Epistemology of computer science aims to investigate the
different theories of knowledge underlying computer science and
informatics, as well as Artificial Intelligence.
7. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Epistemology of computer science
A new discipline, quite fragmented
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There isn’t any comprehensive textbook in epistemology of
computer science. Two main reasons:
8. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Epistemology of computer science
A new discipline, quite fragmented
7/ 40
There isn’t any comprehensive textbook in epistemology of
computer science. Two main reasons:
1 the relative novelty of the discipline;
9. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Epistemology of computer science
A new discipline, quite fragmented
7/ 40
There isn’t any comprehensive textbook in epistemology of
computer science. Two main reasons:
1 the relative novelty of the discipline;
2 different backgrounds of the researchers.
10. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Epistemology of computer science
A new discipline, quite fragmented
7/ 40
There isn’t any comprehensive textbook in epistemology of
computer science. Two main reasons:
1 the relative novelty of the discipline;
2 different backgrounds of the researchers.
However, some main problems are generally acknowledged. Now,
two examples.
11. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Epistemology of computer science
Alan Turing puts the main challenges of classic AI
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12. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Epistemology of computer science
Turing’s classic: the Imitation Game
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I propose to consider the question, “Can machines
think?” This should begin with definitions of the
meaning of the terms “machine” and “think”. The
definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as
possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is
dangerous. If the meaning of the words “machine” and
“think” are to be found by examining how they are
commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion
that the meaning and the answer to the question, “Can
machines think?” is to be sought in a statistical survey
such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of
attempting such a definition I shall replace the question
by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed
in relatively unambiguous words.
13. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Epistemology of computer science
A visualization of the Imitation Game, first phase
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14. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Epistemology of computer science
A visualization of the Imitation Game, second phase
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“Macchina” is the Italian word for “machine”.
15. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Epistemology of computer science
An other classic is the Chinese Room argument by Searle
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16. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Epistemology of computer science
Good questions our students we expect to learn
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Is computer science really a science?
How should an empirical experiment in computer science be
carried out?
What is the status of knowledge gained from conducting an
experiment in evolutionary or genetic programming?
How should an empirical experiment in computer science be
carried out?
17. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Epistemology of computer science
The need to have a historical background
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Our students are graduate in computer science, with no
philosophical background. We soon realized that these key
questions are correctly addressed after an introduction to the
history of computation and logic.
In other terms, we find that a historical perspective greatly helps
our students to relativize problems, i.e. to understand the main
topics in a more general way.
18. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Epistemology of computer science
The history of logic
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The Ars Magna by Ramon Llull
19. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Epistemology of computer science
From Ramon Llull to George Boole and beyond
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We explain the influence of Ars Magna by Raimond Llull into
Western philosophy. He was the first to postulate a way to
mechanize the whole human thought into algorithms.
Then we present the main steps of Western philosophy until
George Boole and beyond. At the end, students understand what
is behind an everyday tool as Boolean Logic.
20. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Epistemology of computer science
The history of calculating machines
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Babbage’s Difference Engine realized in meccano
21. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Epistemology of computer science
From the abacus to modern computers
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We are deeply convinced that there are profound relations between
the history of calculation and the developments of the calculating
machines.
Our students learn a common background with students coming
from humanities. We are trying to break the Two Cultures
approach, i.e. technologists vs. humanists, in favour of a
Renaissance model.
22. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Epistemology of computer science
Being in and out at the same time
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23. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Computer ethics
The epistemological foundation of Computer Ethics
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Computer Ethics start point: technology should not be
considered as a social monad, i.e. a factor neutral in relation to
social change, but as socially determined – e.g. the debate free vs.
open source software has social and political implications.
Although computer ethics issues started as a branch of
epistemology of computer science, this field has achieved a status
of relative autonomy, at least since the fundamental work of
Deborah Johnson.
24. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Computer ethics
Some issues in computer ethics
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Is computer ethics indipendent from “general” ethics?
Privacy: freedom vs. security
Copyright: from free software to open source up to creative
commons
Artificial ethics: may expert systems substitute humans? Why
not?
Professional codes of ethics for computer scientists
25. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
The need of lecture notes in our discipline
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Ours is the first experience in Italy, so there isn’t any material in
Italian. we had to prepare lecture notes almost from scratch.
In our view, the lecture notes should be considered both as a
preliminary textbook for our students and, far more importantly, as
the starting point to their homework.
26. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
A metodology based on active tasks
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Students ‘learn by doing’: they write some assessments and a final
essay about some topics. The best one we used as complementary
material for next years’ students.
Advantages: (a) we may be surprised by the active tasks
performed by students and so learn something new obtaining good
feedback for what we teach; (b) active tasks commit students to
learn about learning, i.e. they metalearn, in particular rhetorics and
logics of argumentative writing.
27. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
The need of lecture notes de- and reconstruction
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Some lectures are dedicated to deconstructing the myth of new
and old writing media, such as the web as an always trustable
source of public information and books as the unique media
carrying state-of-the-art knowledge on every imaginable topic.
Nevertheless, most students treat our lecture notes reverentially, as
‘silver bullets’, i.e. ontological entities outside society, space and
time, with some immutable characteristics that magically lead to
the right solution.
28. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
The reasons behind a writing technology shift
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On the contrary, we consider our lecture notes both as a work in
progress and as an arena for collaborative knowledge. In particular,
we want to emphasize that lecture notes play a role as guidelines
on arguments and topics, but their contents may be trusted and at
the same time expanded and annotated by students.
Initially, we wrote lecture notes through a word processor, but this
writing technology doesn’t encourage particularly active studying.
We thus decided to change our writing paradigm, adopting a
wiki-based technology.
30. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Learning Management Systems unfit for our purposes
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LMSs as BlackBoard (used by our University) need to prepare the
learning objects, a very time-consuming task. We want to avoid
this. Our technical requirements of the wiki system we were
looking for are:
ease of converting existing lecture notes from Word format;
ease of publishing into the BlackBoard platform;
presence of a revision history, to keep track of the different
versions.
31. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Wikis started from the analysus of thread systems
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thread content
Jack White Pietro
Bianchi
root msg
comment A
comment B spin-off topic
comment C comment D
John Smith
Mario Rossi
Too much complexity, content redundancy, personalisms
32. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
...as an opposite and complementary KM system
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wiki content
edit A edit C
edit B
edit D
Pietro
John Smith Jack White Mario Rossi
Bianchi
Shared content, collaboration, anonymity
33. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
We need a non-standard wiki system
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We can’t allow anyone edit contents, i.e. lecture notes,
anonymously, as in standard wikis. We need to retain the role of
authorship in the following way:
edit mode: easy to convert lecture notes from MS Word;
annotation mode: easy to write different study paths;
browser mode: easy to navigate with any web browser.
34. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Our choice after a period of acceptance testing
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http://www.tiddlywiki.com
36. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Once dowloaded, it’s ease to annotate
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Look at the right menu: “new tiddler” (i.e. lexia)
37. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Not-so-easy to convert style from a word processor
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It’s not clear how to extract meaningful text and its typesetting,
i.e. bold, quotations, etc., in an automatic way.
Moreover, the hypertext structure (i.e. non-sequential readings
through multiple paths) implies a content editing, e.g. resolving a
lot of anaphoras.
38. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Sequential and non-sequential paths together
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We retain a classical sequential, page-turn order of lexias (i.e.
semantic hypertext units) with an index.
Moreover, the hypertext structure (i.e. non-sequential readings
through multiple paths) implies a content editing, e.g. resolving a
lot of anaphoras.
39. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Add semantic areas to lexias by tags
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Each lexia has meaningful tags, i.e. keywords that form sets of
lexias, as definite semantic areas. Our basic tagset is the following
one: figure; figure reference; introduction; note; reference. There
are also additional tags depending on specific contents, e.g. history
of logical calculus; objection to Turing’s test.
Students can choose which lexias to load in the TiddlyWiki web
page at a given time, e.g. every reference cited in the text, with or
without figures.
40. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
The search box and the reverse linking features
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For instance, a student may want to review a picture about Ramon
Llull seen during the last lecture, as it was already shown in
previous one in a different context. After loading every lexia
tagged ’figure’ the student quickly finds the right one, and then he
or she may read the text lexias that comment that lexia through
the reversed linking feature present in TiddlyWiki, i.e. a special
link showing every lexia which points to the current one.
Alternatively, if students don’t remember exactly why and how
Babbage is important, they may search through the whole lexia
set, even using regular expressions.
41. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Open issues for further work
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1 Duplication. By now, each module is a separate TiddlyWiki
file, with some duplication (i.e. references, as they were
written once for all in the word version).
42. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Open issues for further work
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1 Duplication. By now, each module is a separate TiddlyWiki
file, with some duplication (i.e. references, as they were
written once for all in the word version).
2 Integration. Not easy to integrate PowerPoint or Latex/PDF
presentations in TiddlyWiki. We are exploring a HTML only
slide show format, S5.
43. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Open issues for further work
38/ 40
1 Duplication. By now, each module is a separate TiddlyWiki
file, with some duplication (i.e. references, as they were
written once for all in the word version).
2 Integration. Not easy to integrate PowerPoint or Latex/PDF
presentations in TiddlyWiki. We are exploring a HTML only
slide show format, S5.
3 More collaboration. Students may want to share their study
paths; we may switch to a server-based TiddlyWiki clone,
LesserWiki (http://www.lesserwiki.org).
44. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Let’s see a demo.. if we have enough time
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http://www.dicom.uninsubria.it/∼federico.gobbo/
formatex2006.html
45. Indice Introduction Educational aspects Wiki-based lecture notes Conclusions
Thanks
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This presentation is under the following CreativeCommons licence:
Attribuzione-Non Commerciale-Condividi allo stesso modo 2.5 Italia
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/it/
A
Where to find this presentation (also LTEXsource):
http://www.dicom.uninsubria.it/∼federico.gobbo/#2006
Questions?