The main objective is to redesign
laboratory practical sessions in order to improve the learning
of scientific and technical material within an educational
framework. Subsequently, the division in time and space
of the theoretical study and actual experimentation in the
laboratory should be reconceptualized.
A virtual environment
will facilitate the implantation of a constructivist learning
environment, where the theory articulates the practice,
and where actions and colaborative interactions in different
spaces can be developed, which are related to a variety
of representations. The system will integrate all the involved
actors: students, tutors and professors, throughout the
academic period. The definition of each application will
have a declarative form at a suitable abstraction level
for a teacher. An authoring tool will be developed for this
purpose.
This
objective must be broken down and seen from perspectives:
1.
Modelization of scenes for the learning
Considering
the models of learning based on social processes of knowledge
construction and the Activity Theory, computable descriptions
of experimental scenes will be elaborated. The descriptions
will be done using a markup language that allows the context
to be expressed, including the learning tasks as well
as the media and people involved. A description will constitute
an Active Document that when processed, will give create
a virtual environment that will give rise to a distributed
educational community, where learning activities are mediated
by a set of tools.
The virtual environemnt will handle individual and colaborative
learning in three secuencial stages: study and virtual
experimentation at a distance, support in the accomplishment
of real laboratory sessions, facilitate the analysis of
results and elaboration of conclusions at a distance in
a later phase.
Using XML as a metalanguage, a language will be defined
with the necessary expresivity for this purpose. To this
end, two related sub-objectives are defined:
1.1
Determine the elements to define in order to establish an
ontology.
1.2 Express them in terms of labels and attributes.
2.
Software design and construction
-
To
define and design an authoring tool that allows a professor
to create the description of the activities in a learning
scenario.
-
To
define an architecture which processes the descriptions
and integrates the necessary tools in order to generate
the virtual environment that will support the learning
activities. In this project an architecture is required
that is able to manage the Active Document (e.g., to
access a document in the stable system storage, to validate
its content, extract the pertinent information about
the current user position, and process everything in
a fast, efficient, and safe way), to deal with the management
of the users (e.g., access to the system, formation
of groups, treatment of entry of data, etc.), and to
control the tools available (e.g., its state of activation,
requests for startup data and the format of the produced
data, etc.). With respect to that last objective, it
will not only be necessary to prepare an API but also
a guide to facilitate the incorporation of tools from
other work groups (new or or existing, whether written
in Java or otherwise) in to the system.
In
addition to these specific project objectives, emphasis
needs to be placed on the production of a system that is
able to adapt to new educational scopes, incorporate the
results of future didactic investigation, and finally, to
be based upon standard open technologies in order to be
able to function on a wide range of platforms.
3.
Applications
The
applications will be extended in two different ways:
1)
In the context of teaching chemistry, the project aims to
support the phases defined in 3.2.4 by means of the creation
of an integrated environment that allows experiments to
be undertaken which have been articulated with the corresponding
theoretical study; where the experimental phase will be
simulated in one phase and undertaken for real in another.
The process of reasoning (analysis and synthesis) for each
part of the proposed activities will be structured by the
mechanisms that provide the available models. Furthermore,
it should be noted that the scenario models and the associated
DTDs will structure the different sections (theoretical
principles, a study guide structured by objectives, glossary,
access to external resources), which will be used in the
scenarios.
As
well as these environments there will also be the following
integrated elements:
·
Pedagogical components for the construction of knowledge
· Colaborativas tools for the edition of scientific content,
which can be used in simulations and the structured communication/discussion.
The
knowledge contained in the scenarios will be modeled independently
of the pedagogic intention. To this end external knowledge
bases based upon the previous definition of a conceptualization
of the material (defined as an ontology) will allow the
knowledge to be reused in a variety of scenarios and also
to different degrees within the same scenario. At the same
time the objective here is to create diverse mechanisms
that will increase the knowledge associated with the concepts
by means of the association of pairs of question-answer.
The
tools for creating contents are also external to the environment
and are integrated like a resource of the environment defined
in the same model and parameterised as per the required
activity. The editors included enable complex objects like
annotated graphs, conversational graphs of the discussions
in group, the presentation of chemical formulae, and multimedia
simulations to be produced.
2) In the context of the definition of experimental scenarios
the creation of a library of instructional templates or
generic models of environments was considered, which can
be instanciated to form certain types of experimental educational
activities from the different models of proposed scenarios.
Teaching will be structured by means of the combination
of consultation scenarios with others of a more practical
nature.
4.
Methodology
Develop
a methodology of development of experimental applications
for distance learning based upon the construction of a scenario
library, an organizational memory with use cases, as well
as criteria for implantation, student progress and evaluation.
