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Project description
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The diversity of knowledge, experience and resources (both real and
virtual) that are available in an increasing number of scientific disciplines,
together with the wide range of mobile electronic devices, software modelling,
simulation and collaboration tools, and distributed and ubiquitous computational
technologies, offer an enormous potential for the exploration of new ways
to teach and learn. This technology, seen in the context of current theories
of situated cognition and learner centred education, offers interesting
possibilities for the design and realisation of collaborative learning
activities in scenarios that extend the standard scholastic framework,
not only in terms of their physical location but also the methodology
and the realism of the scientific context, the participants, and the temporal
dimension of the work, moving the learning scope away from the school.
This has a similar philosophy to what are called ‘active museums’
or exploratories, or environmental education centres which are typically
located in wildlife parks or reserves, and have a similar educational
framework. The idea here is to improve the learning process, focussing
on the acquisition process via the practical development of a learner’s
own scientific research capabilities. However, it is very important to
note that these explorative activities are connected to the day to day
school curriculum, being established as a link that enables the students
to integrate information.
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The purpose of the ENLACE project is to explore the design of innovative
educational environments, which offer intelligent support for a wide
range of learning activities in natural science related domains. The
idea here is to enable knowledge creation and sharing (co-construction)
within a social structure of ‘learning communities’ that
require another type of organization and flexibility in order to work.
Hence, open computing environments need to be designed that integrate
modelling tools for the analysis and collaborative construction of solutions
– to scientific problems in our case -, that offer semantic mechanisms
which store, share and enable the interchange of multimedia data, objects,
and artefacts, and that enable mediation and negotiation to propose,
organize, and undertake collaborative tasks, that respond in a dynamic
way to the necessities of different theoretical and experimental situations,
both individual and collective, in the classroom, the laboratory, and
in nature, which offer flexibility both in the design and undertaking
of activities that adapt to the necessities of each group, and contain
‘awareness’ mechanisms that maintain and develop the "collective
memory" of the community.
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From a computer science perspective, the use of agent technology for
modelling and providing active support of activities in complex organizations,
together with the utilization of the ‘semantic Web’ to organize
and structure shared knowledge and distributed resources, represent the
technological baseline needed to achieve the objective of the present
project: the modelling and design of open environments with intelligent
community learning support where the learning strategies, the collaboration
mechanisms and the tools available, offer additional functionality to
different work environments, experimental scenarios, and formal levels
of social organization: individual, small groups, large groups, and communities.
A fundamental part of this investigation is the generation of a semantic
portal for learning communities in the area of environmental education,
using a participative design methodology and formative evaluation to verify
the viability of the proposal. Specifically, to analyse and modify the
functionality necessary to articulate the notion of ‘community’
(made up of both real and artificial agents) from different perspectives:
the scholastic world, the scientific world, the professional world, and
the society. In order to this, collaboration is planned with experts from
different organizations with a long history of environmental education,
for example, both primary and secondary education.
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