KEYNOTE

 

Professor PAOLO PAOLINI

E-mail: [email protected]

Paolo Paolini teaches Web Application Design, Hypermedia Applications, and Human Computer Interaction at the Politecnico di Milano. He is the scientific coordinator of the HOC-LAB, located in Milano-Lambrate and Como.

His research interests span the requirements and design of multimedia applications, collaborative applications for the eLearning, technology-mediated communication and cultural heritage applications.

He is author of more than 70 papers published in international conferences and journals and he has coordinated numerous international and national research projects.

 

Abstract of the keynote speech:

“EXPLORATION FOR EDUCATION PORTALS”

Many teachers in the field create very effective (and at times very innovative) solutions for introducing technologies in the learning process of their pupils. In TPACK’s terms[i], these solutions are interesting under different perspectives and especially at the seldom explored intersection between Technology and Pedagogy Knowledge (T-PK): i.e. how technology affected pedagogy or how pedagogy exploited the possibility of technology. This “empirical knowledge” by the teachers (in principle, very valuable) is generally not fully exploited. Researchers run their own experiments (typically, with a few teachers) get their data and publish them. Teachers do not systematically record what they do and, more discomforting, they often do not properly “capture” what is really interesting in what they do.

There are, world-wide, few attempts to collect this empirical knowledge, harvesting experiences and publishing them on “portals”. Unfortunately the way experiences are described and classified emphasizes Content Knowledge (CK) rather than Technology-Pedagogy Knowledge. In other words, teachers can look for “dinosaurs for 2^nd grade”, but not for “use of the cloud for interactive quizzes in the class, combined with independent use of learning objects”. Another problem is that these portals emphasize search over inspiration seeking: a teacher can hardly answer crucial questions like “I would like to use the cloud for my history class, exploiting learning objects; what can I do”.

Given the above, Politecnico di Milano, together with other partners in a number of projects, has started developing educational portals around two pillars:

·         The description of the educational experiences (from the field and not from the lab) should emphasize the T-PK intersection rather than CK

·         The portals gathering the educational experiences should support exploration rather than search, i.e. scenarios in which the user has an ill-defined idea and is looking for inspiration. “Exploratory portals” are a new paradigm, currently being developed in partnership with UNISALENTO in the frame of the EDOC national research project.

The speech will describe the concept of educational portals, how they were developed in previous projects and currently for the EDOC project. It will argue that good educational portals can be greatly beneficial in the field of education (both for research and everyday practice) and will illustrate in what sense “exploration” is a new paradigm, different from “search”.

     

 

TECHTALK SPEAKER

Eng. Stefano Santo Sabato

E-mail: [email protected]

Stefano Santo Sabato is currently serving as CTO for MediaSoft (www.mediasoftonline.com), an Italian cutting-edge company operating in Information and Communication Technology specialized in the design and implementation of solutions based on new communication channels and digital media and mostly involved in Collaborative Virtual Environments and in Internet of Things fields.

Now he collaborates with various companies as a senior software architect and as coordinator of agile development teams in projects related to CVEs, Virtual Presence, 3D simulations, Internet of Things.

He is a member of the Digital Agenda Task Force, a unit created by the Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta to lead the development of the Digital Strategy, being involved in the "Digital Identity" initiative.

He is also expert of embedded system also being able to code firmware for microcontrollers.

Abstract:

Collaborative learning meets Internet of Things

Technological innovation provides even more powerful tools to improve the transfer of information and education. Moreover, thanks to the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), we can imagine learning experiences where the environment itself (art sites, museum spaces, works, etc.) has an active role in the interaction with visitors (students). Visitors can then come into close contact with the works and the museums (IoT) and among them (collaboration). Art sites and museums aim to make their exhibits captivating and engaging for a growing variety of public without losing their lead  role in conservation, interpretation, education and awareness. How to reconcile these needs by creating effective collaborative learning experiences for a wide variety of audiences? In his technical presentation  Stefano Santo Sabato will describe the available technology as well as the good practices to be followed in order to be able to plan collaborative and fully immersive visit experiences, describing real case studies he dealt with as an architect of learning experiences. In order to do so, he uses the state of the art of the available technologies in indoor and outdoor museum contexts.

 

KEYNOTE

Aron Keith Barbey

https://decisionneurosciencelab.org/lab/aron-k-barbey/

Cognitive Neuroscience of Human Intelligence

Abstract:

Accumulating neuroscience evidence supports a systems-level approach to understanding higher cognitive functions. Rather than mapping specific executive functions onto specific brain regions, modern human lesion studies have increasingly applied voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping to elucidate the involvement of distributed brain systems in multiple high-level functions. One key brain network to emerge from contemporary lesion mapping studies is the fronto-parietal network, which is known to play an important role in executive control functions. Prior research indicates that cells in many frontal and parietal regions have highly dynamic response properties, selectively coding information required for goal-directed behavior. This adaptive fronto-parietal representation is believed to serve as a source of bias to other brain systems, guiding the flow of activity along neural pathways that support task-relevant processing. In this talk, I introduce a cognitive neuroscience framework for understanding the contributions of the fronto-parietal network to executive and social cognitive functions, surveying recent lesion mapping studies in humans implicating this network in general intelligence, fluid intelligence, cognitive flexibility, and emotional intelligence. This approach breaks away from the traditional neuroscience view that intellectual functions are localized to a single cortical area, suggesting instead that each cortical region has more than one function, and that functions of distinct areas might overlap with one another to support an integrative architecture for executive, social, and emotional processes. I review emerging neuroscience evidence to elucidate the contributions of fronto-parietal network function to human intelligence, uncovering the executive, social, and emotional foundations of intelligent behavior and their joint contributions to perception, memory, language and thought. I show how this approach advances our understanding of the neural foundations of executive and social cognitive functions – motivating new insights about how intelligence emerges through evolution and development, is cultivated through experience and cognitive training, and is altered through psychiatric illness and neurological disease.