Laura Fedeli

THE USE OF VIDEO RECORDED CLASSES TO DEVELOP TEACHER PROFESSIONALISM: THE EXPERIMENTATION OF A CURRICULUM

The paper presents an investigation aimed at validating the hypothesis that the teaching workshops in teacher training degree courses, in which videos are used as a supporting strategy, can foster the development of students’ professional vision. Since several studies highlighting the advantages of the use of videos exist, yet there is less literature that describe the educational procedures to be used, the aim of the research is to present a tried-and-tested curriculum for teacher professionalization that involves, over the time span of 5 years of initial training, the alternation of theoretical lectures, internships, and workshops in which the use of videos has specific goals each year. The research is framed within a qualitative approach using a control group, post-test only quasi-experimental method to address the effectiveness and the impact of the use of video recordings during a prospective teacher training program. The research involved students from the University of Macerata as the experimental group and students from different Italian universities as the control group.

Personalization, adaptivity, attunement

The complexity of the current educational context, that is, the fragmentation of knowledge and the diversity which characterizes the students in our schools requires new competences. One of the answer is certainly to think about personalized path. The personalization of paths is a hard task for the teacher and, thus, the efficacy and also the sustainability of this choice need to be examined. For what concerns sustainability a solution has been provided by the interaction between the educational world and the world of knowledge engineering. The focus on the user, on intelligent systems for personalization, the adaptive and responsive design are proposals that were born with a different objective, but that have opened new perspectives also in the educational context. Besides, such processes have linked different research fields, the one of education and the one of knowledge engineering, such connection needs a common languages and meanings to be able to produce solutions. The paper is aimed at investigating possible solutions to foster the convergence and the dialogue between the two sectors and wants to verify if the complexity of the current situation is changing the concept itself of personalization.

Empathy, Education and AI

The concept of empathy has multiple meanings. In the present paper we present an experiment in which the relationship between empathy and spatial perspective Berthoz and Jorland (L’Empathie, 2004) acquires a significant role in the process of structural coupling Maturana and Varela (The tree of knowledge: the biological roots of human understanding, 1992) and Damiano (Unità in dialogo. Un nuovo stile per la conoscenza, 2009). The concept of empathy in education is at the basis of the relation between teacher and students and between teaching and learning. Thus the concepts of co-activity Vinatier and Numa-Bocage (Revue française de pédagogie, 158:85–101, 2007) and of structural coupling have analogies with empathy and can provide operational indications. The research question is the following: is it possible to detect the presence of a structural coupling and of empathic processes in a class of students and their teachers through the mediation of a conceptual space created by an automated AI system? The present contribution analyses the use of an AI plug-in developed within the European project I-TUTOR. In the experiment the artefact plays the role of mediator between the teacher and the students and lets their different perspectives be compared. The artefact does not engage in dialogue with the student in a one-to-one relationship, but it is a vertex of the student-artefact-teacher triangle. The artefact, an automated space, fosters a comparison between the perspective of the student and that of the teacher in relation to the dominant teaching object of the course. The paper describes the findings of the experiment run with two groups of students and proposes some changes to be worked into the plug-in to foster further empathic processes.

Fostering Teacher-Student Interaction and Learner Autonomy by the I-TUTOR Maps

The paper analyses the use of an automatically generated map as a mediator; that map visually represents the study domain of a university course and fosters the co-activity between teachers and students. In our approach the role of the teacher is meant as a mediator between the student and knowledge. The mediation and not the transmission highlights a process in which theres no deterministic relation between teaching and learning. Learning is affected by the students previous experiences, their own modalities of acquisition and by the inputs coming from the environment. The learning path develops when the teachers and the students visions approach and, partly, overlap. In this case we have co-activity. The teacher uses artifacts-mediators in such a process Bruner. The automatically generated map can be considered a mediator. The paper describes the experimentation of the artifact to check if its use fosters: 1 the elicitation of the different subjects perspectives different students and the teachers, and 2 the structural coupling that is the creation of an empathic process between the perspectives of the teacher and the student as the way to enable co-activity processes between teaching and learning..

Integrating Video into Pre-Service and In-Service Teacher Training

Chapter 7: The Use of Videos in the Training of Math Teachers: Formative Assessment in Math Teaching and Learning Giorgio Bolondi, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Italy Federica Ferretti, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Italy Alessandro Gimigliano, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Italy Stefania Lovece, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Italy Ira Vannini, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Italy

Technology and peer review: the open and participatory dimension

Abstract Peer review is a consolidated procedure in the academic context and its process affects various range of research outputs from project funding applications to manuscript publication. Peer review can be developed through modalities that imply a different level of transparency in the relationship between anonymity of the author and the reviewer/s. With the development of social media and the growth of scientific online communities, new forms of peer review have acquired a recognised value, matching the need of the academy to rely on selected reviewers and the need of the prospective author to get a richer feedback from a variety of scholars through different means, open comments and/or discussion fora, and always accessible online. Hybrid forms of review, which can integrate a formal peer review with an open comment opportunity on the Web, proved successful for both improving the author’s draft and enhancing its chances of publication and for the reviewers who can use this valuable activity to enrich their reputation by collecting and showing their reviews as research output. In this framework, quality, transparency and reputation acquire new nuances in their connection with the process of research validation.

Personalization and Adaptivity. What Relation

The complexity of the current educational context, that is, the fragmentation of knowledge and the diversity which characterizes the students in our schools requires new competences: the learner should develop skills in building significant network, the teacher should set multiple dispositifs that are connected to support learning. The personalization of the processes is certainly an answer, that is, the chance to develop different paths in which diversity is respected, but in which also the autonomy of the learners is fostered. For sure the problem is the sustainability of such path. Can adaptivity be a strategy in this direction? If yes, how and thank to what modalities?

A Study on Real/Virtual Relationships Through a Mobile Augmented Reality Application

The increasing adoption of mobile devices and their impact on the processes of conceptualization are affecting the educational field enhancing interest in the educational use of these devices and, specifically, in the potentialities of augmented reality applications. Several studies have recently been developed to investigate this area and the gap that currently exists between technological development, the conceptualization of the real/virtual relationship and the reflection on the way in which these applications impact different learning contexts. A qualitative research study was developed by the Department of Education, Cultural Heritage and Tourism of the University of Macerata along with a primary school teacher following a collaborative model framed in a naturalistic paradigm. The overall research goal was to make explicit the nature of “mixed reality†in which the student acts within the real-virtual continuum, and the role played by technological means in such a process. Specifically, a mobile augmented reality application, “Point at†, was investigated. Once installed on iPads, the application allows the recognition of physical objects and activates a web resource connected to the object.