Vania Paula de Almeida Neris

Supporting Teachers to Plan Culturally Contextualized Learning Activities

This paper presents PACO-T, a common sense-aided computational tool that helps teachers on planning culturally contextualized learning activities supported by common sense knowledge. The tool is based on the framework PACO, a seven-step framework for planning learning activities that concerns pedagogical issues, for an effective learning. It implements the framework seven steps and makes available common sense knowledge from the Brazilian Open Mind Common Sense (OMCS-Br) knowledge base, so that teachers can analyze how people with the same profile of their target group talk about themes related to the learning activity which is being planned, and therefore possibly identify the target group’s previous knowledge and contextualize the learning activity to its needs. In this way teachers can approach themes which they consider relevant to reach the intended pedagogical goals with that specific target group.

Socially Aware Organisations and Technologies. Impact and Challenges

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th IFIP WG 8.1 International Conference on Informatics and Semiotics in Organisations, ICISO 2016, held in Campinas, Brazil, in August 2016. The 16 full papers and 9 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 30 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: organisational semiotics: theory and research; semiotics of interactions and socially aware user interface design; digital business ecosystems; knowledge management and engineering; and trends, challenges and new issues in education, health and eScience systems.

Designing for Culturally Contextualized Learning Activity Planning: Matching Learning Theories and Practice

Helping teachers in their activities has been an issue more and more explored in Computer Science. However, in order to support teachers effectively, it is necessary to understand their needs and to design tools that they can easily manage. One of those needs is undoubtedly to put in practice pedagogical principles. This paper presents the design of PACO-T, a tool for helping teachers in planning learning activities (LAs) supported by common sense knowledge, based on PACO, a seven-step textual framework for planning pedagogically suitable LAs. The design was based on the results of a case study carried out to investigate how teachers can plan LAs following PACO steps, using common sense knowledge from a common sense knowledge base collaboratively built through the web. Moreover, the interface design was ruled by a Web Design Pattern Language, attempting to improve the usability of the tool. PACO-T aims to help teachers to put in practice the recommendation for contextualizing LAs to the target group, found in several learning theories.