Re: After Genoa - tangibles on eco-modelling
Jakob Tholander <[email protected]> Thu, 12 May 2005 15:49:47 +0200
| Newsgroups | gmane.education.weblabs.general |
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| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
--=====================_5001301==.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Hi everyone, I have to say that even though I wasn't present at Ylva's presentation I understand from her reaction and from what I gather from the reaction of the rest of the project that our work on tangibles did not get much positive feedback. Unfortunately, from my point of view the dominant part of the project has adopted a very limited view of the core ideas of weblabs i.e. transparent modules, working models, collaboration, and knowledge building for knowledge domain in math and science for 10-14 year-olds. We all have interpreted these ideas in different ways and adapted them to our different conditions, while some has focused more on knowledge building through group discussions other have focused on the idea of transparent models. I believe that it should be considered a strength of the project that we are working with different perspectives of how these ideas might support the different knowledge domains for the age-span of our target group (don't forget 11 year-olds are very different from 14 year-olds). However, as the project has developed it has basically all been about small and quite advanced areas in mathematics and how one can make those accessible for kids. In Sweden on the other hand we have chosen to work with a knowledge domain that have less such properties. We have spent considerable efforts in grounding our domain in the Swedish curriculum and the schools we are collaborating with. To deny the value of how that domain is formulated by referring to a scientific journal about complex systems I have to say seems incredibly naive. Also, we would be terribly ignorant if we when discussing appropriate knowledge domains with the teachers of our school if we simply dismissed their interests and ways of working. As a researcher it is not my job to tell the teachers what they should be teaching their children, it is merely to provide them with a new set of tools that they might find useful in their practice. An other important thing which seem not to have been discussed is that the work with tangibles that we have been doing aimed at addressing the issues in the contract that were about exploring new tangible technologies for building working models of one's knowledge. This has involved exploring and investigate technologies for tangible systems that we did not have access to at the start of the project. The application that we have built is therefore still a prototype and not finished in any way. It is of course easy to criticize it in many ways. What our application attempts to demonstrate is how tangible technologies can be designed for children to collaborately build working models of dynamic systems. Therefore we have also chosen to implement a subset of the ecomodelling behaviours that we have been implementing in ToonTalk. We are very much aware that the prototype needs further work when it comes to the kinds of models that children can build with it, but the goal was never that this application would be ready for full-scale testing within the project. In our activities with children we believe that we actually have come quite far in also evaluating the use of the system for learning about ecosystems. /jakob At 09:33 2005-05-12, Ken Kahn wrote: >Hi all. > >I think Ylva and Jakob's work on tangibles has led to an innovative and >interesting input device. Furthermore they showed how the device can >change the way children build models, especially how they collaborate. I >think this is good work and I'll leave it to others to make this work fit >into the project final report. > >Where I disagree with Joao Filipe is about the word "eco" and to lesser >extent "complex systems". A very quick Google search and I found "Complex >Systems is a journal devoted to the science, mathematics, and engineering >of systems with simple components but complex overall behavior." My >problem with making a connection to complex systems is I don't see what we >or the kids have to say about "the complex overall behaviour". If we want >to say they were doing complex systems then they should be trying to >understand the overall behaviour -- I don't recall hearing that the kids >were trying to do this. > >I have a few problems using "eco" to describe what the kids were doing. >First, this year the kids have drifted even further from modelling >ecologies -- I admit that vampires and skeletons could be part of an >imaginary ecology but I think the kids were not approaching things that >way. Previous years were more focussed on ecologies. Yes, one small part >of understanding ecologies is that some creatures eat other creatures. But >it seems hard to make a case that kids need to build computer models to >understand that more deeply. Ecological questions are about balance, >disturbances, sustainability, etc. At the minimum there needs to be >reproduction since without it everyone starves. Ideally there should >sources and sinks for energy and other resources. Compare the WebLabs >eco-literacy efforts with those in StageCast Creator -- ><http://www.stagecast.com/cgi-bin/templator.cgi?PAGE=School/worlds/simhost/POPULATIONGROWTH/>http://www.stagecast.com/cgi-bin/templator.cgi?PAGE=School/worlds/simhost/POPULATIONGROWTH/ >-- I bet the StageCast version is at least as transparent as the >eco-modelling TM and is so much richer. > >Best, > >-ken >----- Original Message ----- >From: <mailto:[email protected]>Joao Filipe Matos >To: <mailto:[email protected]>[email protected] >Cc: <mailto:[email protected]>[email protected] ; ><mailto:[email protected]>Joao Filipe Matos >Sent: Wednesday, May 11, 2005 4:29 PM >Subject: [weblabs-general] After Genoa - tangibles on eco-modelling > >Dear Weblabs' > >First of all thanks to our Italian colleagues for the hospitality during >the meeting. >When returning to Lisbon (two flights connection and 9 hours travelling) I >guess I realized how impressed I was of the reaction of several people in >the meeting after the short presentation of Ylva on Eco-modelling >tangibles, and how unconfortable I felt for not having reacted (as I think >I should). Certainly that we need to make a (collective) effort to provide >evidence of the relevance of what we are all doing in the project and to >convince our audience(s) that our claims are educationaly soundfull. As >this is a research project, and as open-minded researchers, I think that >our positioning as researchers must go in the line of interrogate what >evidence are we providing for the claims we are doing and discuss this >openly (and this criteria must certainly be equally applied to all >knowledge domains) and we must support all efforts to explore new ways of >representing knowledge and develop powerful ideas and learning (at the >end, this is what WebLabs is about). >As far as I could interprete, Ylva presented a first exploration of a kind >of tangibles that allow children to both embody and be in the millieu of a >phenomenon which clearly is in the domain of complex systems and ecology. >Being the basis to children activities a "computational world", this goes >in parallel with the work of Abelson and DiSessa when they were exploring >virtual worlds with Logo back in the 1980's (although in different time >and distance of the technology resources available by that time) . The >added value of the line Ylva is following now, is that it brings together >new ways of looking at learning and cognition (see for example the way >Francisco Varela discusses this in his book Principles of Biological >Autonomy bringing in the concept of "autopoiesis"; the way Humberto >Maturana and Francisco Varela go in Ch. 5 the natural drift of living >beings in The Tree of Knowledge; the forms the discussion of Terry >Winograd and Fernando Flores assume in Ch.3 and 4 into cognition as >biological phenomena on Understanding Computers and Cognition-new >frontiers for design; the way Boohan suggest creating worlds from objects >and events in Ogborn et al. Learning with Articial Worlds-Computer bases >Modelling; etc). >Flying from Genoa to Paris I got from the French newspaper Liberation of >10 May an article on how scientists are trying to fight Homalodisca >Coagulata (a small fly that is terrible for several kinds of fruit) with >another fly, La microguepe. This is a rather important problem in the >field of ecology as the scientists are not sure if there is some further >implication of the action they are taking to combat the bad fly although >the probablity is low acoording to the report (see how natural is puting >together randomness and eco-modelling). A decision was taken to make a >controled experiment in Polinesia and then to decide if the problem can be >addressed in the same way in the US. It is a simple real and important >problem that children can model when being exposed to the story of what is >happening in those countries, and in doing so, deal with relevant issues >in ecoliteracy, science and mathematics. But this has to make sense in the >particular context of the Swedish school (or any other country) in order >to be fully appreciated by teachers and children. >Certainly one needs to ask relevant and powerful research questions when >looking at the experiments Ylva is doing with the tangibles. Let me offer >a few suggestions: >- how do children decide what behaviours to assign to each character and >why? what is their alignment (i.e. what do they aim for, what is the >expected outcome of the model built)? >- what steps can we identify in children's discussion and dialogue (e.g. >reflecting + identifying variables and behaviours -- assigning behaviours >-- defining quantities of characters -- putting the model in action -- >observing the global behaviour of the population of characters -- telling >stories (i.e. constructing narratives to make sense of the phenomena) -- >refining the model (i.e. changing the behaviours -- etc). >- how do children relate the local to the global (i.e. the local >definition of each character to the global population)? how is locality >addressed by children? how do they formulate (in their repertoire) those >relationships? how do they deal with this dimention of complexity? >- how do children "project" themselves in the field of the characters they >build? what is specific of their location in that field (of characters) -- >as "part of the system" in the sense of Varela or within the system -- >that becomes visible in the way they collaborate in the production of the >global system? >- what is the nature of the ressonance of this activity of children in the >way they address problems such as the example I got from Liberation? >- in the methodological dimension, would it be helpful to make a >collective interview of the group following guidelines that allow the >researcher to have detailed evidence of the ways they appropriate powerful >ideas in eco-modelling? > >I hope this is helpful. It is the way I found to support Ylva here. >All the best, >Joao Filipe > ><http://www.educ.fc.ul.pt/docentes/jfmatos>http://www.educ.fc.ul.pt/docentes/jfmatos > > > > > >---------- >Yahoo! Groups Links > * To visit your group on the web, go to: > * > <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/weblabs-general/>http://groups.yahoo.com/group/weblabs-general/ > > * > * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: > * > <mailto:[email protected]?subject=Unsubscribe>[email protected] > > * > * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the > <http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/>Yahoo! Terms of Service. ------ phone + 46 8 674 74 79 mobile + 46 70 482 12 51 www.dsv.su.se/research/kids --=====================_5001301==.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit <html> <body> Hi everyone,<br><br> I have to say that even though I wasn't present at Ylva's presentation I understand from her reaction and from what I gather from the reaction of the rest of the project that our work on tangibles did not get much positive feedback. <br><br> Unfortunately, from my point of view the dominant part of the project has adopted a very limited view of the core ideas of weblabs i.e. transparent modules, working models, collaboration, and knowledge building for knowledge domain in math and science for 10-14 year-olds. We all have interpreted these ideas in different ways and adapted them to our different conditions, while some has focused more on knowledge building through group discussions other have focused on the idea of transparent models. I believe that it should be considered a strength of the project that we are working with different perspectives of how these ideas might support the different knowledge domains for the age-span of our target group (don't forget 11 year-olds are very different from 14 year-olds). However, as the project has developed it has basically all been about small and quite advanced areas in mathematics and how one can make those accessible for kids. In Sweden on the other hand we have chosen to work with a knowledge domain that have less such properties. We have spent considerable efforts in grounding our domain in the Swedish curriculum and the schools we are collaborating with. To deny the value of how that domain is formulated by referring to a scientific journal about complex systems I have to say seems incredibly naive. Also, we would be terribly ignorant if we when discussing appropriate knowledge domains with the teachers of our school if we simply dismissed their interests and ways of working. As a researcher it is not my job to tell the teachers what they should be teaching their children, it is merely to provide them with a new set of tools that they might find useful in their practice.<br><br> An other important thing which seem not to have been discussed is that the work with tangibles that we have been doing aimed at addressing the issues in the contract that were about exploring new <br> tangible technologies for building working models of one's knowledge. This has involved exploring and investigate technologies for tangible systems that we did not have access to at the start of the project. The application that we have built is therefore still a prototype and not finished in any way. It is of course easy to criticize it in many ways. What our application attempts to demonstrate is how tangible technologies can be designed for children to collaborately build working models of dynamic systems. Therefore we have also chosen to implement a subset of the ecomodelling behaviours that we have been implementing in ToonTalk. We are very much aware that the prototype needs further work when it comes to the kinds of models that children can build with it, but the goal was never that this application would be ready for full-scale testing within the project. In our activities with children we believe that we actually have come quite far in also evaluating the use of the system for learning about ecosystems.<br><br> /jakob<br><br> <br> At 09:33 2005-05-12, Ken Kahn wrote:<br> <blockquote type=cite class=cite cite><font face="Comic Sans MS" size=2>Hi all.<br> </font> <br> <font face="Comic Sans MS" size=2>I think Ylva and Jakob's work on tangibles has led to an innovative and interesting input device. Furthermore they showed how the device can change the way children build models, especially how they collaborate. I think this is good work and I'll leave it to others to make this work fit into the project final report.<br> </font> <br> <font face="Comic Sans MS" size=2>Where I disagree with Joao Filipe is about the word "eco" and to lesser extent "complex systems". A very quick Google search and I found "</font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=2><i>Complex Systems</i> is a journal devoted to the science, mathematics, and engineering of systems with simple components but complex overall behavior." </font><font face="Comic Sans MS" size=2>My problem with making a connection to complex systems is I don't see what we or the kids have to say about "the complex overall behaviour". If we want to say they were doing complex systems then they should be trying to understand the overall behaviour -- I don't recall hearing that the kids were trying to do this.<br> </font> <br> <font face="Comic Sans MS" size=2>I have a few problems using "eco" to describe what the kids were doing. First, this year the kids have drifted even further from modelling ecologies -- I admit that vampires and skeletons could be part of an imaginary ecology but I think the kids were not approaching things that way. Previous years were more focussed on ecologies. Yes, one small part of understanding ecologies is that some creatures eat other creatures. But it seems hard to make a case that kids need to build computer models to understand that more deeply. Ecological questions are about balance, disturbances, sustainability, etc. At the minimum there needs to be reproduction since without it everyone starves. Ideally there should sources and sinks for energy and other resources. Compare the WebLabs eco-literacy efforts with those in StageCast Creator -- <a href="http://www.stagecast.com/cgi-bin/templator.cgi?PAGE=School/worlds/simhost/POPULATIONGROWTH/">http://www.stagecast.com/cgi-bin/templator.cgi?PAGE=School/worlds/simhost/POPULATIONGROWTH/</a> -- I bet the StageCast version is at least as transparent as the eco-modelling TM and is so much richer.<br> </font> <br> <font face="Comic Sans MS" size=2>Best,<br> </font> <br> <font face="Comic Sans MS" size=2>-ken<br> </font> <dl> <dd>----- Original Message ----- <br> <dd>From:</b> <a href="mailto:[email protected]">Joao Filipe Matos</a> <br> <dd>To:</b> <a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a> <br> <dd>Cc:</b> <a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a> ; <a href="mailto:[email protected]">Joao Filipe Matos</a> <br> <dd>Sent:</b> Wednesday, May 11, 2005 4:29 PM<br> <dd>Subject:</b> [weblabs-general] After Genoa - tangibles on eco-modelling<br><br> <dd><font size=2>Dear Weblabs'<br> </font> <dd> <br> <dd><font size=2>First of all thanks to our Italian colleagues for the hospitality during the meeting.<br> <dd>When returning to Lisbon (two flights connection and 9 hours travelling) I guess I realized how impressed I was of the reaction of several people in the meeting after the short presentation of Ylva on Eco-modelling tangibles, and how unconfortable I felt for not having reacted (as I think I should). Certainly that we need to make a (collective) effort to provide evidence of the relevance of what we are all doing in the project and to convince our audience(s) that our claims are educationaly soundfull. As this is a research project, and as open-minded researchers, I think that our positioning as researchers must go in the line of interrogate what evidence are we providing for the claims we are doing and discuss this openly (and this criteria must certainly be equally applied to all knowledge domains) and we must support all efforts to explore new ways of representing knowledge and dev elop powerful ideas and learning (at the end, this is what WebLabs is about).<br> <dd>As far as I could interprete, Ylva presented a first exploration of a kind of tangibles that allow children to both embody and be in the millieu of a phenomenon which clearly is in the domain of complex systems and ecology. Being the basis to children activities a "computational world", this goes in parallel with the work of Abelson and DiSessa when they were exploring virtual worlds with Logo back in the 1980's (although in different time and distance of the technology resources available by that time) . The added value of the line Ylva is following now, is that it brings together new ways of looking at learning and cognition (see for example the way Francisco Varela discusses this in his book Principles of Biological Autonomy bringing in the concept of "autopoiesis"; the way Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela go in Ch. 5 the natural drift of living beings in The Tree of Knowledge; the forms the discussion of Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores assume in Ch.3 and 4 into cognition as biological phenomena on Understanding Computers and Cognition-new frontiers for design; the way Boohan suggest creating worlds from objects and events in Ogborn et al. Learning with Articial Worlds-Computer bases Modelling; etc).<br> <dd>Flying from Genoa to Paris I got from the French newspaper Liberation of 10 May an article on how scientists are trying to fight Homalodisca Coagulata (a small fly that is terrible for several kinds of fruit) with another fly, La microguepe. This is a rather important problem in the field of ecology as the scientists are not sure if there is some further implication of the action they are taking to combat the bad fly although the probablity is low acoording to the report (see how natural is puting together randomness and eco-modelling). A decision was taken to make a controled experiment in Polinesia and then to decide if the problem can be addressed in the same way in the US. It is a simple real and important problem that children can model when being exposed to the story of what is happening in those countries, and in doing so, deal with relevant issues in ecoliteracy, science and mathematics. But this has to make sense in the particular context of the Swedish school (or any other country) in order to be fully appreciated by teachers and children.<br> <dd>Certainly one needs to ask relevant and powerful research questions when looking at the experiments Ylva is doing with the tangibles. Let me offer a few suggestions:<br> <dd>- how do children decide what behaviours to assign to each character and why? what is their alignment (i.e. what do they aim for, what is the expected outcome of the model built)?<br> <dd>- what steps can we identify in children's discussion and dialogue (e.g. reflecting + identifying variables and behaviours -- assigning behaviours -- defining quantities of characters -- putting the model in action -- observing the global behaviour of the population of characters -- telling stories (i.e. constructing narratives to make sense of the phenomena) -- refining the model (i.e. changing the behaviours -- etc).<br> <dd>- how do children relate the local to the global (i.e. the local definition of each character to the global population)? how is locality addressed by children? how do they formulate (in their repertoire) those relationships? how do they deal with this dimention of complexity?<br> <dd>- how do children "project" themselves in the field of the characters they build? what is specific of their location in that field (of characters) -- as "part of the system" in the sense of Varela or within the system -- that becomes visible in the way they collaborate in the production of the global system?<br> <dd>- what is the nature of the ressonance of this activity of children in the way they address problems such as the example I got from Liberation?<br> <dd>- in the methodological dimension, would it be helpful to make a collective interview of the group following guidelines that allow the researcher to have detailed evidence of the ways they appropriate powerful ideas in eco-modelling?<br> </font> <dd> <br> <dd><font size=2>I hope this is helpful. It is the way I found to support Ylva here.<br> <dd>All the best,<br> <dd>Joao Filipe<br> </font> <dd> <br> <dd><font size=2><a href="http://www.educ.fc.ul.pt/docentes/jfmatos">http://www.educ.fc.ul.pt/docentes/jfmatos</a><br> </font> <dd> <br> <font size=2><br> </font> <dd> <br><br> <hr> <dd><tt>Yahoo! Groups Links</b> </dl> <ul> <li>To visit your group on the web, go to: <li><a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/weblabs-general/">http://groups.yahoo.com/group/weblabs-general/</a> <li> <li>To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: <li><a href="mailto:[email protected]?subject=Unsubscribe">[email protected]</a> <li> <li>Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the <a href="http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/">Yahoo! Terms of Service</a>. </tt> </ul></blockquote> <x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep> <br><br> ------<br> phone + 46 8 674 74 79<br> mobile + 46 70 482 12 51<br> <a href="http://www.dsv.su.se/research/kids" eudora="autourl">www.dsv.su.se/research/kids</a> </body> </html> --=====================_5001301==.ALT--