Compas organise une session spéciale de la Conférence Internationale Enactive08, Pise 19-21 Novembre 2008.
Veuillez consulter le site internet de la conférence
Ainsi que celui spécialement dédié au Symposium Compas
La session aura pour thème: Présence, tele-présence et présence virtuelle dans l’Education et sera animé par:
Elena Pasquinelli, Chair
Daniel Andler, Roberto casati, Bastien Guerry et David Wilgenbus, Speakers.
The rationale of our symposium is represented by the widely diffused interrogation about the usefulness of introducing new technologies into education. This question has recently been extensively discussed in the pages of The Economist and has received a positive answer.
We are strongly committed to the idea that technology is not good “per se” and that it is important to identify the scenarios, positive and negative, that are made possible by introducing technologies, and could not be possible otherwise.
The development of virtual and augmented reality media is giving rise to new, hitherto unexplored opportunities of interaction with virtual objects, exploration of virtual environments, and interaction with virtual people. One important application is the development of educationalinterfaces, which enable learners to experience otherwise inaccessible objects and to actively operate upon them in order to extract information, and plan and execute activities of exploration and investigation. Another set of applications allow learners and teachers to interact at a distance through perceptual representations (avatars), or by more conventional means (videos or even just e-mail). These applications affect both formal and informal learning.
A University is broadcasting conferences of teachers on the net. Is the lesson as “freely” given (with jokes, etc.) as when it is not recorded and broadcast on the web? What kind of intimacy and privacy is required for the students and teacher to feel like they are part of the same context and community of learning?
A college uses virtual reality devices for teaching physics. Students interact with virtual representations of the Solar system. What is the role of the teacher? Where goes the attention of the students (and the teacher)? Is the visual and interactive representation of the object interfering with processes of abstraction and with attention towards the teacher’s explanations?
A school teacher uses a digital whiteboard to teach geometry. She can draw “perfect” circles and triangles and go back to previous lessons, and comment what she said. How is her authority affected? Does TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning) weaken her authority, because the teacher is relying on some sort of clever assistant, or does this strengthen her authority, because the teacher demonstrates to master a complex technology?
The aim of the proposed symposium is to further our understanding of the processes at work in these diverse forms of virtual and at-distance interaction; to identify the relevant advantages and side-effects of adopting TEL; and to sketch directions for further research.
Research questions revolve around four dimensions: (i) cognitive (as revealed by cognitive science and educational psychology), (ii) pedagogical (as revealed in-vivo classroom dynamics), (iii) learning (as revealed in settings in and out of school), (iv) ethical. Specifically:
(i) What are the processes which an absent teacher (distant, video-canned, or fully virtual) activates as a facilitator of learning, as compared to the live traditional teacher? The use of virtual training and the interaction with virtual entities pose a crucial question to cognitive science and to educational psychology. Broadly stated, we need to gain an understanding of the cognitive functions and processes which underwrite experiences in virtual reality and the transfer of acquisitions from one domain to another (i.e. virtual to real).
(ii) A classroom which involves attending courses given by distant teachers, interacting at distance with peers, and employing virtual trainers and guides is bound to give rise to a profoundly transformed pedagogy, in which the ‘non-virtual’ teacher’s role is as yet not fully understood. How do new technologies for virtual and tele-presence affect pedagogical instruments and practices?
(iii) Learning is a process that interests the most part of our lives, not only school time. For this reason learning contexts and situations, and relative technologies, include museums and professional training. How is the pedagogy of informal educational environments affected?
(iv) The user must always be able to maintain a clear awareness that she is in front of a mediating interface; this is necessary from both an instrumental and an ethical point of view. In fact, enhancing the believability of mediated experiences can lead to manipulating the subject and exploiting her vulnerability to gullibility. Creating and disseminating learning tools involving the new media thus engages the moral obligation to investigate the consequences of its uses by the learner, in the short and the long term. Is there a need for a specific learning of epistemic distinctions, as part of the deployment of virtual tools in everyday formal and informal learning?
It is important to accompany the introduction of new technologies with a serious reflection upon the appropriate pedagogical approaches.
Our symposium aims at exploring both dimensions through the constitution of a special interest group on new technologies - education - cognitive sciences, capable of promoting and orienting the research efforts and of structuring future collaborations between interdisciplinary laboratories.
We intend to explore our topic through the study of scenarios of desirable and non-desirable uses of presence and tele-presence technologies in different educational contexts (formal and informal, kindergarten and high school).