Posted by Andreas Zitek in Dynalearn on February 2nd, 2010
New team member @ BOKU
Michael Stelzhammer joined the BOKU team to support the current intense model building activity with a special focus on natural and social processes in river catchments. Welcome to our team!
Posted by René Bühling in Dynalearn on January 22nd, 2010
Project page at UAU
Augsburg University added its work for the DynaLearn virtual characters to the project portfolio. The report is available in German language as well as in English.
Posted by Moshe Leiba in Dynalearn on January 5th, 2010
Marine Biology Course with DynaLearn
“Marine Biology - Qualitative models” course has started 5 weeks ago at the Faculty of Life Sciences at Tel Aviv University (TAU). A group of 11 students are attending the 7 weeks course using DynaLearn environment to construct a model related to the course syllabus. So far the students have chosen a scientific paper related to Marine Ecosystem (e.g. Shrimp and Gubi) and have started to model the system in pairs. The students have learned and used the qualitative modeling language and terminology; built a concept map representing entities and types of relationships in a chosen system; and addressed processes, conditions, consequences in.
So far the students reported to enjoy the process of modelling and showed a deep understanding of the Marine Ecosystem they choose. Full evaluation data will be available after the end of the course.
DynaLearn in the media
In the last months, the DynaLearn project members have published several press releases. Those have led to numerous newspaper articles and blog posts in technological and educational web-logs. The press releases and a list of media coverage can be found in the Press Room section of the website.
This section now also contains demo videos of the Quiz agent. The virtual agents form a vital part of the DynaLearn project. They should make the interaction between the user and the software engaging and motivating.
Posted by Michael Wißner in Dynalearn on December 9th, 2009
DynaLearn-related Master Thesis @ UAU
Markus Häring, one of our student researchers for the DynaLearn project, just started his Master Thesis “Automatenbasierte Dialogsteuerung für Charaktere in intelligenten Lernumgebungen” (State Machine-based Dialog Management for Virtual Characters in Intelligent Learning Environments).
Posted by Michael Wißner in Dynalearn on December 9th, 2009
New team member @ UAU
Cristina Kadar from UAU’s Elite Graduate Program “Software Engineering” joined us as a student researcher for the DynaLearn project. Cristina’s work will focus on user / learner modeling in the Virtual Character component.
Posted by Bert Bredeweg in Dynalearn on December 3rd, 2009
Ecological informatics - Special issue on QR
A special issue has been published in the international journal Ecological informatics on Qualitative models of ecological systems which reports on the main results obtained in the NaturNet-Redime project (No. 004074, EU, FP6). The special issue has papers on the Garp3 software, advanced QR models, and evaluation studies. It provides important information for the DynaLearn project.
- Special Issue: Qualitative models of ecological systems
- Edited by Bert Bredeweg and Paulo Salles
- Volume 4, Issues 5-6, Pages 261-412 (November-December 2009)
Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS 2010)
The Tenth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS 2010) will be held in Pittsburgh (USA) June 14-18, 2010. Bert Bredeweg was invited to serve on the Advisory Board for ITS. Submissions are due starting on January 12th. 2010.
The theme of the ITS 2010 conference is Bridges to Learning, a theme that connects the scientific content of the conference and the geography of the city.
Posted by Jorge Gracia del Río in Dynalearn on December 1st, 2009
Using ontology matching tools to align qualitative reasoning models
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) and University of Amsterdam (UVA) started an experiment to test the suitability of some well-established Ontology Matching tools when used to align qualitative reasoning models. The studied systems were CIDER, from University of Zaragoza (Spain), and FALCON, from Southeast University (China). The goal of these tools is to discover semantic correspondences between the terms of two different ontologies (or QR models, in our experiment), in order to give an estimation of how similar the two ontologies are.
The experimental data consisted of some manually aligned qualitative reasoning models created by experts at University of Brásilia (FUB). We compared these alignments with the ones automatically derived by the matching tools. The initial results (0.93 F-Measure with CIDER and 0.79 F-Measure with Falcon), although not yet conclusive (this is just the starting of a series of tests), are very promising and point out the feasibility of applying ontology matching techniques in the context of DynaLearn. For more details you can contact Jorge Gracia (UPM).
Posted by Andreas Zitek in Dynalearn on November 16th, 2009
IHTL enters DynaLearn as Evaluation Partner
The IHTL Bad Radkersburg (Styria, Austria) aims to provide young people from Austria, Hungary, Slovenia and Croatia with a common training to become engineers. As a result of this the graduates should be able to establish and develop a cross-border market and help to promote the economy and culture of the Adria-Alpe-Pannonia Region. DynaLearn software will be introduced by BOKU to train students in a better understanding of local and global environmental issues, especially related to sustainable energy supply within European electricity networks (SmartGrids). The effects of the DynaLearn approach on learning and understanding important related scientific concepts will be evaluated in dfferent classroom settings. Welcome to the Dynalearn project!
Update log
December 18th,2009
Updated software page with expected release datesDecember 6th,2009
Uploaded: DynaLearn folder (Publications)November 30th,2009
Uploaded: Agenda and Minutes (draft) project meeting Madrid (internal)November 18th,2009
PowerPoint Template (internal)November 8th,2009
New favicon for DynaLearn websiteOctober 8th,2009
Uploaded: Project meeting presentations Madrid (Internal)
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