Today, I came back to one of loves: Python. I found a good implementation for OS X that intrigued me to start learning programming again.

Interesting enough I dig an old script that was trying to retrieve the number of times in which the word “war” or “peace” was printed in the main page of the mayor european journals compared to the american ones. I was interested in this topic during the beginning of the second Gulf war.

This picture shows the number of times the word “war” (dark red) or “peace” (light red) was printed in the main pages of the American journals (group on the left) compared with the European journals (group on the right). The first graph was taken the 9th of March 03 and the second the 9th of March 03.

“La Mole Antonelliana” from my appartment in Torino.

[Barros and Verdejo2000] Barros, B. and Verdejo, M. F. (2000). Analysing student interaction processes in orger to improve collaboration: the degree approach. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, (11):221–241.
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The idea presented in this paper is to use the logs of CSCL system to guide the teacher and the students using the system. The logic used in the system consists of applying finite qualitative evaluation rules to the logs. One of the characteristics of the system is to ask the user to define what their are doing into the system to say, for instance, if they are making a proposal, or a contra-porposal, or commenting, or clarifying, or questioning. Finally the logs are compared with a model of what a good interaction in the group should look like.

Interesting discussion today with Patrick about the fundamental issues of CSCL. We started from the discussion about the differences of a guiding /tutoring system to a mirroring system. The limits of the former are the complexity of a computational model able to acknowledge group interaction. The latter has the limit of the design choice of what elements of the interaction are relevant to show and provide as feedback to the users.

Fundamentally, the problem is that building a model intelligent fight against the difficulty of translating a cognitive model into a third order logic. So, either you loose the discreteness and concreteness of the elaboration you get form the system, either you find yourself in a finite state machine (FSM), which do not acknowledge the complexity of human interaction, therefore is of no use.

I was questioning myself wether AI is dead. Patrick’s current point is to find good algorithms able to show relevant information to the users which are able to propel the learning process. More so, he is interested in finding algorithms able to detect the change of state of a group. Problem here is to find exactly what to measure to be able to detect those kind of changes, and secondly how to define such changes.

You might actually think that OS X is a dumb system, but you have actually come to use it how you enjoy to have just one button!!!

The context in which this study is developing is the field of CSCL, where computational methodologies comes in support of human-interaction. A computer can be seen as an agent into the system where the interaction happens, the computer is the logical partner, with limited responsiveness, limited features but still part of the system.

People communicates, exchanging messages, negotiating meanings. How does this happen? Meaning to places is socially assigned into a small group. Inference and misconceptions drives the grounding process. Some theories affirm that miscomprehension generates positive effects on collaborative learning because propels negotiation.

My initial question is: hacking the inference process of this “spatial communication”, using relevant information when there is a lack of comprehension, and providing misleading information when there is a good understanding, can result in a stranger grounding between the peers?

To answer this question we need to define a model of the communication process and of the negotiation of meaning. when this happen? How this happen? By which means? We need to find good tools for analysing the interaction, distinguishing the cognitive/meta-cognitive dimension, the social/cognitive dimension, the task communicative dimension.

One of the major point is to define essentially what does it mean “to understand” something.

The framework in which this work can develop is the context of “spatialised communication”, meaning messages which makes explicit use of the context-space to deliver the meaning.

The ideal system would be a mobile system in which every user is able to attach messages to space for different reasons: (a) orientate someone; (b) meeting someone; (c) describe a place for someone; (d) spam / make him/herself visible to the community; (e) remember something for himself.

Throughout the piling messages, the aim of this work is to find good algorithms able to grasp structures referring to the content of the messages in relation of the interaction of the users. From here, the system may guide the users interaction to achieve the research question goal.

[Dillenbourg et al.1996] Dillenbourg, P., Baker, M., Blaye, A., and O’Malley, C. (1996). The evolution of research on collaborative learning. In Spada, E. and Reiman, P., editors, Learning in Humans and Machine: Towards an interdisciplinary learning science, pages 189–211. Elsevier, Oxford.
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The goal of this paper is to show the current trend of research on CSCL, showing that while recent studies tend to focus on the group as a unit of analysis, more recent studies showed that it is not possible to measure the effectiveness of group interaction per se. More micro theories are needed to highlight how a group works in a specific context (“microgenetic features of the interaction”). In this context, we need more tools for observing these micro interactions and the computer can be seen as providing particular support in this regard. We can consider the computer as a mediator in the interaction process. On the other hand having a very fine observation is of no use if this doesn’t connect with analysis tools, able to give meaning to what we have observed. Therefore, we need sophisticated collaboration models, which can highlight how and where negotiation takes place. Particularly, it is interesting to notice the emergence of a negotiation of meanings, that is something “to be jointly constructed throughout the interaction by both speakers”. One of the criteria suggested to decide wether grounding happened is when: “the contributor and the partners mutually believe that the partners have understood what the contributor meant to a criterion sufficient for current purposes”.

Another interesting citation point is that individual masters new approaches while interacting with others coordinating his/her approaches to reality.

Today I felt the “impasse” of my laziness. Checking the timeline I started with, I can see already that I am in late. I should have already a reasoning protocol and some ideas on how to build an experiment for the reasoning model.

Yes, I have to admit it: yesterday I spent lots of time jerking around with iDVD, just to discover that Apple has “blocked” its ability to burn to external DVD burners. Here, anyway I found a solution to open this easter egg.

Besides this I finally decided to trash my old video camera and to buy a new one. Why? because I am sick o the crappie audio and the f**king NTSC format.

Today is my birthday … 1 year of web logging!
Of course this also means 1 year at CRAFT.
Forza e Onore