Introduction

The workshop BZ-TEL is organised as an initiative of the Faculty of Computer Science of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, also with the support of the TERENCE European project.

The workshop BZ-TEL is dedicated to some Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) initiatives that are relevant for the Faculty of Computer Science of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. The workshop sees interventions of researchers of the faculty and of a guest speaker, see the below programme.

The presentations are intended for a general public, e.g., colleagues from the education field, and hence, whenever possible, technical details will be avoided.

Programme

No registration is required; participation in the workshop is free and most welcome!

10:30–10:40	Gabriella Dodero (Free U. of Bozen-Bolzano). Welcome.
10:40–11:20	Giuliana Dettori (ITD-CNR, Genova). Download slides. Narrative Learning. Abstract: Narrative (intended as stories and narrations) has been used to communicate ideas from very ancient times and is perceived as a natural expressive form by both children and adults. Scholars with diverse perspectives highlight the presence of causal and temporal interdependences among story elements, which derive from their position in the narrative sequence. This leads people dealing with both fictional stories or experience narrations to grasp not only explicit but also implicit information, and consequently to instinctively engage in a meaning-construction process. This makes narrative a powerful learning device. Moreover, stories and narrations facilitate understanding by helping to overcome the difficulty of abstraction and providing a concrete starting point for discussion and reflection. Because of the centrality given to human actions, intentions, emotions and relations, narrative-based contexts usually result engaging for learners also from the emotional/affective point of view, favoring the connection of this aspect with content knowledge and stimulating the development of intrinsic motivation. Narrative can be used in different ways and with a variety of aims to help set up constructive learning activities and environments. This lecture will discuss several examples which illustrate the variety of possibilities to set up meaningful narrative-based learning activities, considering diverse cases such as narrating a story in collaboration, taking part in a story by role-playing, jointly reconstructing a story, and sharing individual stories as a starting point to boost joint reflection.
11:20–12:00	Gabriella Dodero, Vincenzo del Fatto (Free U. of Bozen-Bolzano). Attaching geographical meaning to Learning Objects. Download slides. Abstract: The complexity of a territory needs to be managed by appropriate tools, especially in a context of rapid urban population growth. We think a territory as a place where citizens need to learn and need to know where and how to learn in order to actively contribute to the life and development of their territory. Based on these motivations, in this presentation we discuss how topics from a field suitable for managing a territory, such as a Geographic Information System, and from a field suitable for managing learning content, such as an E-learning System, could be mixed in order to improve learning activities and environments.
12:00–12:20	Alessandra Melonio (Free U. of Bozen-Bolzano). Co-design with intergenerational teams. Download slides. Abstract: This presentation is an introduction to co-design in an instructional context with intergenerational teams of adults and children aged 7--11 year old. Adults and children become design partners in the design development process of new technology. I will start by introducing the main ideas of co-design. Then I will focus on the user research methods used in co-design sessions. For describing them concretely, I will conclude my presentation by reporting on existing projects that have used these methods in their experiments.
12:20–14:00	Lunch.
14:00–15:30	Rosella Gennari (Free U. of Bozen-Bolzano). The TERENCE EU Project: Selected Highlights. Download slides. Abstract: TERENCE is a three year long project dedicated to the design and development of the first Adaptive Learning System for poor comprehenders, hearing and deaf, and for their educators. This tool aims to help educators in their daily work with 7-11 year old children who have profound text comprehension problems. Besides learners and educators, that are its primary end users, the system is also being developed for experts in the consortium, like linguists, logicians or psychologists. TERENCE employs stories and smart games for poor comprehenders as learning material. Smart games serve to reason about stories and tackle specific high-level cognitive text processing skills. More precisely, the system's smart games aim at stimulating children to reason about the events of stories, written both in Italian and English. The design of the system and of its learning material, in particular, were carried out through an extensive context of use analysis and refined in light of evaluations with experts and users, by combining the user centred and evidence based design methods. The talk will overview the design of the system and the creation of its learning material, explaining how design choices were rooted in the analyses of the context of use as well as in the results of user-based and expert-based evaluations.
15:30–16:30	Open Discussion.

Location

The working day takes place in the seminar room, 1st floor, Piazza Domenicani 3, Bolzano.

Organisers and contact people

Enzo del Fatto <vincenzo.delfatto AT unibz.it>.

Gabriella Dodero <gabriella.dodero AT unibz.it>.

Rosella Gennari <gennari AT inf.unibz.it>.

Alessandra Melonio <alessandra.melonio AT unibz.it>.

Flyer

You can download the flyer of the workshop.