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Remember: You can hunt information about Tecfa's research by
searching our server
In addition, you may want to scan people's home pages.
Contents
When we solve a problem with a colleague or a friend, we often use a piece of paper to draw a diagram or sketch. Such diagrams help us to build a shared representation of the problem and to repair communication breakdowns. Can we design equivalent artefacts to enrich human-computer collaboration?
This project concerns the design of artificial agents able to collaborate with a human agent which is a key issue in the area of educational science and will advance the knowledge about learning from an interdisciplinary perspective, bringing together Swiss and Romanian researchers from the areas of psychology, educational science and computer science.
Contact: Pierre Dillenbourg and David Traum
Implicit Coordination in Distributed Systems
Contact: Pierre Dillenbourg and Catalin Buiu
See also: Computer Mediated Communication, Information
Systems and Virtual Worlds, e.g. the The
TecfaMOO project. 
Distance Education
JITOL
The JITOL project concerns "Just in Time Open Learning". Jitol
is based on the essential assumption that collaborative learning is the
best way to access professionnals know-how and that it provides an infrastructure
for communities of professionnals to discuss, document and enhance their
working practices and the knowledge bound up in them. Through the creation
of a transient virtual community bound by a strong motivation to analyse
focused themes, it bonds and mixes both experts and learners around an
electronic conferencing device.
Contact: Daniel
Peraya or Philip
Swann
TEMPUS
The mediatization of teaching contents in the context of distance learning
is in the forefront of the contribution of TECFA to the TEMPUS-Project
"Distance Study Centre Budapest". TEMPUS (the acronym for Trans-European
Mobility Scheme for University Studies) forms part of the overall programme
of European Community aid for the economic restructuring of the countries
of Central and Eastern Europe. Its main goals are to support the development
of higher education systems and to encourage joint activities and exchanges.
Contact: Daniel
Peraya
TRIBUNE
TRIBUNE is a so-called horizontal project giving a comprehensive view
of R&D in the European DELTA Community. It's main production is the
TRIBUNE
Collection , a series of booklets of which one has proven indispensable:
Who's Who in DELTA.
Contact: Pierre
Dunand Filliol or Daniel
Peraya
SIGMA
The SIGMA Project aims to give a survey of the curricula in Communication Sciences offered in the Swiss Universities. The main idea is to help the students compare the courses provided. This project prepares the SOCRATES and LEONARDO European programs. The Swiss Report includes swiss and european recommandations. A postscript copy is available here .
In September 1995 an European Conference took place in Sienna. The Swiss report of the Sienna Conference The future of Communication Sciences in Europe has been published and is available on demand. The participants decided to make a proposal to the SOCRATES Programme in order to set up a thematic network. A working group was set up to prepare a proposal. Unfortunately, the proposal was refused.
Contact: peraya@divsun.unige.ch.
The HUMANITIES Project - in its second phase - aims to develop and consolidate
a structure for virtual mobility through European Universities. Three academic
domains are concernend by this project: Litterature, Law, and Communication
Sciences in which TECFA is involved. The project will make use of available
technology, such as ISDN, satellite, Computer Mediated Communication (CMC).
Information on the project and its newsgroups are available here.
Contact: Daniel
Peraya, Pierre
Dunand Filliol or Daniel
D'ancona.
updated 10.10.96
This project aims to update a overview (written in 1991) of the state
of the art of the OFDL scene through all Swiss Univerisities. It describes
both soft- and hardware uses, analyses pedagogical projects and focuses
on human ressources. An brief presentation of the repport is available
here.
Contact: Daniel
Peraya
COMP'ACT
: EDUCATION AND TRAINING IN EUROPE
This project aims to study particulary the changes in competences brought
about, for the different training actors, by the development of information
and communication technologies (ICT), at both individual (trainers and
learners) and collective (training services and organisations) levels.
Contact: Daniel
Peraya
PROJET
POSCHIAVO
The projetc described here concerns the developpement and implementation of a course focusing on human ecology for distance delivery, in the first instance, to teachers and trainers working in the Poschiavo region of Switzerland (Canton des Grisons). The course is organised by the Istituto Swizzero di Pedagogia per la Fomazione Professionale (ISPFP) and the Swiss Telecom. It will be technology based, will have a six month duration, and will be offered for the first time in January 1997.
TECFA will be part of this project, and will be in charge of its global evaluation.
An exhibition will present the project to the region in May 1996.
An brief presentation of the project is available here.
Contact: Daniel Peraya
The FETICHE Project analyses the present situation about the impact of new information and communication technologies (NICT) - such as telematics, multimedia, Internet... - in the field of Teachers' Continuing Education and Training in a number of European Countries.
The inquiry will focus on actual practice in the different participating institutions. It will then broaden its scope and include state of the art reflection on teacher's training in the participating institutions. Finally, it will be complemented by a systematic enquiry into current practice, ideas and views on the role of new technologies in traning teachers/educators in the different countries involved.
Two fields will be especially investigated: team work and co-operative learning using NTICs and computer mediated communication.
Outcomes will take the form of a series of guidelines for future teachers' training endeavors that include NICTs and will propose pilot experiments to test the validity of these recommendations.
Mail Contacts: Pierre Dunand Filliol or Raymond Morel.
updated 16.10.96
The Socrates' Mailbox Project is focused on users' implicit learning procedures with Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the classroom. A European Observatory Project, it pertains to global Open and distance learning issues. It is planned for a two year period, and began in September 1996.
The inquiry will concentrate on learning with ICTs and will stress on interpersonal communication skills, group dynamics, inter-cultural communication, integration strategies, etc.
It will also seek to bring some enlightment in the domain of developing teachers' new comptences and skills within a ITC empowered classroom. Project findings will be regularily disseminated through a WEB site in order to enhance collaborative inter-institutional co-operation.
Mail Contacts: Pierre Dunand Filliol or Raymond Morel.
updated 12.12.96 pdf
The objective of this project is to have an inventory of available electronic and digital resource (Internet servers) to be able to make them available to the users of a G7 Pilot server. The data gathered must be usable for tans-cultural language learning. An inclusive range of servers have been analysed:
Mail Contacts: Pierre Dunand Filliolor Raymond Morel.
updated 14.10.96
The NRP 33 aims to enhance the effectiveness of learning and the quality of evaluation. TECFA's project in the program consists in writing a trend-report on swiss research in the domain " NIT application in education".
Contact: Patrick
Mendeslsohn or Patrick Jermann
Contact: Peraya Daniel
"Machina Carnis" is an educational software tool on electro-cardiology
and cardio-vascular regulation. It is currently tested with physiology
classes in the Faculte de Medecine of the Universtiy of Geneva. It is 100MB
application running under Windows 3.1 including 16 hypermedias, 12 simulation
modles, 3 interactive animations, auto-evaluation tools etc. The package
also a 37 minute movie with synthetic images which will we plan to distribute
in digital format in the future. The whole includes thus several multimedia
features, such as images, sound, interactive animations and digital video.
It should also represent a interessting testcase for highspeed WANs (add
something on the ATM project)
Contact: Daniel
Peraya or Francois-Daniel
Giezendanner
GEOLAB: A learning environment fo reservoir volumetric characterization.
FSS Consultants is a company which provides geostistics courses, mainly
for oil companies. We submitted a joint research proposal to develop an
intelligent learning environment in which the trainees learn to estimate
the uncertainty of their prediction when they have to estimate the volume
of an oil or water reservoir. This software will be built around the existing
geostatisctical package developped by FSS and integrated to their existing
courses.
Contact: Pierre
Dillenbourg
PUZZLE:
An environment to study help tools.
The aim of this project is to study how people can discover the underlying
regularites of a complex computer environment they have never seen before
in order to propose new efficient help tools. The project includes the
development of two different tools interacting with each other. The first
one is a complex environment to learn visual computing concepts and artificial
life fundings. The other one is a kind of multipurpose courseware manager.
Contacts: Silvere
Martin-Michiellot or Patrick
Mendelsohn .
MEMOLAB
et ETOILE
The memolab research project is funded by the Swiss Research Fund under
a special research program (PNR 23), intitled `Artificial Intelligence
and Robotics'.The research team is multidisciplinary. It includes P. Mendelsohn
(psychology), B. Borcic (computer science), M. Hilario (computer science),
D. Schneider (political and computer sciences), P. Dillenbourg (educational
and computer sciences).
Contact: Pierre
Dillenbourg
SMILE
SMILE stands for 'student modelling in interactive learning environments'.
In traditional ITS systems, the role of student modelling is to select
an adapted teaching strategy. This projects focuses on the role of student
modelling in systems which are more open than traditonal ITsS. In such
systems, the role of student modelling is not to select s strategy for
the learner but to help him to manage his own learning. Therefore, this
project tackles issues such as metacognition, open student models, reciprocal
modelling, ... and tries to unify this work in a formal approach.
Contact: Pierre
Dillenbourg
Learning
in Humans and Machines
The mission of this recently launched programme is to advance our konowledge
about learning from an interdisciplinary perspective, bringing togethere
researchers from cognitive science, computer science (especially machine
learning) and educational sience.
Contacts: Pierre
Dillenbourg or Patrick
Mendelsohn .
Contact: Daniel
Schneider
- D.K.S.