A week at the World Conference on Computers in Education (ppts & preprints available)

WCCE dates approaching, swine flu notwithstanding. I hope the flu doesn't prevent anyone from coming to Bento Gonçalves-RS (Brazil) next week (July 27-31, 2009). Let me tweet about the papers I will be presenting:

• Kern VM, Possamai O, Selig PM, Pacheco RCS, Souza GC, Rautenberg S, Lemos RTS: Growing a Peer Review Culture among Graduate Students (preprint here, slides below).
  Thursday 30th, 15:30-17:00, Aud. 3, 2nd paper of 3 (30-min presentation).
  Session NET 3.3, Network and Collaboration 3.3


• Kern VM, Saraiva LM, Braz ERC: Emergo: Academic Performance Assessment and Planning with a Data Mart (preprint here, slides below).
  Monday 27th, 11:45-12:45, Aud. 2, 2nd paper of 4 (15-min presentation).
  Session INNO 1.1, Innovation and creativity in schools 1.1

Hopefully there will be intense feedback in the sessions I'll present or attend to. Excellent opportunity. Slides of my presentations were uploaded to SlideShare, so here they are:

Emergo: Academic Performance Assessment and Planning with a Data Mart (WCCE 2009)

View more presentations from vmkern.

Growing a Peer Review Culture among Graduate Students (WCCE 2009)

View more presentations from vmkern.

Off-topic update: It was very nice to visit the Guarani indians (from Viamão, near Porto Alegre-RS) booth at the conference site. They have a project and a blog (Jaikuaa - means "to pay attention", "to listen") coordinated by the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in which Guarani youngsters work with camera obscura and production of pinhole photography.

They also play with regular (digital) photo and video cameras. The blog is in Portuguese, with some text in Guarani and in English. And there I am, visiting:

Wesch "The machine is us/ing us" strikes again: World Simulation

Anthropologist Michael Wesch (from Kansas State University, author of "The machine is us/ing us") gives away another awesome lesson: a YouTube report on the World Simulation conducted with his students, with the help of Twitter (ok, I tweet) and Jott (don't know) through the cellphone.

They've created a fake world with lands and peoples and developed a whole history, with commerce, wars, domination from colonization to core-periphery dynamic etc. The fake world evolution described in the video is interspersed with real-world facts, for instance, about diamonds in Africa, the wars around it, the (little little) money made by extractors and cutters (25 cents per diamond cut; many sharp-eyed cutters are children in India)... Makes you wonder how can there be any glamour around diamonds.

It looks like that War (board) game but much enlarged and enriched. It is, indeed, a "radical experiment in education" that I praise and recommend watching (4:40 - be ready to stop the presentation as the captions flash in unreadable intervals). It is an inspiration for me as a professor (I've been trying things of this sort with peer review in education and concurrency control learning games) and for anyone pursuing real educational systems.

Dr. Wesch ends by quoting the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-1978): "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." This prompted a Text Comment from kdcruz75: "never doubt that a small group of thoughtless, powerful committed hidden elite can control the human populace. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has". Well... the discussion catches on as the view count soars. See the video:

Juno em 27/7/09 (mais cinema e psicanálise em Floripa)

Atendendo a pedido, divulgo mais uma sessão do Ciclo de Cinema e Psicanálise, (a anterior foi "Brilho eterno...") , promoção do CEPSC (Centro de Estudos Psicodinâmicos de Santa Catarina):

Juno (verbete na Wikipedia)

• 29 de julho de 2009 (Quarta-feira), 18:30
• Auditório do Ed. Casa do Barão
  Av. Othon Gama Deça, 900
  Centro - Florianópolis
• Entrada franca

Debatedoras:

• Maria Inês Gasperini - Médica e Educadora Sexual
• Ana Paula Casagrande Darós - Psicóloga Clínica e Associada do CEPSC

Início do Debate: 20:30
Fone CEPSC: +55 (48) 3223-6422.

Science of happiness at TED Talks

Okay, this might be waaay outdated, but there must be others who are not really aware about TED Talks as I wasn't (had heard about it, never went for it). And those who know Ted Talks but not this talk I'm mentioning. Thanks due to Andréa Bordin for sharing this.

I went there, saw the mosaic of speeches and begun with Nancy Etcoff on the surprising science of happiness. There is a lot of other seemingly excellent stuff.

So this is only a tweet to those who didn't know: Yes, Ted Talks is true to its subtitle: "Ideas worth spreading". Etcoff's talk end with this simple yet effective and excessively forgotten idea from Epictetus: "First, say to yourself what you would be. Then do what you have to do".

Nielsen's speech on Extreme thinking

Michael A. Nielsen is an accomplished physicist in Australia. It is a great thing that there is the web and that he blogged the text of his speech at the “Tough Learning” conference in Brisbane, Australia, 2003.

He addresses 3 fundamental principles critical to success in tough learning. So inspirational that I've changed my Bunge citation e-mail footer to this one from Emerson: "It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

It's a 15-30 min read. Here's the text in Nielsen's blog. Another thing I've learned from his blog is that there is a "Science YouTube", SciVee.