Literacy

Summary

Literacy in its broadest sense describes "particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing" with the purpose of understanding or expressing thoughts or ideas in written form in some specific context of use. In other words, humans in literate societies have sets of practices for producing and consuming writing, and they also have beliefs about these practices. Reading, in this view, is always reading something for some purpose; writing is always writing something for someone for some particular end. Beliefs about reading and writing and their value for society and for the individual always influence the ways literacy is taught, learned, and practiced over the lifespan. Some researchers suggest that the history of interest in the concept of "literacy" can be divided into two periods: the period before 1950, when literacy was understood solely as alphabetical literacy (word and letter recognition); and the period after 1950, when literacy slowly began to be considered as a

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy

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Accessible Maker-based Approaches to Educational Robotics in Online Learning

Amaury Robert Dame, Christian Giang, Anthony Guinchard, Aditya Mehrotra, Francesco Mondada

Educational Robotics holds the potential to promote the development of important 21st century skills, such as creativity and problem-solving skills in addition to digital literacy. However, the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic has posed particular obstacles that had to be overcome in order to allow Educational Robotics activities to be conducted in distance learning. In the first place, the obligation to work from home limited the access to required equipment for many students. Secondly, many teachers had to face the novel challenge of creating pedagogically meaningful activities in online learning formats. Aiming to address these challenges, this work explored maker-based approaches as a way to implement Educational Robotics activities in online learning. The devised tools and activities were evaluated in two case studies performed with (i) high school students participating in a mobile robotics summer school and (ii) in-service teachers attending a professional development course on Educational Robotics. The teachers’ and students’ perception of the proposed activities was analyzed using online surveys and video interviews. The findings showed that the combination of the devised tools and activities allowed teachers and students to explore the basics of mobile robotics while helping them develop a maker mindset. The use of ubiquitous construction materials and affordable electronic components promotes accessibility of the approach. The proposed tools and activities may therefore provide an exemplary framework for more general applications of Educational Robotics in online learning that go beyond the context of emergency remote teaching.

2021

A large number of countries have engaged themselves in an energy transition towards more re- newable energy in their energy systems. Motivations stem mainly from the need to reduce CO2 emissions, and from a desire of their population to phase out technologies such as nuclear. Most of these countries promote biomass, wind and solar energy sources, among other possibilities. How- ever the current rate of deployment of renewable energy systems globally is not sufficient to reach the CO2 emissions reduction that would allow to maintain the global average temperature increase below the 2°C threshold. The main barriers to a wider integration of renewable energy systems are i) their limited realisable potential, ii) their still limited competitiveness, iii) their intermittence; iv) public acceptance often related to poor level of energy literacy amongst citizens. Citizens are key decision-makers. They must decide on energy policies and on the energy technologies they use, hence they have the power to foster or halt the energy transition. This thesis presents two different strategies for addressing the problem of the integration of re- newable energy sources for energy transitions. The first one (Chapter 1) consists in developing an energy modelling tool to help decision-makers understand the energy system and find their own answers. The modelling approach also includes a new methodology for the calculation of the total cost of a national energy system. A model of the Swiss energy system has been created following this approach, which serves as basis to develop the Swiss-Energyscope online calculator. This calculator and its model present an optimal trade-off between scientific rigour and user-friendliness, which allows the reproduction of the energy transition scenarios conceived by the Swiss Government, and consequently its use for energy policy making. The second strategy (chapters 2 and 3) profits from the possibilities offered by mathematical mod- elling and optimisation to analyse national energy systems, and derive insights for policy and decision-makers. First, a methodology using a mix-integer linear programming (MILP) model analyses biomass usage pathways to determine its optimal use in Switzeland in 2035. Second, in order to study the role of biomass, non-linear optimisation is applied to create future scenarios. (Chapter 3) focuses on the solutions to deal with the variability of renewable electricity. To this end, a MILP model with hourly time resolution is conceived to study the use of flexible electricity supply and demand options for the integration of renewable electricity. The optimisation methodologies are validated on case studies for the Swiss energy system. Regarding biomass, the results reveal that woody biomass chemical conversion technologies can allow for an overall better performance in terms of CO2 avoided emissions compared to direct combustion, as long as the produced biofuels are used in efficient technologies. Results also show that the combination of the gasification-methanation process of woody biomass with the production of H2 produced from excess electricity would allow to reduce the Swiss natural gas imports to zero by 2050. Concerning the integration of variable renewable electricity, the cost difference between using flexible electricity supply- and demand-options or electricity imports to deal with variable renewable electricity is below 2.5% of the total cost of the energy system.

EPFL2018

These lectures present a research that investigates the representation of communities, and the way to foster their understanding by different audiences. Communities are complex multidimensional entities intrinsically difficult to represent synthetically. The way to represent them is likely to differ depending on the audience considered: governing entities trying to make decision for the future of the community, general public trying to understand the nature of the community and the members of the community themselves. This work considers two types of communities as example: a scientific organization and an arising domain: the EPFL institutional community composed of faculty members and researchers and, at a world wide level, the emerging community of Digital Humanities researchers. For both cases, the research is organised as a process going from graphical research to actual materialization as physical artefacts (posters, maps, etc.), possibly extended using digital devices (augmented reality applications). Through iterative cycles of design and experimentation, the research explores theoretically (representation theory, studies about networks, cartography, etc.) and experimentally (development of methods to assess the relevance of each representation depending on the target audiences) how to create effective community mapping. Its global ambition is to inform a theory of design helping to understand how certain community representations can lead to actual cognitive shifts in the way a community is understood. First Day - Design Creation The lecture proposes a new way to look at scientific communities. Dealing with a very complex situation, where literacy production is enormous and decisions are made using metrics that are judged obsolete by all, we propose a visual way to understand the community organization. How do scholars work together? What is the intermediary object which makes scientific researchers work together? This first session transforms the current situation into a visual object, a design artefact that embodies the elemental in the creation of maps to understand and evaluate scientific communities. Second Day - Use of the Maps The lecture proposes the use of maps to understand and evaluate scientific communities. As continuation of yesterday's lecture, the topic of the day is how to present elementary objects—which represents publications, teaching, grants and subjects of matters—in a map. Several maps will be shown, representing a precise scientific community inside the EPFL, but with the perspective to make them adaptable to other communities. Moreover, much attention will be dedicated to the reading and interpretation of these maps. Finally a web-based software will be introduced, to illustrate to members and managers of any given community the benefit of a visual representation of a scientific organisation.

2016

EPFL2018

2016