Conference To Promote Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse

Conference To Promote Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse On August 25–27, 2009, in New Orleans, LA, the National Children’s Advocacy Center will hold its tenth National Conference on Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation Prevention. Staff from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention will conduct a workshop at the conference. Topics to be addressed by the conference include: child pornography child pornography sexting Resources: To obtain additional information about the conference and register online, visit http://www.nationalcac.org/professionals/index.php?option=com_content&task=view &id=121&Itemid=129.

Encontro sobre Podcasts: 8 e 9 de Julho 2009

Encontro sobre Podcasts: 8 e 9 de Julho 2009

Universidade do Minho, Braga

8 Julho – Encontro sobre Podcasts

Podcasts, Vodcasts e Screencasts – como utilizar no ensino?

Painéis:

“Podcasts no Ensino: Usos e Contextos”

“Podcasts: Princípios a respeitar”

Conferência:

“Teaching and Learning with Podcasts” - por Palitha Edirisingha, da University of Leicester, UK.

9 Julho – Workshops

Workshops: cada 15 €.

1) Podcast com o software Audacity: 9.00h -10.30h ou 14.15h -15.45h

2) Vodcast com o Movie Maker: 10.45h -12.15h ou 16.00h -17.30h

3) Screencast utilizando o software Jing: 12.30h -14.00h ou 17.45h – 19.15h

Quanto mais cedo se inscrever, maior é a probabilidade de ficar inscrito no Workshop e horário pretendido.

Mais informação em

http://www.iep.uminho.pt/encontro.podcast/

A carpa aprende a crescer

Fonte: http://colunas.g1.com.br/paulocoelho/

Postado por Paulo Coelho em 27 de junho de 2009 às 00:13

A carpa japonesa (koi) tem a capacidade natural de crescer de acordo com o tamanho do seu ambiente. Assim, num pequeno tanque, ela geralmente não passa de cinco ou sete centímetros. Mas pode atingir três vezes esse tamanho, se colocada num lago.

Da mesma maneira, as pessoas têm a tendência de crescer de acordo com o ambiente que as cerca. Só que, neste caso, não estamos falando de características físicas, mas de desenvolvimento emocional, espiritual e intelectual.

Enquanto a carpa é obrigada, para seu próprio bem, a aceitar os limites do seu mundo, nós estamos livres para estabelecer as fronteiras de nossos sonhos. Se somos um peixe maior do que o tanque em que fomos criados, ao invés de nos adaptarmos a ele, devíamos buscar o oceano – mesmo que a adaptação inicial seja desconfortável e dolorosa.

1st Ibero-American Symposium on Project Approaches in Engineering Education

PAEE’2009

1^st Ibero-American Symposium on Project Approaches in Engineering Education

"The Added Value of Team Work"

21 - 22 July 2009

Dear Colleagues,

It is our pleasure to invite you to attend the 1^st Ibero-American Symposium on Project Approaches in Engineering Education (PAEE’2009), which will take place at the University of Minho, Guimarães, from 21 to 22 of July 2009.

The Department of Production and Systems and the Research Centre for Education of the University of Minho are hosting the symposium in cooperation with the SEFI Curriculum Development Working Group to join teachers, researchers on Engineering Education, deans of Engineering Schools and professionals concerned with Engineering Education, to enhance Project Approaches in Engineering Education through workshops and discussion of current practice and research.

We are especially honoured to announce our international keynote speakers:

· Alex Stojcevski –Victoria University (Australia)

The Problem-Project-Practice Approach in Engineering Education

· Jordi Segàlas – Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Spain)

Effective Team building in international interdisciplinary frameworks: EPS experience at UPC.

· Arvid Andersen – Copenhagen Engineering College (Denmark)

Project Management and Teamwork

For those of you who are looking for hands-on experiences in project approaches for engineering education, we would like to draw attention to the strong workshop component of the symposium, aiming to encourage discussion of current practice and research on project approaches. The workshops will focus on the following themes:

· Workshop A – Project Approaches in Engineering Education

· Workshop B – Evaluation and Assessment of Project Approaches

· Workshop C – Student and Staff Involvement

· Workshop D – Project Management and Team Work

· Workshop E – Team Work in Project-Led Engineering Education

Workshop E is organised by Wim Weenk and Maria van der Blij from the University of Twente, the Netherlands, who have longstanding experiences in Project-Led Engineering Education (PLEE).

A Special Paper Session on ICT and Projects will be held on Tuesday July 22, with the Invited Lecturer Susan M. Zvacek – University of Kansas (USA).

More information on the programme and workshops will soon be updated on the Symposium website http://paee2009.dps.uminho.pt/.

We are looking forward to welcome you in July, at the University of Minho!

Best regards,

Dinis Carvalho (Associate Professor, Production and Systems Department, School of Engineering, University of Minho, Portugal)

Natascha van Hattum-Janssen (Educational Researcher, Research Centre for Education, University of Minho, Portugal)

Rui M. Lima (Assistant Professor, Production and Systems Department, School of Engineering, University of Minho, Portu

How Google Is Making Us Smarter

Fonte: http://discovermagazine.com/2009/feb/15-how-google-is-making-us-smarter

Our minds are under attack. At least that’s what I keep hearing these days. Thumbing away at our text messages, we are becoming illiterate. (Or is that illiter8?) Blogs make us coarse, YouTube makes us shallow. Last summer the cover of The Atlantic posed a question:“Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” Inside the magazine, author Nicholas Carr argued that the Internet is damaging our brains, robbing us of our memories and deep thoughts. “As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world,” he wrote, “it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”

I have a hard time taking these Cassandras of the Computer Age seriously. For one thing, they are much more interested in our fears than in the facts. In his new book, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, the English linguist David Crystal demonstrates that many of the dire warnings about texting are little more than urban legends. Texting doesn’t lead to bad spelling, he finds. In fact, Crystal writes, “texting actually improves your literacy, as it gives you more practice in reading and writing.”

More significantly, the ominous warnings feed on a popular misconception of how the mind works. We tend to think of the mind as separated from the world; we imagine information trickling into our senses and reaching our isolated minds, which then turn that information into a detailed picture of reality. The Internet and iPhones seem to be crashing the gate of the mind, taking over its natural work and leaving it to wither away to a mental stump. As plausible as this picture may seem, it does a bad job of explaining a lot of recent scientific research. In fact, the mind appears to be adapted for reaching out from our heads and making the world, including our machines, an extension of itself.

This concept of the extended mind was first raised in 1998, right around the time Google was born, by two philosophers, Andy Clark, now at the University of Edinburgh, and David Chalmers, now at the Australian National University. In the journal Analysis, they published a short essay called “The Extended Mind” in which they asked a simple question: “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” Most people might answer, “At the skull.” But Clark and Chalmers set out to convince their readers that the mind is not simply the product of the neurons in our brains, locked away behind a wall of bone. Rather, they argued that the mind is something more: a system made up of the brain plus parts of its environment.

The mind appears to be adapted for reaching out and making the world, including our machines, an extension of itself.

Clark and Chalmers asked their readers to imagine a woman named Inga. Inga hears from a friend that there’s an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. She decides to go see it. She thinks for a moment, recalls that the museum is on 53rd Street, and starts walking that way. She accesses her belief that MOMA is on 53rd Street from its storage place in her brain’s memory network. Now imagine a man named Otto, who has Alzheimer’s. His memory is faulty, and so he keeps with him a notebook in which he writes down important details. Like Inga, Otto hears about the museum exhibit. Since he can’t access the address in his brain, he looks it up in his notebook and then heads off in the same direction as Inga.

In the view of Clark and Chalmers, Inga’s brain-based memory and Otto’s notebook are fundamentally the same. Inga’s mind just happens to access information stored away in her brain, while Otto’s mind draws on information stored in his notebook. The notebook, in other words, is part of his extended mind. It doesn’t make any difference that Otto keeps his notebook tucked away much of the time. After all, Inga tucks the memory of MOMA’s address out of her conscious awareness most of the time too. Clark and Chalmers concluded that real people are actually more like Otto than like Inga: We all have minds that extend out into our environments.

Eleven years later, this argument continues to trigger fierce debate among philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. There is no doubt that the extended mind is a weird concept. One reason it seems so strange is that our minds feel as if they are really totally self-contained. We innately believe, for example, that as we walk down a street, we are continuously filming a detailed movie of our surroundings and using that mental movie to decide what to do next. But like many beliefs we have about ourselves, this movie is an illusion. Our awareness is, in fact, remarkably narrow.

One of the most spectacular demonstrations of how oblivious we can be was carried out by psychologists Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois and Christopher Chabris at Harvard University. They asked people to watch a video of students weaving around each other and passing a basketball. Half the students wore white shirts, the other half black. The subjects had to keep track of how many times the ball was passed by members of one of the teams. In the middle of the game, a gorilla (rather, a student in a gorilla costume) sauntered through the scene. Many subjects later reported that they never saw the gorilla; their brains discarded it as extraneous.

Inside our heads, instead of making a perfect replica of the world, we focus our attention on tiny snippets, darting our eyes from point to point. We extract only the information we need for whatever task is at hand, whether we’re sorting the laundry or climbing a mountain.

We use strikingly little information in the process. Dana Ballard, a computer scientist at the University of Texas, developed a computer game to measure just how little. He showed his subjects a pattern of colored blocks in the upper left-hand corner of the computer monitor. He then had them build a similar pattern of blocks in the lower left-hand corner. To do so, the players used a mouse to grab blocks, one by one, from a collection on the right-hand side of the screen. As the players looked from the original model to the collection of blocks to their own growing pattern, Ballard tracked their eye movements. He found that players looked at the model at the upper left before they picked up a block, and then again afterward. His experiments suggest that in each glance, the players were storing only a single piece of information. The first time they noted a block’s color. The second time they noted its position in the model. Instead of keeping a detailed picture of the blocks in mind, people extracted just tiny scraps of information on a need-to-know basis.

Clark argues that Ballard’s subjects made the pattern of blocks part of their extended mind. It became a store of knowledge they could dip into, an external repository of information. It was as if Inga did not actually recall the address of MOMA but only the page in her notebook where she had written it down. Our memory holds a great deal of information. But the extended mind moves swiftly between outside and inside sources, showing little regard for where its information comes from.

Our minds do more than take in information, of course. They also make decisions and send out commands—and those commands certainly don’t stay inside the mind. In the block-building game, for example, some commands go to neurons in the hand in order to move the computer mouse. But our brains don’t make a perfect mental replica of our hands and the mouse and the table in order to calculate where the mouse needs to go. Our hands and eyes constantly send signals to the brain, and that feedback alters the signals coming back out. Hand, eye, and brain are part of the same system.

We will soon be able to enhance our brains with drugs or implants. But changes we make to the environment already alter our minds.

What’s even more remarkable about our brains is that they actually search for new things to make part of this feedback system. Imagine you are poking a stick into an animal’s burrow. As you poke away, you are aware of what the far end of the stick is touching, not the end you’re holding in your hand. This kind of extended sensation appears to be the result of a reorganization of the brain. Scientists have found that when test monkeys spent five minutes learning how to use a rake, some of the neurons in their hands began behaving in a new way. They began to fire in response to stimuli at the end of the rake, not on the monkey’s hand. Other neurons, in the brain, respond to things that appear to lie within arm’s reach. Training the monkeys to use the rakes caused these neurons to change—reacting to objects lying within rake’s reach rather than arm’s reach.

The eagerness with which the brain merges with tools has made it possible to create some stunning mind-machine interfaces. For instance, Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University and his colleagues put electrodes in the brains of monkeys to link them to a robot arm. The monkeys quickly learned how to move the arm around with pure thought; their neurons reorganized, establishing a new feedback loop between brain and robot arm.

Humans are proving just as good at this merger of mind and machine. The U.S. Navy has developed a flight suit for helicopter pilots that delivers little puffs of air on the side of the pilot’s body as his helicopter tilts in that direction. The pilot responds to the puffs by tilting away from them, and the suit passes those signals on to the helicopter’s steering controls. Pilots who train with this system can learn to fly blindfolded or to carry out complex maneuvers, such as holding the helicopter in a stationary hover. The helicopter becomes, in effect, part of the pilot’s body, linked back to his or her mind.

Results like these, Clark argues, reveal a mind that is constantly seeking to extend itself, to grab on to new tools it has never experienced before and merge with them. Some people may be horrified by how passionately people are taking to their laptops and GPS trackers. But to Clark it would be surprising if we didn’t. We are, in Clark’s words, “natural-born cyborgs.”

The extended mind theory doesn’t just change the way we think about the mind. It also changes how we judge what’s good and bad about today’s mind-altering technologies. There’s nothing unnatural about relying on the Internet—Google and all—for information. After all, we are constantly consulting the world around us like a kind of visual Wikipedia. Nor is there anything bad about our brains’ being altered by these new technologies, any more than there is something bad about a monkey’s brain changing as it learns how to play with a rake.

Neuroscientists will soon be able to offer fresh ways to enhance our brains, whether with drugs or with implants. To say that these are immoral because they defile our true selves—our isolated, distinct minds—is to ignore biology. Our minds already extend out into the environment, and the changes we make to the environment already alter our minds.

That doesn’t mean we must approve of every possible extension of the mind, and even good extensions will have some drawbacks. Socrates worried that writing would make people forgetful and unwise. Sure enough, writing did rob us of some gifts, such as the ability to recite epic poems like The Iliad from memory. But it also created a much larger pool of knowledge from which people could draw, a pool that has continued to expand (or, dare we say, continued to extend?).

There’s no point in trying to hack apart the connections between the inside and the outside of the mind. Instead we ought to focus on managing and improving those connections. For instance, we need more powerful ways to filter the information we get online, so that we don’t get a mass case of distractibility. Some people may fear that trying to fine-tune the brain-Internet connection is an impossible task. But if we’ve learned anything since Clark and Chalmers published “The Extended Mind,” it’s not to underestimate the mind’s ability to adapt to the changing world.

Google Wave: Google Tries to Reinvent Email

Fonte: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_wave_google_tries_to_reinvent_email.php

Google today announced a new Internet-based communications and collaboration platform; Google Wave. While some of the details are still a bit sketchy, Google Wave looks to be an integrated communications platform that brings together email, chat, photo-sharing, and collaborative editing features. Google describes a 'wave' as "equal parts conversation and document" and the Wave team basically sees it as a replacement for email and other collaboration tools.

Reinventing Email for the 21st Century

Users will be able to create 'waves,' and add documents and collaborators to it. The system will feature concurrent rich-text editing, as well as email and IM-like messaging functions. Lars Rasmussen, one of the co-founders and lead engineers behind this project, especially stressed the real-time nature of Wave, where edits to a wave, be they new messages or edits in a document, appear immediately on the screens of all participants.

From what we have seen, Wave combines aspects of productivity tools, social networks, and micro-blogging. One of the most interesting features is that every change to a wave is captured and users can 'replay' how the specific wave developed over time. Wave will allow users to send private and public messages, and Google is heavily relying on HTML5 to make the product work well in modern browsers. We will have a more detailed look at all the features of Wave once we get access to the product itself.

Developers, Developers, Developers

Google is also making a set of APIs available to developers today. These APIs should give developers the ability to enhance Wave by building extensions for the core product, but also to embed Wave's features on other sites to make them more collaborative. One extension Google offers today, for those lucky enough to have access to Wave already, is a Twitter extension, and Google will also offer the ability to integrate OpenSocial gadgets into Wave.

Interestingly, Google is taking a very open approach with this new product. Not only will it give developers access to Wave's APIs, but the team also plans to open-source the protocols at the core of Wave, which really points at the greater ambition of the Wave team to see Wave and its protocols replace at least some of today's standard communications systems.

OJJDP News @ a Glance, May/June 2009

OJJDP News @ a Glance, May/June 2009 The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) announces the availability of "OJJDP News @ a Glance," May/June 2009. The bimonthly newsletter provides readers with news about OJJDP activities, publications, funding opportunities, and events. This issue's lead article features the Department of Justice's commemoration of National Missing Children's Day, which recognizes the efforts made by law enforcement personnel and other concerned citizens to protect children. The issue also reports on: OJJDP-sponsored training for law enforcement personnel on ways to communicate with adolescent girls an assessment of AMBER Alert operations in Indian country updates to OJJDP's Statistical Briefing Book a recent training course under OJJDP's Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force Program. Resources: "OJJDP News @ a Glance," May/June 2009, is available online only at http://www.ncjrs.gov/html/ojjdp/news_at_glance/226641/index.html.

Interactive Digital Storytelling

CALL FOR PAPERS

*** ICIDS – Interactive Storytelling 2009 ***

2nd International Conference on

Interactive Digital Storytelling

09-11 December 2009, Guimarães, Portugal

http://www.icids2009.ccg.pt

Extended Submission Deadline: July 6th, 2009

------------------------------------------------------------

ICIDS is the premier international conference on interactive digital storytelling.

It was successfully launched in 2008, superseding the two previous European conference series, TIDSE ("Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling") and ICVS ("Virtual Storytelling – Using Virtual Reality Technologies for Storytelling"). While the venues of these events were traditionally bound to France and Germany, ICIDS is set to overcome also this geographical limitation. The fusion of the previous conferences was most successfully inaugurated in Erfurt, Germany, as ICIDS 2008. In a very inspiring and friendly atmosphere, over 100 international participants have enjoyed high-quality talks and worked together at creative and fruitful workshops, and there were plenty of delightful occasions that gathered the attendees for more informal exchange.

ICIDS 2009 aims at setting forth the success of this new beginning. The venue will be the Centro Cultural Vila Flor, an excellent modern conference center that extends a historical palace, at walking distance from most hotels and from the city center of the historical city of Guimarães, the birthplace of Portugal.

　

***SCOPE***

Interactive entertainment, including novel forms of edutainment, therapy, and serious games, promises to become an ever more important market. Interactive Digital Storytelling provides access to social and human themes through stories, and promises to foster considerably the possibilities of interactive entertainment, computer games, and other interactive digital applications. ICIDS also identifies opportunities and addresses challenges for redefining the experience of narrative through interactive simulations of computer-generated story worlds.

Interactive Storytelling thus promises a huge step forward for games, training, and learning, through the aims to enrich virtual characters with intelligent behavior, to allow collaboration of humans and machines in the creative process, and to combine narrative knowledge and user activity in interactive artifacts. In order to create novel applications, in which users play a significant role together with digital characters and other autonomous elements, new concepts for Human-Computer Interaction have to be developed. Knowledge for interface design and technology has to be garnered and integrated. Interactive Storytelling involves concepts from many aspects of Computer Science, above all from Artificial Intelligence, with topics such as narrative intelligence, automatic dialogue- and drama management, cognitive robotics and smart graphics. In order to process stories in real time, traditional storytelling needs to be formalized into computable models, by drawing from narratological studies, and by taking into account the characteristics of programming. Consequently, due to its technological complexity, it is currently hardly accessible for creators and end-users. There is a need for new authoring concepts and tools supporting the creation of dynamic story models, allowing for rich and meaningful interaction with the content. Finally, there is a need for theoretical foundations considering the integration of so far disjunctive approaches and cultures.

　

*** SUBMISSIONS ***

We welcome research papers, case studies and demonstrations presenting new scientific results, innovative technologies, best practice showcases, or improvements to existing techniques and approaches in the multidisciplinary research field of interactive digital storytelling and its related application areas, e.g. games, virtual/online worlds, e-learning, edutainment, and entertainment.

Suggested research topics for contributions include, but are not limited to:

* Interactive Storytelling Theory

* Virtual Characters and Agents

* Environments and Graphical Effects

* Interactive Cinematography

* Design of Sound Interactivity

* Story Generation and Drama Management

* New Authoring Modes

* Narrativity in Digital Games

* Mixed Realities and Mobiles

* Tools for Interactive Storytelling

* Emotion Design for Interactive Storytelling

* Non-Visual Senses for Interactive Storytelling

* Social and Cognitive Approaches for Interactive Storytelling

* Semantic knowledge for Interactive Storytelling

* Real-time techniques for Interactive Storytelling

* Collaborative environments for Interactive Storytelling

* Evaluation and user experience reports

* Case studies and demonstrations

All submissions should follow the Lecture Notes in Computer Science format (see "Information for LNCS Authors" at www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html). Papers must be in English. Only electronic submissions in PDF format will be considered for review. Submissions (of all categories) that receive high ratings in the review process will be selected for publication by the program committee. They shall be published as Springer LNCS conference proceedings. For the final print-ready version, the submission of source files (Microsoft Word/LaTeX, TIF/EPS) and a signed copyright form will be required.

Submission categories: Full papers (8-12 pages in the proceedings); Short papers (4-6 pages in the proceedings); Demonstration and posters (2-4 pages in the proceedings)

For the submission and review process, we will use the Easychair conference management system.

　

*** IMPORTANT DATES ***

July 6, 2009 Extended Submission deadline (all categories)

August 20, 2009 Author notification of the review result

September 10, 2009 Submission of the print-ready version

December 9-11, 2009 ICIDS Conference Interactive Storytelling ‘09

　

A limited number of Student Volunteers will be granted free access to the conference in exchange for helping with on-site organizational tasks. Details on application modalities will be published after the reviewing process.

　

*** COMMITTEES ***

Co-Chairs:

Ido Iurgel – Universidade do Minho, Portugal

Nelson Zagalo – Universidade do Minho, Portugal

Paolo Petta – OFAI, Austria

Local Chairs:

Pedro Branco & Rogério Silva – Universidade do Minho, Portugal

Prorgamme Committee:

(preliminary list of confirmed members)

André, Elisabeth - University of Augsburg, Germany

Aylett, Ruth – Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK

Bae, Byung-Chull - North Carolina State University, USA

Barry, Barbara, MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, USA

Boa-Ventura, Ana - University of Texas, Austin, USA

Branco, Pedro – University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

Bushoff, Brunhild – Sagasnet, Munich, Germany

Cavazza, Marc - University of Teesside, Middlesbrough, United Kingdom

Champagnat, Ronan – L3i, IUT de La Rochelle, France

Correia, Nuno - Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal

Crawford, Chris - Storytron.com, USA

Donikian, Stéphane – IRISA / INRIA, Rennes, France

Fencott, Clive - University of Teesside, Middlesbrough, United Kingdom

Göbel, Stefan - Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany

Gordon, Andrew - University of Southern California, USA

Grimm, Paul – Erfurt University of Applied Sciences, Erfurt, Germany

Hartmann, Knut – Flensburg University of Applied Sciences, Flensburg, Germany

Jantke, Klaus P. – Fraunhofer IDMT, Ilmenau, Germany

Leão, Lucia - Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, Brasil

Lindley, Craig – Blekinge Technical College, Sweden

Magerko, Brian – Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA

Marcos, Adérito – University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

Marinho, Chico - Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil

Marsella, Stacy – University of Southern California, USA

Masuch, Maic -University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

Mueller, Wolfgang – University of Education, Weingarten, Germany

Murray, Janet H. - Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA

Nack, Frank - University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

Nakatsu, Ryohei - National University of Singapore, Singapore

Natkin, Stephane - Cedric, France

Nitsche, Michael – Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA

Paiva, Ana - INESC-ID, Lisboa, Portugal

Pan, Zhigeng – Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

Pelachaud, Catherine - CNRS LTCI, TELECOM ParisTech, Paris, France

Pisan, Yusuf – University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

Prada, Rui - Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisboa, Portugal

Rauterberg, G.W.M. - Technical University Eindhoven, Netherlands

Réty, Jean-Hugues – University of Paris 8, Saint-Denis, France

Riedl, Mark – Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA

Roussou, Maria - University of Athens, Greece

Ryan, Marie-Laure - University of Colorado, Boulder, USA

Schneider, Oliver - IGDV, University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt, Germany

Seif El-Nasr, Magy – Simon Fraser University, Surrey, Canada

Spierling, Ulrike – University of Applied Sciences, Erfurt, Germany

Stern, Andrew - Procedural Arts, LLC, Portland, USA

Su, Wen-Poh – Griffith University, Nathan, Australia

Sumi, Kaoru – National Institute of Information & Communications Technology, Kyoto, Japan

Szilas, Nicolas – TECFA, University of Geneva, Switzerland

Wages, Richard - Cologne University of Applied Sciences, Germany

Young, Michael R. – North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA

Yun-Gyung Cheong, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, South Korea

　

***VENUE***

ICIDS 2009 will be held in the Centro Cultural Vila Flor, in Guimarães, Portugal, EU. It is organized by the University of Minho and the CCG (Centro de Computação Gráfica) with support of OFAI (Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence). ICIDS is sponsored by ZON Multimedia and several other partners.

OJJDP Promotes Internet Safety

June is National Internet Safety Month. The purpose of this observance is to raise awareness of the dangers to which children may be exposed on the Internet and ways in which they can be protected from them.

Online safety is everyone's responsibility. Parents need to be vigilant about their children's use of the computer and cell phone. Teachers need to promote responsible Internet usage by students. Internet safety organizations need to help youth develop the decision-making skills needed to use the Web safely. Only through such coordinated efforts can we maximize the benefits of the Internet, while minimizing its dangers.

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) supports a number of programs and activities designed to raise awareness about the importance of online safety and to help protect children and youth from online exploitation and victimization.

Resources:

To obtain further information about OJJDP supported initiatives to promote Internet safety, visit:

• Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force Program
• Project Safe Childhood National Public Awareness Campaign
• NetSmartz
• Enough Is Enough
• i-SAFE
• WebWiseKids
• IKeepSafe Internet Safety Coalition

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The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention is a component of the Office of Justice Programs in the U.S. Department of Justice.

Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age (CELDA 2009)

Deadline for submissions: 24 July 2009 (for all contributions)

IADIS International Conference on

Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age (CELDA 2009)

November 20 - 22, 2009 - Rome, Italy

(http://www.celda-conf.org/)

Endorsed by the Japanese Society of Information and Systems in Education

* Keynote Speakers (confirmed):

Professor David Jonassen, University of Missouri Columbia, USA

Professor Fred Paas, Open University of the Netherlands, The Netherlands

* Invited Speaker (confirmed):

Dr. Carmen Taran, REXI Media, USA

* Tutorial Speaker (confirmed):

Professor Fred Paas, Open University of the Netherlands, The Netherlands

* Conference background and goals

The IADIS CELDA 2009 conference aims to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There have been advances in both cognitive psychology and computing that have affected the educational arena. The convergence of these two disciplines is increasing at a fast pace and affecting academia and professional practice in many ways. Paradigms such as just-in-time learning, constructivism, student-centered learning and collaborative approaches have emerged and are being supported by technological advancements such as simulations, virtual reality and multi-agents systems. These developments have created both opportunities and areas of serious concerns. This conference aims to cover both technological as well as pedagogical issues related to these developments. Main tracks have been identified. However innovative contributions that do not easily fit into these areas will also be considered as long as they are directly related to the

overall theme of the conference – cognition and exploratory learning in the digital age.

* Format of the Conference

The conference will comprise of invited talks and oral presentations for discussion-oriented papers. The proceedings of the conference will be published in the form of a book and CD-ROM.

Authors of the best published papers in the CELDA 2009 proceedings will be invited to publish extended versions of their papers in a special issue of an international journal.

* Types of submissions

Full papers, Short Papers and Reflection papers. All submissions will go through a double-blind refereeing process with at least two international experts.

* Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following areas:

- Acquisition of expertise

- Assessing progress of learning in complex domains

- Assessment of exploratory learning approaches

- Assessment of exploratory technologies

- Cognition in education

- Collaborative learning

- Educational psychology

- Exploratory technologies (such as simulations, VR, i-TV and so on)

- Just-in-time and Learning-on-Demand

- Learner Communities and Peer-Support

- Learning Communities & Web Service Technologies

- Pedagogical Issues Related with Learning Objects

- Learning Paradigms in Academia

- Learning Paradigms in Corporate Sector

- Life-long Learning

- Student-Centered Learning

- Technology and mental models

- Technology, learning and expertise

- Virtual University

* Important Dates:

- Submission Deadline: 24 July 2009

- Notification to Authors: 4 September 2009

- Final Camera-Ready Submission and Early Registration: Until 25 September 2009

- Late Registration: After 25 September 2009

- Conference: Rome, Italy, 20 to 22 November 2009

* Conference Location

The conference will be held in Rome, Italy.

* Secretariat

IADIS Secretariat - IADIS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE CELDA 2009

Rua Sao Sebastiao da Pedreira, 100, 3

1050-209 Lisbon, Portugal

E-mail: secretariat@celda-conf.org

Web site: http://www.celda-conf.org/

* Program Committee

Conference Co-Chairs

Pedro Isaias, Universidade Aberta (Portuguese Open University), Portugal

Dirk Ifenthaler, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany

Program Co-Chairs

Kinshuk, Athabasca University, Canada

Demetrios G Sampson, University of Piraeus, Greece

J. Michael Spector, University of Georgia, USA

Committee Members: please see http://www.celda-conf.org/committees.asp for updated list.

* Co-located Conferences:

Please also check the co-located events Applied Computing 2009 (http://www.computing-conf.org/) - 19-21 November 2009 and WWW/Internet 2009 (http://www.internet-conf.org/) - 19-22 November 2009.

* Registered participants in the CELDA conference may attend the Applied Computing and WWW/Internet conferences’ sessions free of charge.

Perigos na rede

«MÍUDOS» A QUEM FAZER CHEGAR ISTO...

Após deixar os livros no sofá ela decidiu lanchar, pegar no seu portátil e entrar online. Assim, ligou-se ao Messenger com o seu nome de código (nick): Docinho14. Procurou na sua lista de amigos e viu que Meteoro123 estava ligado. Enviou-lhe uma mensagem instantânea: Doçinho14: Oix. Que sorte estares aí! Pensei que alguém me seguia na rua hoje. Foi mesmo esquisito! Meteoro123: Lol. Vês muita TV. Por que razão alguém te seguiria? Não moras num local seguro da cidade? Docinho14; Com certeza. Lol. Acho que imaginei isso porque não vi ninguém quando me virei. Meteoro123: A menos que tenhas dado o teu nome online. Não fizeste isso, pois não? Docinho14: Claro que não. Não sou idiota, já sabes. Meteoro123: Jogaste vólei depois das aulas, hoje? Docinho14: Sim e ganhamos! Meteoro123: Óptimo! Contra quem? Docinho14: Contra as Vespas do Colégio da Sagrada Família. LOL. Os uniformes delas são um nojo! Pareciam abelhas. LOL Meteoro123: Como se chama a tua equipa? Docinho14: Somos os Gatos de Botas. Temos garras de tigres nos uniformes. São impecáveis. Meteoro123: Jogas ao ataque? Docinho14: Não, jogo à defesa. Olha: tenho que ir. Tenho que fazer os TPC antes que cheguem os meus pais. Xau! Meteoro123: Falamos mais tarde. Xau. Entretanto, Meteoro123 foi à lista de contactos e começou a pesquisar sobre o perfil dela. Quando apareceu, copiou-o e imprimiu-o. Pegou na caneta e anotou o que sabia de Docinho até agora. Seu nome: Susana aniversário: Janeiro 3, 1993. Idade.: 13. Cidade onde vive: Porto. Passatempos: vólei, inglês, natação e passear pelas lojas. Além desta informação sabia que vivia no centro da cidade porque lho tinha contado recentemente. Sabia que estava sozinha até às 6.30 todas as tardes até que os pais voltassem do trabalho. Sabia que jogava vólei às quintas-feiras de tarde com a equipa do colégio, os Gatos de Botas. O seu número favorito, o 4, estava estampado na sua camisola. Sabia que estava no oitavo ano no colégio da Imaculada Conceição. Ela tinha contado tudo em conversas online. Agora tinha informação suficiente para encontrá-la. Susana não contou aos pais sobre o incidente ao voltar do parque. Não queria que ralhassem com ela e a impedissem de voltar dos jogos de vólei a pé. Os pais sempre exageram e os seus eram os piores. Ela teria gostado não ser filha única. Talvez se tivesse irmãos, os seus pais não tivessem sido tão super protectores. Na quinta-feira, Susana já se tinha esquecido que alguém a seguira. O seu jogo decorria quando, de repente, sentiu que alguém a observava. Então lembrou-se. Olhou e viu um homem que a observava de perto. Estava inclinado contra a cerca na arquibancada e sorriu quando o viu. Não parecia alguém de quem temer e rapidamente desapareceu o medo que sentira. Depois do jogo, ele sentou-se num dos bancos enquanto ela falava com o treinador. Ela apercebeu-se do seu sorriso mais uma vez quando passou ao lado. Ele acenou com a cabeça e ela devolveu-lhe o sorriso. Ele confirmou o seu nome nas costas da camisola. Sabia que a tinha encontrado. Silenciosamente, caminhou a uma certa distância atrás dela. Eram só uns quarteirões até casa dela. Quando viu onde morava voltou ao parque e entrou no carro. Agora tinha que esperar. Decidiu comer algo até que chegou a hora de ir à casa da menina. Foi a um café e sentou-se. Mais tarde, essa noite, Susana ouviu vozes na sala. 'Susana, vem cá!', chamou o seu pai. Parecia perturbado e ela não imaginava porquê. Entrou na sala e viu o homem do parque no sofá. 'Senta-te aí', disse-lhe o pai, 'este senhor acaba de nos contar uma história muito interessante sobre ti'. Susana sentou-se. Como poderia ele contar-lhes qualquer coisa? Nunca o tinha visto senão nesse mesmo dia! 'Sabes quem sou eu?' perguntou o homem. 'Não', respondeu Susana. 'Sou polícia e teu amigo do Messenger - Meteoro123'. Susana ficou pasmada. 'É impossível! Meteoro123 é um rapaz da minha idade! Tem 14 anos e mora em Braga!'. O homem sorriu. 'Sei que te disse tudo isso, mas não era verdade. Repara, Susana, há gente na Internet que se faz passar por miudos; eu era um deles. Mas enquanto alguns o fazem para molestar crianças e jovens, eu sou de um grupo de pais que o faz para proteger as crianças dos malfeitores. Vim para te ensinar que é muito perigoso falar online. Contaste-me o suficiente sobre ti para eu te achar facilmente. Deste-me o nome da tua escola, da tua equipa e a posição em que jogas. O número e o teu nome na camisola fizeram com que te encontrasse facilmente. Susana gelou. 'Quer dizer que não mora em Braga?'. Ele riu-se: 'Não, moro no Porto. Sentiste-te segura achando que morava longe, não é?' 'Tenho um amigo cuja filha não teve tanta sorte: foi assassinada enquanto estava sozinha em casa. Ensinam-se as crianças e jovens a não dizer a ninguém quando estão sozinhos, porém contam isso a toda a gente pela internet. As pessoas maldosas enganam e fazem-se passar por outras para tirar informação de aqui e de lá online. Antes de dares por isso, já lhes contaste o suficiente para que te possam achar sem que te apercebas. Espero que tenhas aprendido uma lição disto e que não o faças de novo. Conta aos outros sobre isto para que também possam estar seguros'.

'Prometo que vou contar!'. CUIDADO COM AS INFORMAÇÕES QUE PASSAS NO HI5, NO MSN OU AINDA OUTROS.

Redaxão

Recebi este e-mail, leiam e reflictam...

Texto verídico retirado de uma prova livre de Língua Portuguesa,

realizada por um aluno do 9º ano, numa Escola Secundária das Caldas da

Rainha (para ler, estarrecer e reflectir...!!!))

REDAXÃO

'O PIPOL E A ESCOLA'

Eu axo q os alunos n devem d xumbar qd n vam á escola. Pq o aluno tb tem Direitos e se n vai á escola latrá os seus motivos pq isto tb é perciso ver q á razões qd um aluno não vai á escola. Primeiros a peçoa n se sente motivada pq axa q a escola e a iducação estam uma beca sobre alurizadas.

Valáver, o q é q intereça a um bacano se o quelima de trásosmontes é munto Montanhoso? Ou se a ecuação é exdruxula ou alcalina? Ou cuantas estrofes tem um cuadrado? Ou se um angulo é paleolitico ou espongiforme? Hã?

E ópois os setores ainda xutam preguntas parvas tipo cuantos cantos tem 'os Lesiades''s, q é u m livro xato e q n foi escrevido c/ palavras normais mas q no aspequeto é como outro qq e só pode ter 4 cantos comós outros, daaaah.

Ás veses o pipol ainda tenta tar cos abanos em on, mas os bitaites dos profes até dam gomitos e a Malta re-sentesse, outro dia um arrotou q os jovens n tem abitos de leitura e q a Malta n sabemos ler nem escrever e a sorte do gimbras foi q ele h-xoce bué da rapido e só o 'garra de lin-chao' é q conceguiu assertar lhe com um sapato. Atão agora aviamos de ler tudo qt é

livro desde o Camóes até á idade média e por aí fora, qués ver???

O pipol tem é q aprender cenas q intressam como na minha escola q á um curço de otelaria e a Malta aprendemos a faser lã pereias e ovos mois e piças de xicolate q são assim tipo as pecialidades da rejião e ópois pudemos ganhar um gravetame do camandro. Ah poizé. Tarei a inzajerar?

Quando as teclas falam, as palavras calam @ Brasil

Pois é... As teclas vão passear... A 25 de Julho parto para o Brasil, mais concretamente Bento Gonçalves, para participar na 9° edição do IFIP World Conference on Computers in Education (WCCE 2009), cujo tema principal é "Educação e Tecnologia para um Mundo Melhor". "O primeiro "World Conference on Computers in Education" organizado com ajuda da International Federation for Information Processing - IFIP ocorreu em Amsterdam, em 1970. Desde então, o evento é organizado a cada quatro ou seis anos em um país diferente. Essa é a primeira edição do evento a ser realizada na América Latina. (...)

Além disso, a IFIP coopera com muitas organizações internacionais. Entre elas está a UNESCO que participa em diversos projetos e suporta a participação de pessoas de países em desenvolvimento nos eventos da IFIP. A IFIP é associada ao ICSU (International Council of Scientific Unions).

A IFIP também colabora com quatro federações internacionais: IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control), IMACS (International Association for Mathematics and Computers in Simulation), IFORS (International Federation of Operational Research Societies) and IMEKO (International Measurement Confederation)."

Para mais informações sobre o 9th WCCE, seguir o link http://www.wcce2009.org/indexpt.html

Acreditando no impossível

Postado por Paulo Coelho em 07 de junho de 2009 às 00:07 in http://colunas.g1.com.br/paulocoelho/

William Blake diz em um de seus textos: “tudo aquilo que hoje é uma realidade, antes era apenas parte de um sonho impossível”. E por causa disso temos hoje o avião, os vôos espaciais, o computador em que neste momento escrevo a coluna, etc.

Em sua famosa obra-prima “Alice através do espelho” há um diálogo entre o personagem principal e a rainha, que acabara de contar algo extraordinário.

“Não posso acreditar”, diz Alice.

“Não pode?”, a rainha repete com um ar triste. “Tente de novo: respire fundo, feche seus olhos, e acredite”.

Alice ri: “Não adianta tentar. Só tolos acham que coisas impossíveis podem acontecer”.

“Acho que o que lhe está faltando é um pouco de prática”, responde a rainha.

“Quando eu tinha sua idade, eu treinava pelo menos meia-hora por dia. Logo depois do café da manhã, fazia o possível para imaginar cinco ou seis coisas inacreditáveis que poderiam cruzar meu caminho, e hoje vejo que a maior parte das coisas que imaginei se tornaram realidade. Inclusive, eu me tornei rainha por causa disso”.

A vida nos pede constantemente: “acredite!”.

Acreditar que um milagre pode acontecer a qualquer momento é necessário para nossa alegria, mas também para nossa proteção ou para justificar a nossa existência.

No mundo de hoje, muita gente julga impossível acabar com a miséria, ter uma sociedade justa, diminuir a tensão religiosa que parece crescer a cada dia.

A maior parte das pessoas evita a luta sob os mais diversos pretextos: conformismo, maturidade, senso de ridículo, sensação de impotência. Vemos a injustiça sendo feita a nosso próximo, e ficamos calados. “Não vou me meter à toa em brigas”, é a explicação.

Isto é uma atitude covarde. Quem percorre um caminho espiritual, carrega consigo um código de honra a ser cumprido; a voz que clama contra o que está errado é sempre ouvida por Deus.

About Wolfram|Alpha

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That it should be possible to build Wolfram|Alpha as it exists today in the first decade of the 21st century was far from obvious. And yet there is much more to come.

As of now, Wolfram|Alpha contains 10+ trillion of pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains. Built with Mathematica—which is itself the result of more than 20 years of development at Wolfram Research—Wolfram|Alpha's core code base now exceeds 5 million lines of symbolic Mathematica code. Running on supercomputer-class compute clusters, Wolfram|Alpha makes extensive use of the latest generation of web and parallel computing technologies, including webMathematica and gridMathematica.

Wolfram|Alpha's knowledge base and capabilities already span a great many domains, and its underlying framework has the power and flexibility to support ready extension to essentially any domain that is based on systematic knowledge. More »

The universe of potentially computable knowledge is, however, almost endless, and in creating Wolfram|Alpha as it is today, we needed to start somewhere. Our approach so far has been to emphasize domains where computation has traditionally had a more significant role. As we have developed Wolfram|Alpha, we have in effect been systematically covering the content areas of reference libraries and handbooks. In going forward, we plan broader and deeper coverage, both of traditionally scientific, technical, economic, and otherwise quantitative knowledge, and of more everyday, popular, and cultural knowledge.

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Today's Wolfram|Alpha is just the beginning. We have ambitious plans, for data, for computation, for linguistics, for presentation, and more. As we go forward, we'll be discussing what we're doing on the Wolfram|Alpha Blog, and we encourage suggestions and participation, especially through the Wolfram|Alpha Community.

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Wolfram|Alpha was made possible in part by the achievements of Mathematica and A New Kind of Science (NKS). In their different ways, both of these point to far-reaching future opportunities for Wolfram|Alpha—whether a radically new kind of programming or the systematic automation of invention and discovery.

Wolfram|Alpha is being introduced first in the form of the wolframalpha.com website. But Wolfram|Alpha is really a technology and a platform that can be used and presented in many different ways. Among short-term plans are developer APIs, professional and corporate versions, custom versions for internal data, connections with other forms of content, and deployment on emerging mobile and other platforms.

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For the first time in history, we have computers that are powerful enough to support the capabilities of Wolfram|Alpha, and we have the web as a broad-based means of delivery. But this technology alone was not enough to make Wolfram|Alpha possible.

What was needed were also two developments that have been driven by Stephen Wolfram over the course of nearly 30 years.