1,720,954 research outputs found
Introdurre le Idee chiave delle Nanoscienze e Nanotecnologie nel Curriculum della Scuola Superiore con un Approccio Sperimentale: il Progetto NANOLAB
No full textL’integrazione di argomenti di Nanoscienze e Nanotecnologie all’interno dei curricula di scuola superiore è oggetto di ampio dibattito. Viene infatti generalmente considerato un tema troppo difficile e specialistico per poter essere introdotto a livello secondario e si finisce così per focalizzare l’attenzione quasi esclusivamente sull’addestramento dei futuri ricercatori e lavoratori del settore. Tuttavia di recente si va facendo strada la tendenza a favorire tale inserimento. Vi è addirittura chi ritiene che esso possa accelerare il processo di innovazione dell’ educazione scientifica.
Questa tesi vuole fornire un contributo alla discussione, presentando NANOLAB www.nanolab.unimore.it, un progetto educational che mira ad introdurre nei curricula delle superiori percorsi didattici che illustrando le idee principali dell’attuale sviluppo di Nanoscienze e Nanotecnologie. Realizzato in Italia, viene sperimentato dal 2011. All’interno del progetto sono state selezionate alcune idee Nano chiave e ciascuna di esse è stata collegata ad un’area tematica di grande rilevanza nell’ambito della attuale ricerca: nanoparticelle, materiali intelligenti, polimeri conduttivi, superfici nanostrutturate. Grande attenzione è stata posta nel presentare le più avanzate applicazioni ma altrettanto spazio è dedicato ai principi di base. Per ciascuna area sono stati sviluppati alcuni protocolli sperimentali che permettono di investigare il comportamento della materia alla nanoscala.
Nel panorama esistente la maggior parte delle attività nano proposte agli studenti secondari si basano su quello che potremmo definire “wow-effect”, si tratta cioè di dimostrazioni spettacolari e di grande impatto che sfruttano alcune delle proprietà controintuitive dei nanomateriali per affascinare e stimolare la discussione ma che sono rigorosamente qualitative. NANOLAB mostra che è possibile spingersi oltre, utilizzando gli aspetti più spettacolari per motivare gli studenti ad approfondire con indagini quantitative. E’ infatti possibile proporre protocolli sperimentali nano-ispirati in modalità hands-on, da svolgere a scuola integrati nell’usuale pratica didattica. Ciò offre il duplice vantaggio di completare gli argomenti curricolari tradizionali introducendo anche la nuova prospettiva della materia alla nanoscala e di sperimentare direttamente modalità di lavoro proprie della ricerca scientifica. Le attività infatti sono progettate il più possibile come controparti didattiche degli esperimenti quotidianamente effettuati nei laboratori di tutto il mondo; gli studenti vengono direttamente coinvolti nella sperimentazione ed esplorano la fisica che sta dietro ai fenomeni osservati in un approccio inquiry based .
Portare la ricerca nella scuola può apparire come una sfida difficile anche per dal punto di vista tecnico e in termini di spesa. NANOLAB dimostra che non è necessariamente così. Tramite l’uso di nano materiali accuratamente selezionati, ormai disponibili sul mercato ad un costo relativamente basso, e grazie ai dispositivi elettronici degli studenti stessi utilizzati come sensibili e potenti strumenti di laboratorio integrati con altre risorse reperibili gratuitamente in rete, si può raggiungere grande efficacia ad un costo bassissimo. Il ruolo degli insegnanti è universalmente riconosciuto come fondamentale nel processo di innovazione educativa. Pertanto NANOLAB dedica particolare spazio ad aggiornarli e supportarli, fornendo risorse di elevate qualità e facile implementazione, possibilità di networking e di aggiornamento professionale sia dal vivo (summer school) che on-line (sito web e on-line community).
Tutte le risorse (sia in italiano che inglese) sono distribuite con licenza Creative Commons Licence Share Alike 3.0.The opportunity of incorporating Nano-scale science and technology into secondary school curricula is still controversial. Often considered far too difficult and specialized to be dealt with, not to say performed, at secondary level, the focus has rather been posed on training researchers and future workforce. However a tendency towards favoring the inclusion is slowly making its way through. It is now even ventured the idea that the introduction of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology may result beneficial in boosting science education innovation.
This thesis intends to contribute to the discussion by presenting contents and outcomes of NANOLAB www.nanolab.unimore.it, an educational project aiming at introducing nano-inspired didactical paths, exposing the main ideas of current Nanoscience and Nanotechnologies, into high school curricula. NANOLAB is being developed and tested in Italy since 2011.
Within the project a few key-ideas of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology have been selected and each has been linked to a relevant thematic area: nanoparticles, smart materials, conducting polymers, nanostructured surfaces. Great attention has been put in introducing the most advanced Nanotechnology applications, but as much consideration has been given to the basics of Nanoscience. For each area, a small set of integrated experimental protocols have been developed which probe matter at the nanoscale.
In the existing panorama, most of the proposed nano-activities for young students are actually based on what we may call the “wow-effect”, consisting in high impact spectacular but strictly qualitative demonstrations, exploiting some of the peculiar properties and behavior of nanomaterials to fascinate and stimulate discussion. NANOLAB shows that it is actually possible to go beyond this, exploiting wow-effects to capture student attention and give them the motivation for pursuing further, more quantitative investigations, and to interpret results within their own school labs. It is in fact possible to introduce nano-inspired experimental protocols which may be performed at school, in a hands-on modality and embedded in the usual didactical practice. This offers the double gain of supplementing traditional curricular topics with the new perspective of matter at the nanoscale, and of introducing research own typical working style. The activities are in fact designed as much as possible as the didactic counterparts of experiments performed daily in research laboratories; that is, students play with the real stuff, and explore the Physics behind the phenomena in an inquiry based approach.
Bringing research into school may seem a challenging task, also due to technical and financial issues. NANOLAB shows that this is not necessarily the case. Through the use of carefully chosen nanomaterials, which are now available off-the-shelves and relatively cheap, and by exploiting pupils own consumer electronic devices as powerful lab instruments, jointly to other free educational resources, great effectiveness can be reached at very low cost, thus applying to a high-tech content what we may call a high-tech hands-on approach.
Teachers are universally recognized as key role players in education innovation process. Therefore in NANOLAB a great effort has been spent in training and supporting teachers by providing high quality and user friendly resources, networking possibilities and adequate professional development both on-site (summer school) and on-line (website and on-line community), upgrading in two years from strictly regional to national level in a cascade-like perspective.
One main issue in nano-education within Europe is to obtain information on what’s going on in the different countries. NANOLAB project wanted to offer its own positive contribute by developing both Italian and English version of the website and of the documentions, all distributed under Creative Commons Licence Share Alike 3.0
Educational pathways through nanoscience: nitinol as a paradigmatic smart material
No full textWe developed an educational path based on nitinol, a shape memory alloy
which conveniently exemplifies the smart material concept, i.e., a material
that performs a predetermined, reversible action in response to a change in
the environment. Nitinol recovers a given shape, changes its resistivity
drastically and modifies its elastic properties if subjected to a temperature
change in a convenient range. Here, the properties are verified with
laboratory protocols appropriate to a high-school environment. Use of
mobile electronic devices is also suggested. The collected electrical and
mechanical properties are analysed within a didactic path which emphasizes
their common physical origin, i.e., the martensitic transition. Moreover, the
peculiarities of this solid-to-solid transformation are put in correspondence
with the apparently unrelated but more familiar liquid–vapour transition.
The relationship with possible applications is emphasized by measuring the
efficiency of using a nitinol spring as an actuator
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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