1,720,957 research outputs found
Numeri e Macchine: Un museo virtuale per apprendere la storia dell'informatica
No full textQuesto articolo si propone di illustrare il progetto e la realizzazione di un museo virtuale sulla storia dell’informatica. ll lavoro nasce dall’esperienza maturata negli allestimenti della mostra “Numeri e Macchine” a Udine e si inserisce in un momento di crescente attenzione per la radici storiche dell’informatica. Infatti, in ambito scolastico e universitario ormai si riconosce che una riflessione in
chiave storica può favorire un atteggiamento critico da parte dei sempre più numerosi utenti del computer.
I vari aspetti del progetto sono stati affrontati facendo riferimento a due obiettivi principali. Da un lato si è inteso cogliere le potenzialità offerte dalla multimedialità e dall’interattività al fine di sviluppare un ambiente di apprendimento che si caratterizzi per ricchezza di stimoli e per un coinvolgimento attivo del visitatore, attraverso azioni che vanno da semplici manipolazioni di oggetti fino alla sperimentazione di alcuni dispositivi di calcolo, contribuendo così a mantenere vivi interesse e motivazione anche nei giovani allievi. D’altro lato si è cercato di realizzare un’architettura che si presenti come un sistema aperto in grado di evolvere nel tempo, dotato quindi della flessibilità necessaria a definire nuovi percorsi di visita, adattabili a diverse esigenze didattiche o divulgative.
La versione corrente del museo virtuale, basata sugli strumenti DHTML e consultabile direttamente tramite browser, è disponibile su CD-ROM ed è stata utilizzata in alcune sperimentazioni didattiche
Storia dell'informatica e formazione culturale degli studenti
No full textL'Universita' di Udine aderisce all'iniziativa "Corsi AICA", volta a promuovere l'insegnamento della storia dell'informatica. Questo articolo presenta un'analisi condotta sugli esiti delle prove d'esame con l'obiettivo di esplorare la formazione culturale degli studenti. Dalle prime osservazioni emerge una fragile prospettiva storica, in particolare per quanto riguarda l'evoluzione della scienza, che rende loro difficile trasformare la spontanea curiosita' per gli artefatti tecnologici in un piu' maturo interesse per gli sviluppi del pensiero e della societa' che li hanno resi possibili
"Numeri e Macchine" – A Virtual Museum to Learn the History of Computing
No full textConsidering a historical perspective may be not only, in Knuth's witty words, "one of the ways to help make computer science respectable,'' but also a valuable tool for education purposes.
After outlining the main reasons for teaching the history of computing, in this paper we present a virtual museum on the subject, addressed to Italian students, developed in a cooperative project engaging both university and school teachers.
It is meant first of all as an opportunity to experiment a learning environment suitable to explore the cultural roots of computer science, especially in the school ages.
We are now planning classroom experiences to assess this tool, as well as proposing it in a curricular course on the history of computer science for training secondary school teachers
Enhancing the general background of CS students through a computing history course
No full textThe Italian Association of Automatic Computing (AICA) promotes the introduction of academic courses on the computing history. Also the University of Udine participates in this project by offering an elective course in the CS and IT programs. After the first two years of this new experience, we attempt to outline what is emerging from the analysis of the students' answers to a couple of specifically designed questionnaires and to the examination tests. A major point of interest is that the course helps us to get some insight on our students' general background and attitude toward culture. In particular, the first observations seem to indicate that they are rather curious about the technological artifacts, but come with a poor historical picture and then have difficulty putting science and technology in a historical perspective. Although our analysis reveals some positive trends, it is not easy to assess the course effectiveness in this respect because of the lack of suitable benchmarks
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
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