Keynote Speakers
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The Importance of Excellence Nobel Laureate Aaron Ciechanover
Professor Aaron Ciechanover
Technion (the Israel Institute of Technology), Haifa
Science as a Bridge to Peace
Zafra M. Lerman
President, Mimsad, Inc., USA
Borders are only lines on a map. The environment, nature and science do not recognize these lines. Science is borderless. Science and scientists, therefore, are the key to building a bridge for peace. If one country is working on cleaning its environment, but the neighboring country continues polluting, the air in both countries is polluted. Only by working together and by collaborating on scientific research and application can these problems be solved. Water is becoming a scarce commodity; we are already hearing statements that the next war will be fought for water. Only scientific collaboration between nations will guarantee that people will not die from thirst or water-borne illness in any part of the world. Science is an international language -- a scientist from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in the U.S. and a scientist from Bethlehem, Palestine, can communicate with each other on scientific issues without needing to speak each other's language. As scientists, we have the responsibility to build the bridge needed for peace in the world.
Online Laboratories in Education and the Transition from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0
Michael E. Auer
School of Electronics, Carinthia Tech Institute, Villach, Austria
Laboratories are important elements in science, engineering and technical education. They allow the application and testing of theoretical knowledge in practical learning situations. Experimentation and experience-based learning (learning by doing) is also performed in many other subject areas, for example in economics where students lead virtual companies and compete on a simulated market. Labs have always played an important role in education. However, nowadays experiments have become more and more complicated. As a result, the demand for specialized and expensive equipment has increased. Only some large research centres and perhaps some universities can afford such equipment and even these institutions can only have a limited amount of what is desired. Online laboratories are therefore the solution. In conjunction with the emergence and the process of growing of the Internet new solutions of Collaborative Online Lab Environments were developed all over the world especially in the last decade. The learning situation in laboratories is highly complex, but also well structured. The learning methods usually used in these situations, depend on the specific situation, but self-directed learning prevails, or it is a mix of self-directed and collaborative learning. It is useful to distinguish among three basic types of engineering laboratories: development, research, and educational. While they have many characteristics in common, there are some fundamental differences. These differences must be understood, if there is to be agreement on the educational objectives that the instructional laboratory is expected to meet. Mobility is one of the present trends in all fields of communication. The opportunity to provide students with remote access to experimental hardware and the ability to offer flexibility in time and place in which laboratories are conducted are also becoming powerful motivations for the field. Currently, available online laboratories are often hidden from the public education community. The most significant reason for this problem is the current lack of information about online laboratories that provide interested potential the ability to search for adequate laboratories. A possible solution for that would be a semantically linked repository for the e-learning community that reduces the effort for researchers as well as lecturers and students to find and share information about online laboratories all over the world. To outline the differences between the well-known Web 2.0 methods and the Semantic Web (Web 3.0) a typical information searching scenario can be used: “A user search for all online labs which contains experiments in a specific field, has a specific difficulty level and is freely available.” Using today’s available web searching tools such a query is not possible as these tools make use of keywords to perform a search. On the other hand such a scenario is perfectly supported by the Semantic Web.
Working with Students in Poverty
Joyce VanTassel-Baska
College of William and Mary, USA
This keynote will share current research findings and important theories related to working with promising learners from poverty. It will highlight a six year project in the United States to find and serve more low income learners in gifted programs and the results from that effort.
University Servant Leadership for Community Outreach
Ken McCluskey & Laura Sokal
Winnipeg University, Canada
Psychologist David Hunt (1987) has spoken of the need for universities to become more responsive to the outside world. In his view, university types must begin to put away their "little professor" and – remembering that "in the beginning" there was "experience," not a "blackboard" (or PowerPoint) – to respect community wisdom and expertise. Heeding this admonition that we must surface from the ivory tower, the Faculty of Education at the University of Winnipeg (UW) has endeavoured to expand its tradition of community outreach, service, and partnership. In this session, the Dean and Associate Dean of Education discuss their philosophy and approach to community engagement, and various faculty members describe outreach programs they have designed and implemented (in the areas of mentoring, service learning, alternative programming, projects for at-risk youth, and international practica).
Evaluation of Potential Creativity (EPoC)
Todd Lubart
Université Paris Descartes, Paris-France
This keynote will address a new tool, the Evaluation of Potential Creativity (EPoC 2009). It is a new battery that allows creative giftedness to be measured. It includes verbal and graphic subtests that measure the two key modes of creative cognition"divergent-exploratory thinking and convergent-integrative thinking" in elementary and middle-school students. The instrument can be used as an efficient diagnostic tool to identify creative potential and to monitor progress, using pre-tests and post-tests, in educational programs designed to enhance creativity. Easy to use by psychologists and educators, this instrument can, for example, help school psychologists to identify, in regular schools, children with creative potential. An original, internet-based scoring system that enhances inter-rater reliability is integrated in the battery. Initially developed in France, this instrument will be available in 2010 in other languages with local norms for different cultures. EPoC is a comprehensive evaluation tool that combines an approach to creativity by domain and by mode of thought, allowing a profile of creative potential to be assessed. The EPoC system provides opportunities to add additional domains to the assessment (such as the musical domain, currently under development). EPoC includes a training program for evaluators to facilitate test use and scoring. Creativity plays an increasingly important role in modern society which requires original, innovative thinking and creative problem solving to face unexpected challenges in all aspects of life. The economic importance of creativity as an engine for societal growth in both cultural and industrial sectors has been often recognized (for example the European Union has declared 2009 to be the European Year of Creativity and Innovation). Creativity can be defined as a capacity to produce work that is both original (novel) and adaptive with respect to the constraints of a task or a situation. The EPoC Battery and manuals will be available in different languages, including: Arabic, English, Greek, German, Hebrew, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. The development team has designed a number of cross-cultural studies to generate local norms for each region. Developing EPoC in other languages is a project that involves a partnership between Editions Hogrefe France, the International Centre for Innovation in Education (ICIE-Germany) and the Individual Differences research group at the Institute of Psychology, Universitè Paris Descartes. The ICIE will collaborate and coordinate with a large number of local partners to conduct the cross cultural studies. The new battery, EPoC, represents a synthesis and extension of several traditions in creativity measurement. EPoC evaluates creativity in several domains (currently, artistic and literary, with others to be developed such as music, social problem solving, scientific invention, etc). In each domain, two basic kinds are thinking are measured because they come into play in each creative act. The first is divergent exploration. The second is convergent synthesis and integration. These two modes are widely viewed as the basis of the creative process and relate to numerous pedagogical programmes to train creativity. Results show good psychometric qualities, with a factor structure indicating 4 factors, as expected: Verbal convergent integrative, verbal divergent exploratory, graphic-artistic convergent, graphic artistic divergent. No particular gender-related differences are observed. There are developmental trends across school-grade levels.
The contribution of quantum theory to the phenomena of creativity in science
Thomas Görnitz
Goethe University, Germany
The history of quantum theory in all its steps from the discovery of the quantum of action over quantum mechanics, quantum field theory until the theory of quantum information is accompanied with many creative acts. This creative evolution has shown that at a deep level of understanding distinctions disappear which in everyday life seem to be insuperable. Examples are the distinction between matter and motion, stuff and force and also between matter and abstract quantum information. All this distinctions are replaced by equivalence. The mathematical structure of quantum theory enables to understand how new things and structures come into being. Because consciousness is a special form of quantum information it becomes more and more clear that quantum theory is also the key to understand the human consciousness and its creativity in a scientific way.
Assesment for Excellence in Education
Michalis Kassotakis
University of Athens
On the application of innovative emotion research in educational settings: A case of persons in contexts
Konstantinos Kafetsios
Psychology Department, University of Crete
Recent years have seen an explosion of emotion research with obvious and some less obvious applications for innovative practices in educational settings. The talk will introduce some of the key emotional constructs focusing around the concept of emotion competencies (expression, perception, and regulation of emotion). Using evidence from recent studies on educators’ emotion competencies, it will be argued that proper application of this research in educational settings is not possible without due attention to the organizational context and the interpersonal dynamics and display rules that modulate the effects of those competencies in educational settings
