Thursday, June 18, 2015

BLENDED LEARNING TO BOOST CAPACITY OF COMPUTER SCIENCE COURSE

Google-funded Project Seeks Ways To Meet Growing Demand for Classes

By Byron Spice / 412-268-9068 / bspice@cs.cmu.edu

Carnegie Mellon University will begin adding online instructional tools and targeted study groups to a popular introductory computer science course this fall in an effort to accommodate more students while maintaining instructional quality.

The idea behind the multi-year research project, sponsored by Google, is to find a way to leverage existing faculty to meet a growing demand for computer science courses, while also expanding the opportunities for underrepresented minorities, high school students and community college students, said Jacobo Carrasquel, associate teaching professor of computer science.

The approach is not to simply put lectures and course work online, as is typical of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Rather, Carrasquel will use a blended learning approach that largely replaces formal lectures with videos and optional mini-lectures, and uses an online software application called Classroom Salon to identify concepts that need to be reinforced by instructors in small group meetings with students.

“As we teach a wider diversity of students, with different backgrounds, we can no longer teach to ‘the middle,’” Carrasquel said. “When you do that, you’re not aiming at the 20 percent of the top students or the 20 percent at the bottom.”

Jacobo Carrasquel is developing videos and mini-lectures and incorporating CMU's Classroom Salon to reach more students in an introductory class for non-computer science majors.

By devoting less time to lectures and by using Classroom Salon to identify groups of students with common instructional needs, it should be possible for existing instructors to target the needs of students across the entire spectrum of capabilities.

Carrasquel will begin this fall to add the new elements to his Data Structures and Algorithms course, which attracts non-computer science majors from across the CMU campus. The changes will be fully implemented in the course next spring.

“As we teach a wider diversity of students, with different backgrounds, we can no longer teach to ‘the middle.’” — Jacobo Carrasquel

He and his collaborators, including Marsha Lovett, director of CMU’s Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence, will be evaluating not only the instructional effectiveness of the changes, but whether these elements are scalable — whether they would make it possible to expand enrollment without increasing the instructional staff or adding classrooms.

The project is receiving $200,000 in its first year through Google’s Computer Science Capacity Awards program, which seeks to identify classroom innovations that help computer science programs manage the growing demands by students for computer science instruction.

With industry demand for computer scientists at an all-time high, it will be difficult to manage the demand for computer science instruction by simply hiring additional faculty, said Ananda Gunawardena, a Princeton University faculty member who is collaborating on the project. But simply videotaping lectures and pushing entire courses online isn’t an answer, either, he added.

“You’re looking for something in between,” said Gunawardena, who worked with English Professor David Kaufer to create Classroom Salon while he was a faculty member in CMU’s Computer Science Department. “You’re looking for that sweet spot.”

Classroom Salon can help by enabling students to share their thoughts and questions about course readings and materials; the app’s analytical tools can identify common issues or subgroups of students who need special help. Faculty members or student teaching assistants can arrange study groups as necessary based on this information.

High school students today rarely have opportunities to take more than one Advanced Placement course in computer science, so Carrasquel will work with a high school consortium to transfer the course materials to their schools in the fall of 2016. Plans call for also sharing the materials with community college instructors.

“We’re not just looking to build enrollment, but also to make computer science instruction accessible to underrepresented minorities and other students who might not have had an opportunity to develop a strong interest or background in computer science,” Carrasquel said.

This is an example of the work being done through CMU’s Simon Initiative. Named for the late Nobel and Turing Award laureate Herbert Simon, this initiative harnesses a cross-disciplinary ecosystem of learning science that has developed over several decades at CMU, with the goal of measurably improving student learning outcomes.

Research Reveals Brain’s “Filing System” is Same for Everyone：The Simon Initiative is named for Herbert Simon, professor and co-founder of artificial intelligence

Tuesday, June 9, 2015

SCIENTISTS GAIN FIRST GLIMPSE OF NEW CONCEPTS DEVELOPING IN THE BRAIN

Research Reveals Brain’s “Filing System” is Same for Everyone

By Shilo Rea / 412-268-6094 / shilo@cmu.edu

http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2015/june/brain-filing-system.html

Thanks to Carnegie Mellon University advances in brain imaging technology, we now know how specific concrete objects are coded in the brain, to the point where we can identify which object, such as a house or a banana, someone is thinking about from its brain activation signature.

Now, CMU scientists are applying this knowledge about the neural representations of familiar concepts by teaching people new concepts and watching the new neural representations develop. Published in Human Brain Mapping, the scientists have — for the first time — documented the formation of a newly learned concept inside the brain, which shows that it occurs in the same brain areas for everyone.

The set of "habitat" brain regions (green) and "diet" regions (red and blue) where the new knowledge was stored.

This novel research merges brain science and instructional innovation, two of Carnegie Mellon’s university-wide initiatives — BrainHubSM, which focuses on how the structure and activity of the brain give rise to complex behaviors, and the Simon Initiative, which aims to measurably improve student learning outcomes by harnessing decades of learning science research.

Marcel Just, a leading neuroscientist, pointed to theSmithsonian Institute’s 2013 announcement about the olinguito, a newly identified carnivore species that mainly eats fruits and lives by itself in the treetops of rainforests, as an example of the type of new concept that people learn.

“Millions of people read the information about the olinguito and in doing so permanently changed their own brains,” said Just, the D.O. Hebb University Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in CMU’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. “Our research happened to be examining this process precisely at that time in a laboratory setting. When people learned that the olinguito eats mainly fruit instead of meat, a region of their left inferior frontal gyrus — as well as several other areas — stored the new information according to its own code.”

The study participants learned about the habitat and diet of eight animals, such as the cytar.

Just added, “The new knowledge gained from the Smithsonian’s announcement became encoded in the same brain areas in every person that learned the new information, because all brains appear to use the same filing system.”

For the study, Andrew Bauer, a Ph.D. student inpsychology, and Just taught 16 study participants diet and dwelling information about extinct animals to monitor the growth of the neural representations of eight new animal concepts in the participants’ brains.

Drawing on previous findings, the research team knew “where” to expect the new knowledge to emerge in the brains of their participants. Information about dwellings and information about eating have each been shown to reside in their own set of brain regions, regions that are common across people.

Over the course of an hour, the study participants were given a zoology mini-tutorial on the diets and habitats of the animals, while the scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor the emergence of the concepts in the participants’ brains. As the new properties were taught, the activation levels in the eating regions and the dwelling regions changed.

One important result was that after the zoology tutorial, each one of the eight animal concepts developed its own unique activation signature. This made it possible for a computer program to determine which of the eight animals a participant was thinking about at a given time. In effect, the program was reading their minds as they contemplated a brand-new thought.

For the first time CMU scientists have documented the formation of a newly learned concept inside the brain, which shows that it occurs in the same brain areas for everyone.

But even though the animals had unique activation signatures, the animals that shared similar properties (such as a similar habitat) had similar activation signatures. That is, a resemblance between the properties of two animals resulted in a resemblance between their activation signatures. This finding shows that the activation signatures are not just arbitrary patterns, but are meaningful and interpretable.

“The activation signature of a concept is a composite of the different types of knowledge of the concept that a person has stored, and each type of knowledge is stored in its own characteristic set of regions,” Just said.

Another important result was that once a property of an animal was learned, it remained intact in the brain, even after other properties of the animal had been learned. This finding indicates the relative neural durability of what we learn.

“Each time we learn something, we permanently change our brains in a systematic way,” said Bauer, the study’s lead author. “It was exciting to see our study successfully implant the information about extinct animals into the expected locations in the brain’s filing system.”

Just believes that the study provides a foundation for brain researchers to trace how a new concept makes its way into the brain from the words and graphics used to teach it, foreshadowing a capability to assess the progress in learning a complicated concept like those in a high-school physics lesson. fMRI pattern analyses could diagnose which aspects of a concept students misunderstand (or lack), in a way that could guide the next iteration of instruction.

The results from this study also indicate that it may be possible to use a similar approach to understand the “loss” of knowledge in various brain disorders, such as dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, or due to brain injuries. The loss of a concept in the brain may be the reverse of the process that the study observed.

As the birthplace of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, Carnegie Mellon has been a leader in the study of brain and behavior for more than 50 years. The university has created some of the first cognitive tutors, helped to develop the Jeopardy-winning Watson, founded a groundbreaking doctoral program in neural computation, and completed cutting-edge work in understanding the genetics of autism. Building on its strengths in biology, computer science, psychology, statistics and engineering, CMU recently launched BrainHubSM, a global initiative. The Simon Initiative is named for Herbert Simon, the late CMU Nobel Laureate, professor and co-founder of artificial intelligence.

了解CMU的 Emerging and Integrative Media Initiatives

Integrative Media | Carnegie Mellon University IDeATe ...

ideate.cmu.edu/graduate-programs-research/integrative-media-program/

Learn more about CMU IDeATe's Integrative Media Graduate program and ...Emerging Media Program (EM2) ... The IMP program is housed at Steiner Studios at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and is one of the four NYC Applied Science Initiatives.

http://ideate.cmu.edu/graduate-programs-research/integrative-media-program/

Carnegie Mellon University

CMU Dean of Libraries Keith Webster named director of Emerging and Integrative Media Initiatives.

Keith Webster Named Director of Emerging and Integrative Media-CMU News - Carnegie Mellon University

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