LEARNING IN THE DIGITAL AGE: CERTIFICATE IN CONCEPTUAL CURATION AND PEDAGOGY FOR CONCEPTUAL THINKING AND PEER COOPERATION FOR INSTRUCTORS AND LIBRARIANS

The certificate program is offered by iSchool Institute - Faculty of Information at University of Toronto. It provides hands-on, experiential learning of practical tools for implementation of Conceptual Curation and Pedagogy for Conceptual Thinking and Peer Cooperation in the classroom. The certificate is designed for instructors and librarians in secondary and post-secondary institutions, as well as in public and private organizations with professional learning programs.

The certificate was developed and implemented at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of University of Toronto; Ryerson University Faculty of Science, Engineering and Architecture; Russian Academy of Sciences - Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute, St. Petersburg; Material and Manufacturing Ontario (MMO) Centre of Excellence; and Roots and Routes Summer Institute - RRSI-2012, University of Toronto at Scarborough (http://humrp.utsc.utoronto.ca/ePorte/summer-institutes).

The certificate program covers a total of 72 instruction hours, and includes the following topics:

Introduction to Concept Science: sub-languages with controlled vocabularies; lexical label and building blocks of a concept; Concept Parsing Algorithms (CPA); examples from different knowledge domains.

Knowledge Repositories (KR): Networked information of digital full-text documents; construction and use of a Knowledge Repository for a course of study.

Semantic searches: Key Word In Context (KWIC); creation of KWIC examples by instructors in different knowledge domains.

Interactive Concept Discovery (InCoD): Individual Index: annotation; tagging; linking; concept maps.

Representational competence: Review of the literature on semiotics and development of mental representation with different sign systems in knowledge domains.

Meaning Equivalence Reusable Learning Objects (MERLO): Multiple representations that share equivalence-of-meaning; template for MERLO item construction; overview of existing MERLO databases in different knowledge domains, including: physics; mathematics; biology; architecture; psychology; education; project management; business; construction of MERLO databases by instructors in their own knowledge domains.

MERLO Cooperative/Interactive/Formative (CIF) classroom quizzes: weekly multi-semiotic MERLO quizzes in the classroom; cooperation in small group discussions; individual response with SMS/cell phone/tablet/clicker.

MERLO in summative assessments: Different formats of MERLO items in summative ConcepTest assessment; scoring of summative assessment by instructors in different knowledge domains.

Cognitive control of attentional processing: Review of literature of recent research in neuroscience and brain imagery on cognitive control of inter-hemispheric attentional processing of multi-semiotic stimuli.

Documenting mastery-of-knowledge in individual learners’ e-Portfolios: MERLO (CIF) classroom quizzes and summative assessments; Interactive Concept Discovery (InCoD), annotations and tagging.

CONCEPEDIA (Cooperative Conceptual Encyclopedia): Aggregation of Individual Indexes of learners in context of a knowledge domain; cumulative process-learning-curve of the class.

CF (Cooperative Conceptual Footprint of a document): Aggregation of all annotations in Individual Indexes of scholars/learners that are relevant to a particular document in the KR.