This chapter describes the effects of availability of digital knowledge on teaching, learning, and assessment, and the emergence of pedagogy for conceptual thinking with meaning equivalence in different knowledge domains in early digital era. It includes three proof-of-concept implementations of meaning equivalent reusable learning objects (MERLO) in three different contexts: 1) Course ‘Risk management in the Supply Chain' at Material and Manufacturing Ontario (MMO) Centre of Excellence, in 2002, to evaluate the potential of MERLO to assess and improve learning outcomes in workplace workshops to be offered jointly by MMO and University of Toronto Innovation Foundation; 2) in 2004, secondary school courses in mathematics, physics, and chemistry at Russian Academy of Sciences, Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute, Lycee ‘Physical-Technical High School' at St. Petersburg, to train teachers in administering MERLO formative assessments and evaluate learning outcomes in STEM courses (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics); 3) in 2006, implementing MERLO pedagogy, including development of MERLO databases for grades 9 – 12 mathematics courses at Independent Learning Center (ILC) of TVOntario.
TopIntroduction
In the early 2000s ‘Certificate in Conceptual Curation’ was offered at iSchool Institute, Faculty of Information at University of Toronto. It provided details of important aspects of the emerging reality of digital full-text journals, books, documents, and other digitized artifacts; and the evolution of a systematic approach to the analysis of conceptual content for research, teaching and learning. The certificate was designed for teachers and librarians in secondary and post-secondary institutions, and in public and private organizations with professional learning programs, libraries and archives. It facilitated the development of innovative digital library tools that support higher-order thinking in scholarship, teaching and learning (Stafford, 2010).
Conceptual curation is a recent development in curation of large repositories containing digital full-text documents. It includes the use of semantic searches that reveal structured, multi-layered building blocks of concepts with lateral and hierarchical interactions. Concepts are lexically labeled patterns in the data that encode ‘meaning’ in different domains of knowledge: semantic content embedded in them by the situation being documented, and the specific constraints associated with data generated during this evolutionary process. The emergent discipline of concept science is a novel generic methodology for parsing and analyzing concepts, applicable to the various knowledge domains and professions; with tools designed for recognizing, representing, organizing, exploring, communicating, and manipulating knowledge encoded in controlled vocabularies of sublanguages (Cabre, 1998; Kittredge, 1983). Concept science documents the evolution of content and structure of concepts, and categorization, knowledge representation and use.
The rapid increase in the scope and details of information available via the Internet makes locating educational resources challenging for teachers and learners. The emerging reality of large libraries with digital, full-text documents (as well as other digital artifacts, i.e., photos, databases, diagrams, etc.) makes the development of conceptual curation - namely, a systematic approach to the analysis of concepts across large collections of digital documents - an urgent necessity (Friedman & Deek, 2003; Puntambekar & Goldstein, 2007; Neumann et al., 2017). While both digital documents, as well as traditional paper books, fall under the definition of ‘artifact’: ’an object that has been intentionally made or produced for a certain purpose’ (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://www.oercommons.org/) in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). It provides access to content, services and tools that facilitate and enhance the use of this content in a variety of contexts. These sites are designed primarily for educators, but anyone can access and search the libraries at no cost. The remaining sections of this chapter will survey, discuss, and demonstrate the potential of conceptual curation to change - and enhance - the nature of scholarship, teaching and learning.
TopMeaning Equivalence Reusable Learning Objects (Merlo)
MERLO is a multi-dimensional database that allows the sorting and mapping of important concepts through multi-semiotic representations in multiple sign systems, including: target statements of particular conceptual situations, and relevant other statements.