[Its.an.education.project] SOMs and Constructionism

[Teemu Leinonen]

Hi all,

Related to Gary's SOM analyzes / visualizations: With colleagues we  
have published the following article:

Honkela T., Leinonen T., Lonka K., Raike A. (2000): Self-Organizing  
Maps and Constructive Learning. Proceedings of ICEUT'2000,  
International Conference on Educational Uses of Communication and  
Information Technologies, Beijing, China. August 21-25, 2000, pp.  
339-343.
PDF: http://www2.uiah.fi/~tleinone/teemu_leinonen_som_learning.pdf

If not more, in the end of the short paper there are some good  
references to learning theories, computer supported collaborative  
learning (CSCL) and Self-Organizing Maps.

Best regards,

	- Teemu

its.an.education.project-request at tema.lo-res.org kirjoitti 18.5.2008  
kello 14:36:

> Subject: Re: [Its.an.education.project] Fwd: Its.an.education.project
> 	curiosity
> To: Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com>
> Cc: its.an.education.project at tema.lo-res.org
> Message-ID: <4830231B.3020507 at student.tuwien.ac.at>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
>
> Gary,
>
> excellent work, I love the map!
>
> Maybe this is something that we could add to Walter's SugarLabs digest
> on a monthly/weekly basis?
>
> Cheers,
> Christoph
>
> Gary C Martin schrieb:
>> Hi List,
>>
>> I sent this to Marco, off-list, as a curiosity (I'm not currently
>> subscribed to its.an.education.project so please cc me if needed).
>> It's basically a self organising map (SOM) visualisation of the new
>> list activity up to a day or two ago (more description of the
>> visualisation technique in my email below). Here's a link to the  
>> image:
>>
>>     http://garycmartin.com/som/2008-May-its-an-education-project- 
>> list-som.jpg
>>
>>
>> I was trying to get an idea for the topics being covered here without
>> burning my time by reading all of the archive, but if folks find  
>> it of
>> some use I could automate the process. Perhaps monthly/weekly list
>> views, wiki content, etc?
>>
>> --Gary
>>
>> Begin forwarded message:
>>
>>> This is very nice! I'd actually post it on the list, you don't  
>>> need to
>>> be subscribed to do so...
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Marco
>>>
>>> On Sat, May 17, 2008 at 5:42 AM, Gary C Martin  
>>> <gary at garycmartin.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>> Hi Marco,
>>>>
>>>> Just a random aside, didn't want to post formally as this is just a
>>>> rough,
>>>> but though you might find it vaguely interesting/curious.
>>>>
>>>> I recently noticed the its.an.education.project, but I'm  
>>>> reticent to
>>>> join
>>>> yet another list that potentially another set of distracting  
>>>> rants or a
>>>> talking shop ? be they good or bad, my opinion reading bandwidth is
>>>> pretty
>>>> saturated now with the existing lists... Anyway, I've been working
>>>> on a Self
>>>> Organising Map (SOM) that uses a geographic like landscape  
>>>> metaphor for
>>>> visualisation***, and recently hooked up a text front end for
>>>> extracting
>>>> word distance metrics from bodies of text ? I've been testing it on
>>>> works of
>>>> literature from Project Gutenberg up to now, but have wanted to try
>>>> it on
>>>> bulk mail feeds for a while.
>>>>
>>>> *** Code is all Python/PIL but too CPU intensive for an XO, though
>>>> it might
>>>> make nice visual index/content pages for wiki content and such,  
>>>> with
>>>> URL
>>>> links...
>>>>
>>>> The SOM acts as a kind of spacial summariser visualisation of the
>>>> content,
>>>> where height indicates strong connections between terms, proximity
>>>> represents term association, and label size is a rough guide to  
>>>> basic
>>>> frequency of the term. Now there are many "correct" maps for the
>>>> same set of
>>>> data, each generation will usually settle into a slightly different
>>>> set of
>>>> local minima, but the associations are no less valid for each.
>>>>
>>>> It's currently picking the top ~200 terms by frequency, after  
>>>> removing
>>>> linguistic junk words. Here's the map that generated for the
>>>> Its.an.education.project May archives, as of yesterday. Note that
>>>> the map is
>>>> continuous (wraps around North/South and East/West, surface of a  
>>>> torus
>>>> actually).
>>>>
>>>> Probably just a curiosity, but might be more useful on your disk
>>>> than mine.
>>>>
>>>> --Gary