De la perception à l'apprentissage [From perception to learning]

Dans le domaine de la perception, l'apprentissage est contraint par la présence d'une architecture fonctionnelle constituée d'aires corticales distribuées et très spécialisées. Dans le domaine des troubles visuels d'origine cérébrale, l'apprentissage d'un patient hémi-anopsique ou agnosique sera limité par ses capacités perceptives résiduelles, mais un déficit de reconnaissance visuelle de nature apparemment perceptive, peut également être associé à une altération des représentations en mémoire à long terme. Des réseaux neuronaux distincts pour la reconnaissance - cortex temporal - et pour la localisation des sons - cortex pariétal - ont été décrits chez l'homme. L'étude de patients cérébro-lésés confirme le rôle des indices spatiaux dans un traitement auditif explicite du « where » et dans la discrimination implicite du « what ». Cette organisation, similaire à ce qui a été décrit dans la modalité visuelle, faciliterait les apprentissages perceptifs. Plus généralement, l'apprentissage implicite fonde une grande partie de nos connaissances sur le monde en nous rendant sensible, à notre insu, aux règles et régularités de notre environnement. Il serait impliqué dans le développement cognitif, la formation des réactions émotionnelles ou encore l'apprentissage par le jeune enfant de sa langue maternelle. Le caractère inconscient de cet apprentissage est confirmé par l'étude des temps de réaction sériels de patients amnésiques dans l'acquisition d'une grammaire artificielle. Son évaluation pourrait être déterminante dans la prise en charge ré-adaptative. [In the field of perception, learning is formed by a distributed functional architecture of very specialized cortical areas. For example, capacities of learning in patients with visual deficits - hemianopia or visual agnosia - from cerebral lesions are limited by perceptual abilities. Moreover a visual deficit in link with abnormal perception may be associated with an alteration of representations in long term (semantic) memory. Furthermore, perception and memory traces rely on parallel processing. This has been recently demonstrated for human audition. Activation studies in normal subjects and psychophysical investigations in patients with focal hemispheric lesions have shown that auditory information relevant to sound recognition and that relevant to sound localisation are processed in parallel, anatomically distinct cortical networks, often referred to as the "What" and "Where" processing streams. Parallel processing may appear counterintuitive from the point of view of a unified perception of the auditory world, but there are advantages, such as rapidity of processing within a single stream, its adaptability in perceptual learning or facility of multisensory interactions. More generally, implicit learning mechanisms are responsible for the non-conscious acquisition of a great part of our knowledge about the world, using our sensitivity to the rules and regularities structuring our environment. Implicit learning is involved in cognitive development, in the generation of emotional processing and in the acquisition of natural language. Preserved implicit learning abilities have been shown in amnesic patients with paradigms like serial reaction time and artificial grammar learning tasks, confirming that implicit learning mechanisms are not sustained by the cognitive processes and the brain structures that are damaged in amnesia. In a clinical perspective, the assessment of implicit learning abilities in amnesic patients could be critical for building adapted neuropsychological rehabilitation programs.]

Machine learning for spatial environmental data. Theory, applications and software

The book presents the state of the art in machine learning algorithms (artificial neural networks of different architectures, support vector machines, etc.) as applied to the classification and mapping of spatially distributed environmental data. Basic geostatistical algorithms are presented as well. New trends in machine learning and their application to spatial data are given, and real case studies based on environmental and pollution data are carried out. The book provides a CD-ROM with the Machine Learning Office software, including sample sets of data, that will allow both students and researchers to put the concepts rapidly to practice.

Learning in Product Development Projects - Responding to challenges in global industrial company

Verkostoitunut kansainvälinen tuotekehitys on tärkeä osa menestystä nykypäivän muuttuvassa yritysmaailmassa. Toimintojen tehostamiseksi myös projektitoiminnot on sopeutettava kansainväliseen toimintaympäristöön. Kilpailukyvyn säilyttämiseksi projektitoimintoja on lisäksi jatkuvasti tehostettava. Yhtenäkeinona nähdään projektioppiminen, jota voidaan edistää monin eri tavoin. Tässätyössä keskitytään projektitiedonhallinnan kehittämisen tuomiin oppimismahdollisuuksiin. Kirjallisuudessa kerrotaan, että projektitiedon jakaminen ja sen hyödyntäminen seuraavissa projekteissa on eräs projektioppimisen edellytyksistä. Tämäon otettu keskeiseksi näkökulmaksi tässä tutkimuksessa. Lisäksi tutkimusalueen rajaamiseksi työ tarkastelee erityisesti projektioppimista kansainvälisten tuotekehitysprojektien välillä. Työn tavoitteena on esitellä keskeisiä projektioppimisen haasteita ja etsiä konkreettinen ratkaisu vastaamaan näihin haasteisiin. Tuotekehitystoiminnot ja kansainvälinen hajautettu projektiorganisaatio kohtaavat lisäksi erityisiä haasteita, kuten tiedon hajautuneisuus, projektihenkilöstön vaihtuvuus, tiedon luottamuksellisuus ja maantieteelliset haasteet (esim. aikavyöhykkeet ja toimipisteen sijainti). Nämä erityishaasteet on otettu huomioon ratkaisua etsittäessä. Haasteisiin päädyttiin vastaamaan tietotekniikkapohjaisella ratkaisulla, joka suunniteltiin erityisesti huomioiden esimerkkiorganisaation tarpeet ja haasteet. Työssä tarkastellaan suunnitellun ratkaisun vaikutusta projektioppimiseen ja kuinka se vastaa havaittuihin haasteisiin. Tuloksissa huomattiin, että projektioppimista tapahtui, vaikka oppimista oli vaikea suoranaisesti huomata tutkimusorganisaation jäsenten keskuudessa. Projektioppimista voidaan kuitenkin sanoa tapahtuvan, jos projektitieto on helposti koko projektiryhmän saatavilla ja se on hyvin järjesteltyä. Muun muassa nämä ehdot täyttyivät. Projektioppiminen nähdään yleisesti haastavana kehitysalueena esimerkkiorganisaatiossa. Suuri osa tietämyksestä on niin sanottua hiljaistatietoa, jota on hankala tai mahdoton saattaa kirjalliseen muotoon. Näin olleen tiedon siirtäminen jää suurelta osin henkilökohtaisen vuorovaikutuksen varaan. Siitä huolimatta projektioppimista on mahdollista kehittää erilaisin toimintamallein ja menetelmin. Kehitys vaatii kuitenkin resursseja, pitkäjänteisyyttä ja aikaa. Monet muutokset voivat vaatia myös organisaatiokulttuurin muutoksen ja vaikuttamista organisaation jäseniin. Motivaatio, positiiviset mielikuvat ja selkeät strategiset tavoitteet luovat vakaan pohjan projektioppimisen kehittämiselle.

Information System ProcessInnovation Adoption, Adaptation, Learning, and Unlearning: A Longitudinal Case Study

This thesis examines the history and evolution of information system process innovation (ISPI) processes (adoption, adaptation, and unlearning) within the information system development (ISD) work in an internal information system (IS) department and in two IS software house organisations in Finland over a 43-year time-period. The study offers insights into influential actors and their dependencies in deciding over ISPIs. The research usesa qualitative research approach, and the research methodology involves the description of the ISPI processes, how the actors searched for ISPIs, and how the relationships between the actors changed over time. The existing theories were evaluated using the conceptual models of the ISPI processes based on the innovationliterature in the IS area. The main focus of the study was to observe changes in the main ISPI processes over time. The main contribution of the thesis is a new theory. The term theory should be understood as 1) a new conceptual framework of the ISPI processes, 2) new ISPI concepts and categories, and the relationships between the ISPI concepts inside the ISPI processes. The study gives a comprehensive and systematic study on the history and evolution of the ISPI processes; reveals the factors that affected ISPI adoption; studies ISPI knowledge acquisition, information transfer, and adaptation mechanisms; and reveals the mechanismsaffecting ISPI unlearning; changes in the ISPI processes; and diverse actors involved in the processes. The results show that both the internal IS department and the two IS software houses sought opportunities to improve their technical skills and career paths and this created an innovative culture. When new technology generations come to the market the platform systems need to be renewed, and therefore the organisations invest in ISPIs in cycles. The extent of internal learning and experiments was higher than the external knowledge acquisition. Until the outsourcing event (1984) the decision-making was centralised and the internalIS department was very influential over ISPIs. After outsourcing, decision-making became distributed between the two IS software houses, the IS client, and itsinternal IT department. The IS client wanted to assure that information systemswould serve the business of the company and thus wanted to co-operate closely with the software organisations.

What can ecosystems learn? Expanding evolutionary ecology with learning theory.

BACKGROUND: The structure and organisation of ecological interactions within an ecosystem is modified by the evolution and coevolution of the individual species it contains. Understanding how historical conditions have shaped this architecture is vital for understanding system responses to change at scales from the microbial upwards. However, in the absence of a group selection process, the collective behaviours and ecosystem functions exhibited by the whole community cannot be organised or adapted in a Darwinian sense. A long-standing open question thus persists: Are there alternative organising principles that enable us to understand and predict how the coevolution of the component species creates and maintains complex collective behaviours exhibited by the ecosystem as a whole? RESULTS: Here we answer this question by incorporating principles from connectionist learning, a previously unrelated discipline already using well-developed theories on how emergent behaviours arise in simple networks. Specifically, we show conditions where natural selection on ecological interactions is functionally equivalent to a simple type of connectionist learning, 'unsupervised learning', well-known in neural-network models of cognitive systems to produce many non-trivial collective behaviours. Accordingly, we find that a community can self-organise in a well-defined and non-trivial sense without selection at the community level; its organisation can be conditioned by past experience in the same sense as connectionist learning models habituate to stimuli. This conditioning drives the community to form a distributed ecological memory of multiple past states, causing the community to: a) converge to these states from any random initial composition; b) accurately restore historical compositions from small fragments; c) recover a state composition following disturbance; and d) to correctly classify ambiguous initial compositions according to their similarity to learned compositions. We examine how the formation of alternative stable states alters the community's response to changing environmental forcing, and we identify conditions under which the ecosystem exhibits hysteresis with potential for catastrophic regime shifts. CONCLUSIONS: This work highlights the potential of connectionist theory to expand our understanding of evo-eco dynamics and collective ecological behaviours. Within this framework we find that, despite not being a Darwinian unit, ecological communities can behave like connectionist learning systems, creating internal conditions that habituate to past environmental conditions and actively recalling those conditions. REVIEWERS: This article was reviewed by Prof. Ricard V Solé, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona and Prof. Rob Knight, University of Colorado, Boulder.

Combining Generic Programming and Service-Oriented Architectures for the Effective and Timely Development of Complex e-Learning Systems

Peer-reviewed

Inter organizational learning within and by innovation networks

The thesis deals with the phenomenon of learning between organizations in innovation networks that develop new products, services or processes. Inter organizational learning is studied especially at the level of the network. The role of the network can be seen as twofold: either the network is a context for inter organizational learning, if the learner is something else than the network (organization, group, individual), or the network itself is the learner. Innovations are regarded as a primary source of competitiveness and renewal in organizations. Networking has become increasingly common particularly because of the possibility to extend the resource base of the organization through partnerships and to concentrate on core competencies. Especially in innovation activities, networks provide the possibility to answer the complex needs of the customers faster and to share the costs and risks of the development work. Networked innovation activities are often organized in practice as distributed virtual teams, either within one organization or as cross organizational co operation. The role of technology is considered in the research mainly as an enabling tool for collaboration and learning. Learning has been recognized as one important collaborative process in networks or as a motivation for networking. It is even more important in the innovation context as an enabler of renewal, since the essence of the innovation process is creating new knowledge, processes, products and services. The thesis aims at providing enhanced understanding about the inter organizational learning phenomenon in and by innovation networks, especially concentrating on the network level. The perspectives used in the research are the theoretical viewpoints and concepts, challenges, and solutions for learning. The methods used in the study are literature reviews and empirical research carried out with semi structured interviews analyzed with qualitative content analysis. The empirical research concentrates on two different areas, firstly on the theoretical approaches to learning that are relevant to innovation networks, secondly on learning in virtual innovation teams. As a result, the research identifies insights and implications for learning in innovation networks from several viewpoints on organizational learning. Using multiple perspectives allows drawing a many sided picture of the learning phenomenon that is valuable because of the versatility and complexity of situations and challenges of learning in the context of innovation and networks. The research results also show some of the challenges of learning and possible solutions for supporting especially network level learning.

Desired learning outcomes for the curricula in financial services industry as perceived by professionals in the financial services industry located in the Greater Toronto Area /

This study sought to explore the changing nature of the financial services industry in Toronto, Canada and the impact that these changes will have on the vocational educational outcomes required by Ontario Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology (CAAT) graduates who wish to enter the financial services industry. The study was descriptive and exploratory, based on both quantitative and qualitative data. Triangulation of 3 data sources (a collection of newspaper articles from the Toronto Star between July 1999 and June 2000, the calendars of the 25 CAATs, and a survey questionnaire prepared by me and distributed to subject matter experts who are key practitioners in the financial services industry) was used. The study contains a discussion of how the financial services industry is changing. The first question to be answered was: What do current practitioners in financial services perceive to be the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that will be required of future graduates for employment within the financial services industry? The study found that Ontario CAAT's graduates entering the financial services field need both business and financial services vocational learning outcomes. Colleges should have 2 programs 1 in accounting and 1 in financial services. The report addresses which specific topics should be included in the financial services program. The second question to be answered was: How does this anticipated profile of knowledge, skills, and attitudes change depending on the degree of implementation of the new technologies by the survey respondent? The study found no pattern. The third question to be answered was: In what way do existing programs need to change in the area of accreditation as perceived by the respondents? The study found that for accreditation, 3 credentials should be addressed within the financial services program. These are the Canadian Securities, the Life Underwriters, and the Certified Financial Planner designations. The last question to be answered was: What new knowledge, skills, and attitudes need to be incorporated into college curricula to address changing needs in the employment sector? For each Ontario CAAT which has a financial services program (excluding accounting), their program was reviewed in light of the topics as perceived by professionals in the financial services industry.

Developmental patterns of individiuals within a sensory-based learning environment in art education : insights emerging from a case study /

My research permitted me to reexamine my recent evaluations of the Leaf Project given to the Foundation Year students during the fall semester of 1997. My personal description of the drawing curriculum formed part of the matrix of the Foundation Core Studies at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Research was based on the random selection of 1 8 students distributed over six of my teaching groups. The entire process included a representation of all grade levels. The intent of the research was to provide a pattern of alternative insights that could provide a more meaningful method of evaluation for visual learners in an art education setting. Visual methods of learning are indeed complex and involve the interplay of many sensory modalities of input. Using a qualitative method of research analysis, a series of queries were proposed into a structured matrix grid for seeking out possible and emerging patterns of learning. The grid provided for interrelated visual and linguistic analysis with emphasis in reflection and interconnectedness. Sensory-based modes of learning are currently being studied and discussed amongst educators as alternative approaches to learning. As patterns emerged from the research, it became apparent that a paradigm for evaluation would have to be a progressive profile of the learning that would take into account many of the different and evolving learning processes of the individual. A broader review of the student's entire development within the Foundation Year Program would have to have a shared evaluation through a cross section of representative faculty in the program. The results from the research were never intended to be conclusive. We realized from the start that sensory-based learning is a difficult process to evaluate from traditional standards used in education. The potential of such a process of inquiry permits the researcher to ask for a set of queries that might provide for a deeper form of evaluation unique to the students and their related learning environment. Only in this context can qualitative methods be used to profile their learning experiences in an expressive and meaningful manner.

A study of self-directed learning at an Ontario college of applied arts and technology

Ontario Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology (CAATs) are currently in the process of restructuring to ensure quality, accountability, and accessibility of college education. References to learner involvement and self-directed learning are prevalent. "Alternative delivery" and "paradigm shift" are current buzzwords within the Ontario CAAT system as an environment is created supportive of change. Instability of funding has also dictated a need for change. Therefore, a focus has become quality of learning with less demand on public resources. This qualitative case study was conducted at an Ontario CAAT to gather descriptive, perceptual data from post-secondary community college educators who were identified as supportive of self-directed learning and from post-secondary, traditional-aged college students who were perceived by their educators to be selfdirected learners. This college was selected because of initiatives to modify its academic paradigm to encourage what was reputed in the Ontario CAAT system to be self-directed learning. The purpose of this study was to investigate how postsecondary, traditional-aged college students and their educators perceive self-directed learning as part of the teaching-learning experience within a community college setting. Educator participants of the study were selected based on the results of a teaching and learning survey intended to identify educators supportive of self-directed learning. A total of 317 surveys were distributed to every full-time educator at the sample college; 192 completed surveys were returned for a return rate of 61 %. Of these, 8% indicated instructional beliefs and values supportive of self-directed learning. A purposive sample of six educators was selected using a maximulp variation sampling strategy. A network selection sampling strategy was used to select a purposive sample of seven post-secondary students who were identified by the sample educators as selfdirected learners. The results of the study show that students and educators have similar perspectives and operating definitions of self-directed learning and all participants believe they either practice or facilitate self-directed learning. However, their perspectives and practices are not consistent with the literature which emphasizes learner autonomy or control in course structure and content. A central characteristic of the participants represented in this study is the service-oriented professions with which each is associated. Experientiallearning opportunities were highly valued for the options provided in increasing learner independence and competencies in reflective practice. Although there were discrepancies between espoused theory and theory in practice in terms of course structure, the process of self-directed learning was being practiced and supported outside the classroom structure in clinical settings, labs and related experiences.