No abstract

We present a study on teacher education and, in particular, on Physics. Our assumption is that General Didactics and Disciplinary Didactic constitute two fundamental components of teachers’ professional development and therefore both must be used to interpret didactic phenomena adequately. This research involves a sample of 274 prospective teachers, enrolled in the Primary Education Sciences degrees in three Italian Universities (Milano Bicocca, Udine, Urbino,). It concerns the study of the spontaneous representations produced by students to foster understanding of the force concept and on the reasons given to motivate their effectiveness on an educational level and disciplinary one. The research tools and methods were developed by crossing the literature of General Didactics and Physics Education, identifying analytical categories that emerge from two different and complementary perspectives. In the broad spectrum of students’ conceptions, given by this double perspective, some aspects stand out: most of the representations do not include the representation of the forces at play, but rather imply a precise didactic approach inherent to the concept of force. This is confirmed by the analysis of the didactic and disciplinary motivations, in which a frequent identification of the two types of motivations emerges.

Abstract:The project "topography of Dante's inferno" is an experiment on alternative mode of access to a complex text relying on an evident topographical structure. The artifact (a website) is designed with the aim of introducing young students (11-14 years old) to a text usually read and studied by older students (16-19 years old). The design of the artifact was based on the theories of Sinsemía applied to interaction design, and the testing focused on (1) usability and (2) on the understanding of the topography of the poem as a precondition for understanding the text.

Nowadays cities, as well as Cultural Heritage, are facing new challenges due to the public fi nancial straits and the increasing need to deliver innovative service to manage a wide heritage. Great expectations are in put the Smart City paradigm relying on the capability of the city to realize and scale up intangible infrastructures based on new typologies of partnerships for the development of services. The paper presents a design framework aimed to transform Cultural Items in Smart Cultural Objects (SCO), meant as sources and recipients of advanced information applied on 'Widespread Built Cultural Heritage'. The aim has been not just to enhance the artifacts with their own quality, but their unique social, communal, anthropological and urban-infrastructural meaning. The ability to manage effi ciently heterogeneous data and the levels of global connectivity, as well as the real-time interaction, perception, localization, communication, and identifi cation, made possible by cloud computing and Internet of Things, to allow the changeover from Cultural Objects to SCO. The framework, here exposed, aims to provide an extensive and robust theoretical support to design and to manage the processes of Cultural Objects and Cultural bins, implementing a methodological system and an advanced environment based on ICT technologies for recording, storage, processing, access and presentation of Cultural Heritage (CH) data in a Smart Management environment. The framework has been applied in two projects for a prototypical case study of widespread urban CH.

The paper, aiming to retrieve the original meaning of Smart City, attempts to demonstrate its impact in the field of Cultural Heritage (CH). It presents a framework - applied in a project for a prototypical case study of ‘Widespread Built Heritage’ (WBH) - to create a Smart cultural city, transforming Cultural Items into Smart Cultural Objects (SCO), meant as sources and recipients of advanced information. The framework aims to provide an extensive and robust theoretical support to design and to manage the processes of Cultural Objects (CO) and Cultural bins, implementing a methodological system and an advanced environment based on Smart technologies