Cognitive Factory Module

{Note : This is a preliminary documentation in progress, while dev taskforce is working}

History

The Cognitive Factory modle is a final rework of the Cognitive Factory prototype designed for Moodle 1.9, subsequently redraw of the Brainstorm module.

Basic Concepts

Most human skills are often reductible to a set of cognitive primitives that you must be trained on for achieving tasks in the real world. A cognitive primitive is an operation that we can execute on a set of inputs. We talk about cognitive operations when input are ideas or predicates in respect to computational operations where inputs are calculable values.

The Cognitive Factory module proposes to exploit those operators to build kind of exercices that cannot be built with standard quizes, as proposing a complex mental operation to be performed, maybe combining several operators in the same exercice.

The Cognitive Factory allows each instance to organize an exercice combining some operators and designing a workflow with those operators.

Organisation

The Cognitive Factory module is modular and provides a set of cognitive operators that can be extended by developers.

Exercise Workflow

The module is organized to run a workflow defined by the teacher, running through 5 steps (plus a final grading step). Each step of the workflow can be assigned to either a student or the teacher which multiplies the flexibility of the Cognitive Factory. When changing such step affectation the global behaviour of the exercice can change and address new pedagogic situations in the audience.

Here are described the five workable steps of the cognitive exercise process :

Phase 1: Ideas collection

Users provide textual predicates (ideas) to the factory. This might be done f.e. during some among of time, before going on next steps. Ideas can be fed in a "single user scope" process (each user bringing ideas in his own space whithout collective visibility) or in a group brainstorm process, sharing ideas with the group.

Phase 2 : Operations selection and setup

Once a pool of ideas has been collected, and enough stuff is available to "think" with, some applicable operators have to be choosen in order to build the cognitive exercice. Again, this can (usually) be done by the teacher, but there is sense the learners be asked to make this choice in some activity configuration. At the moment, this choice will be global to the activity instance.

Phase 3 : Operation execution

The users are asked to use the operators to process the initial set of ideas and propose an output. This outcome is always individual, but might be influenced by less or more information visible over what other people is doing aside.

Phase 4 : Outcome display and confrontation

In this phase is assumed sufficiant data has been input for results exploitation and matching or non macthing to make sense. The Display phase attemps to give users a panorama over complete responses which scope depends on overal or local privacy settings. The purpose of display layouts is to help some conclusion to emerge from the initial rough set of predicates.

Phase 5 : Feedback and synthesis

This is the last activity step that asks to participants to write a motivated synthesis over experimentation and outcoming conslusions. This step is reduced to a simple online text editor where to write report.

Extra phase : Evaluation

When the module is used in an evaluated process, a grade can be elaborated by graders to participate to the gradebook compilation. The evaluation only can be used by teachers (graders). In the evaluation process can a feedback be posted by teachers to users, that will display in the synthesis panel.

Operators

• Categorizing
• Reduction my elimination
• Hierarchization
• Sort
• 2D Mapping
• Scaling
• Reduction by synthesis
• Dependancies Analyis and Searching Cycles