Last year Silvia Simionato - an astronomy student from Padova University, Italy - spent 6 months at the UNAWE Office in Leiden, The Netherlands to conduct her major master project in astronomy education and outreach. As a result of this internship, she wrote a master’s thesis entitled “Development of Astronomy Educational Resources: the Case of Universe Awareness” supervised by Pedro Russo, Prof. George Miley from Leiden University and Prof. Giuseppe Galletta from University of Padua. The thesis received the the highest grade possible (8/8) at her graduation in July 2013. Moreover, it was awarded first place in the Italian competition “E-talents of E-learning” organised by the Italian Association for Managerial Education (ASFOR). On Saturday 22 October at the 24th Italian national convention “Job & Orienta 2014: orientation, school, education, job”, Silvia’s thesis was chosen to be the best Italian master’s thesis about e-learning and e-innovation.
The competition, now in its 6th edition, has the purpose to discover new and innovative compositions about learning methodologies and technologies, assessment of educational processes, high quality education, e-learning impact on management processes and knowledge management. This year, some of the discussed topics were innovation and new ways of communication, communicative interaction, web as innovation’s activator, cases of e-learning solutions and web 2.0.
ASFOR introduced the “E-talents of E-learning” award to support young talents and give visibility to theses (subdivided in three categories: bachelor, master and doctorate) which bring important contributions to knowledge and give a innovative boost to e-learning. Indeed, this initiative offers a concrete connection between academic research and practical applications in the field of new possibilities for using knowledge and web information.
During the award ceremony, Silvia received the prize out of the hands of ASFOR secretary-general Dr. Mauro Meda and had the honour of presenting her work to the interested audience. Furthermore, ASFOR will publish special mentions and highlightings in scientific journals for the theses of first three award winners in each category. Dr. Mauro Meda also elaborated on the motivations which led the selection committee to reward Silvia’s thesis among the 36 participants. He said: “The topic of this thesis is of great general interest for the methods and the instruments discussed. Above all in facing the problem of using e-learning and web tools in the dissemination of scientific knowledge to a wide audience, in particular to children."
Dr. Meda went on to compliment Silvia on her research. "The candidate performed her research cooperating with an international science education project, UNAWE, where she studied and developed digital educational resources. She tailored material for being shared through the peer-review platform IAU astroEDU, a platform for open-access astronomy education resources. In addition, for this purpose and to ensure the quality from a scientific and pedagogical point of view, Silvia designed a structural model and gave precise guidelines to help the creation of effective educational activities.”
This award is an exceptional recognition of the value of Silvia’s work performed with and about UNAWE and focused on the development of the new and unprecedented peer-review platform astroEDU.
Silvia's thesis is available on the following link: http://www.unawe.org/resources/reports/simionato_thesis/
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