Cognit 2013 - Third International Conference on Cognitonics

Conference Tracks (The expected topics of these tracks are listed below)
Track 1: Practical Significance of Ethics, Aesthetics, Creativity Development, and Culture Peculiarities for Economics of Information Society
Track 2: Theoretical Foundations and Methods of Supporting Harmonic Development of the Personality and National Cultures in Information Society
Track 3: The Methods and Tools of Computer Science and Web Science for Supporting Harmonic Development of the Personality
Conference Theme
During the last decade many scholars at various international and national conferences, in the books and papers have said and written about serious distortions in the development of the personality (first of all, in the system of moral values) and national cultures caused by stormy development of information and communication technologies (ICT) and globalization processes.
The conviction that it is not only necessary but also POSSIBLE to make something constructive and significant for compensating these distortions has underlain the elaboration of the foundations of a new scientific discipline called Cognitonics (see free of charge the selected papers on Cognitonics on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) at http://ssrn.com/author=1871348, in the Special Issue on the Human Being in the Digital World of Informatica. An International Journal of Computing and Informatics (Slovenia), 2012, Vol. 36, No. 2, pp. 119-130, http://www.informatica.si/vol36.htm#No2, and in the Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Cognitonics (Slovenia, Ljubljana, 10-11 October 2011) - a subconference of the 14th International Multiconference Information Society, Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia; http://is.ijs.si/is/is2011/zborniki.asp?lang=eng; Proceedings A, Section "Cognitonics").
Cognitonics, first of all, aims (a) at explicating the distortions in the perception of the world caused by the information society and globalization and (b) at coping with these distortions in different fields by means of elaborating systemic solutions for compensating the negative implications of the kind for the personality and society, in particular, for creating cognitive-cultural preconditions of the harmonic development of the personality in the information society and for ensuring the successful development of national cultures and national languages.
The birth of Cognitonics was stimulated by the ideas of Philosophy, Cognitive Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence theory, Web Science, Applied Linguistics, Art theory, Cognitive Psychology, and Cognitive Biology.
To follow high moral standards is important not only for people. The studies carried out in different countries during last decade have shown that following high moral norms, decency, honesty, social responsibility are the factors positively influencing the financial success of the best big international companies, in particular, by means of forming a positive image of a company. This explains why during last decade many big international companies have developed the Codes of Business Conduct.
On the other hand, a person working in industry and possessing well-developed aesthetic feeling will not allow himself/herself a negligent attitude to the final product of his/her work. That is why following high ethical norms and possessing well-developed aesthetic feeling are the significant factors of economic development demanding more attention of the researchers.
Besides, one is able to find in the scientific literature numerous confirmations of the fact that culture peculiarities and the level of trust in the society are significant factors of economic development, and these factors are to be studied much more intensively.
That is why one of the principal objectives of Cognitonics is also looking for positive correlations between (a) following high moral norms, decency, honesty, well-developed aesthetic feeling, culture peculiarities and (b) economic development, in particular, looking for positive correlations between establishing and following the codes of business conduct by the companies and their economic success.
Two factors seem to be especially important from the standpoint of achieving the goals of Cognitonics:
information and communication technologies have been developing extremely quickly and have been expanding unusually broadly, they penetrate not only every office and laboratory but also every school class and every family;
it is necessary and promising to use the power of modern ICT in order to very quickly and broadly disseminate the elaborated effective methods of compensating the negative distortions in the development of the personality and of national cultures in information society.
The goal of the conference is to combine the efforts of the scholars from numerous scientific fields and educators in order to establish a new synergy aimed at ensuring the harmonic, well-balanced development of the personality, national cultures, and national economies in the modern information society and, as a consequence, to compensate a number of broadly observed negative distortions (one of most severe distortions is commercialization of moral values).
From the standpoint of educational practice, Cognitonics proposes an answer to the following question: what precious ideas and images accumulated by the mankind, at what age, and in what a way are to be inscribed into the conceptual picture of the world of a person in order to harmonize his/her intellectual and spiritually-coloured emotional development and to contribute to the successful development of national cultures and national economics.
Cognitonics formulates a new, large-scale goal for the software industry and Web science: to develop a new generation of culture-oriented computer programs and online courses (in the collaboration with educators, linguists, art historians, psychologists) - the computer programs and online courses intended for supporting and developing positively-oriented creativity, cognitive-emotional sphere, the appreciation of the roots of the national cultures, the awareness of the integrity of the cultural space in the information society, and for supporting and developing symbolic information processing and linguistic skills, associative and reasoning abilities of children and university students.
Expected Topics (their list is not exhaustive)
Track 1: Practical Significance of Ethics, Aesthetics, Creativity Development, and Culture Peculiarities for Economics of Information Society
the influence of the codes of business conduct on the success of big corporations;
the role of culture peculiarities in the development of national economics;
the positive correlations between well-developed aesthetical feeling of a person and his/her attitude to professional duties;
business ethics stating that social responsibility of a company is its moral duty
Track 2: Theoretical Foundations and Methods of Supporting Harmonic Development of the Personality and National Cultures in Information Society
looking for the philosophical roots of modern technological achievements and forecasting their impact on the nature of the human being,
analyzing the negative shifts in the modern society and the response of the young generation to these shifts,
what to do with digital divide,
how to preserve national cultures and enrich them in the information society,
how to preserve national language and national identity,
how to diminish the shift from the eternal moral values to commercialized values caused by the rapid changes in the information society,
looking for the new ways of introducing the eternal values of the humanity and the changes in the perception of the world in the educational programs in the form of cross-disciplinary courses;
the significance of well-developed emotional intelligence for professional success in information society;
the methods of supporting and developing emotional intelligence;
effective ways of supporting and developing the positively-oriented creativity of young children, teenagers, and university students;
effective approaches to supporting and developing the figurative (metaphoric) reasoning of young children, teenagers, and university students as a foundation of successful carrier in technical and art design, marketing, mathematics, physics, etc.;
cognitive preconditions of introducing children to computers, in particular, the methods of realizing the Thought Producing Self of the child (see The British Journal of Educational Technology, 2000, Vol. 31, No. 3 (July), pp. 213-220) before his/her systematic acquaintance with computer as a precondition of preserving the creativity of the child;
the ways of teaching foreign language as a mirror reflecting the peculiarities of the psychology of the people belonging to a particular culture as a basis of successful direct and Internet communication;
increasing the effectiveness of educational processes with the help of formal means for visual representation of concepts' connections and dynamic conceptual mappings (in particular, concept maps and conceptual-visual dynamic schemes);
realizing the complete potential of teaching/learning literature, poetry, art, history, foreign languages for developing the skill of integrating information (a) from dispersed sources; (b) from remote fragments of the same long discourse;
how to make children distinguish virtual life from real life, virtual imaginary situation from the real one;
how to make children and teenagers be aware of the real consequences following their virtual actions;
how to make computer-mediated and cell-telephone-mediated interaction of children and teenagers less harmful;
how to considerably diminish the total aggressiveness of teenagers using modern information and communication technologies;
how to improve positively-oriented (positively-coloured) creativity with the help of modern ICT?
how to prevent using primitive language by teenagers and improve their language (because language is our primary tool of thinking, and primitive language entails primitive thinking).
Track 3: The Methods and Tools of Computer Science and Web Science for Supporting Harmonic Development of the Personality
The methods of designing and experience of using culture-oriented computer intelligent systems (local computer network based or Web-based) and online courses for:
developing linguistic mechanisms and communication skills of young children, teenagers, university students, and adult learners,
expanding mental outlook and enriching language through learning literature, poetry, art, history, architecture, ecology, etc.;
supporting and developing any qualities and skills mentioned in the formulation of almost every topic pertaining to Tracks 1 - 2.