photographist

“Walking down some stairs at secondary school, I came upon a poster from the Statistics department of the IUT (University Institute of Technology, Tours). I loved maths but did not see the point of theoretical mathematics. I told myself, “That’s where I want to go.” Today I no longer want to work in statistics as I feel it we have made many mistakes with it. Often, statistics are viewed as a recipe whereas they are actually tools which require precision. We can make them say everything and anything because we do not properly adapt the methods, we do not respect the rules of application. Statistics allow us to quantify, not to understand. It is nothing but a representation of a given moment. The important thing is interpretation. In fact, what most interests me is qualitative methods. The interesting thing about qualitative interviews is understanding if the user really understands what he or she is doing, with what, and if it is really of any use.

An orthopaedic surgery simulator for teaching was built by combining our skills: those of the didactics specialist who has to know what knowledge is needed for a certain action, those of the surgeon who has played a part in the development of this knowledge, those of a computer scientist, and mine, for the protocol aspect. Once the simulator had been put together, we put it in the hands of surgeons and juniors to see how they used it, in order to improve its application, to imagine how we could remedy a mistake made by a junior, which tools we could give them, which pages of the course book they needed to read, etc. Creating IT environments for human learning is one of the objectives of the Grenoble IT laboratory. We work on this as a team, to produce intelligent and useful tools – tools which make sense."

Nadine Mandran
Social and Human Sciences Engineer, CNRS - Grenoble

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