Instructors’ Epistemic Intervention Strategies in MOOC Discussion Forums

Facilitating students’ learning in a massive open online context is challenging for instructors in online teaching. The instructors should enact their professional (epistemic) feedback-giving skills to understand when, how, and why to address learning problems. In this study, we address this issue in terms of agency and suggest strategies that teachers can use to address these problems constructively. This study examines how instructors’ professional agency comes into play in selecting how to intervene to assist students in solving problems in course discussion forums (Facebook group and Canvas discussion forums), which we refer to as an epistemic intervention strategy (EIS). By analyzing discussion forums’ dialogical posts using thematic analysis and epistemic network analysis, we found that instructors adopted five different EISs to address students’ learning. The EISs emerged during the processes of facilitating students’ learning and were influenced by the complexity of students’ questions and positioning in learning in the discussion forums. The findings of this study can inform practitioners that facilitating learning in online discussion forums may demand that instructors go beyond their feedback-giving skills to enact professional agency.publishedVersio

Exploring value dilemmas of brain monitoring technology through speculative design scenarios

In the field of brain monitoring, the advancement of more user-friendly wearable and non-invasive devices is introducing new opportunities for application outside the lab and clinical use. Despite the growing importance of responsible innovation, there remains a knowledge gap in addressing the possible impacts of wearable non-invasive brain monitoring technology on mental health and well-being. Addressing this, our main aim was to study the use of speculative design scenarios as a method to describe potential value dilemmas associated with this new technology. Through a qualitative study, we invited participants to engage in discussions regarding three variations of wearable non-invasive brain monitoring technology presented in speculative video scenarios. The study's findings describe how the discussions contribute towards promoting heuristics that can help foster more responsible innovation by identifying norms and value dilemmas through inclusive speculative design practices. This qualitative case study contributes to the literature on responsible innovation by demonstrating how responsible innovation frameworks can benefit from incorporating anticipatory speculative design methods aimed at early identification of potential value dilemmas.publishedVersio

Controverses du changement climatique : la représentation des paroles d’autrui dans les pages de discussion sur Wikipédia francophone et norvégien

This article explores the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia through the lens of two aspects that have particularly interested Kjersti Fløttum throughout her work: (i) the climate crisis, which will be examined through the analysis of a corpus of Wikipedia pages related to climate change as well as the relevant discussion pages. The corpus contains both French and Norwegian versions of the relevant pages; in this sense, it is a comparable corpus that allows us to shed light on differences both in the treatment and textualization of the contents, and in the nature of the discussions carried out; (ii) the plurality of voices, more specifically from the perspective developed by J. Authier-Revuz (2020) (la représentation du discours autre - RDA), which allows us to analyze the representation of the speech of others, and linguistic polyphony (Ducrot 1984, Nølke 2017), with a focus on polemic negation in contexts of RDA, which allows us to analyze the expression of controversy.Le présent article se propose d’explorer l’encyclopédie collaborative Wikipédia au prisme de deux aspects ayant particulièrement intéressé Kjersti Fløttum au fil de ses travaux : (i) la crise climatique, qui sera abordée à travers le choix d’un corpus échantillonné comprenant des articles encyclopédiques et leurs pages de discussion associées. Notre corpus de travail contient les deux versions francophone et norvégienne des pages choisies ; en ce sens, il s’agit d’un corpus comparable qui nous permettra de mettre au jour des différences significatives tant dans le traitement et la mise en texte des contenus, que dans la nature des discussions menées; (ii) la pluralité de voix, plus précisément sous l’optique de la représentation du discours autre (RDA) développée par J. Authier-Revuz (2020), qui nous permettra d’analyser la représentation de la parole d’autrui et la polyphonie (Ducrot 1984, Nølke 2017), abordée dans le cadre de l’analyse de la négation polémique dans les contextes de RDA, ce qui nous permettra d’analyser l’expression de la controverse.publishedVersio

Health-related quality of life in patients with newly diagnosed inflammatory bowel disease: an observational prospective cohort study (IBSEN III)

Purpose This unselected, population-based cohort study aimed to determine the level of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in patients with Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) at the time of diagnosis compared with a reference population and identify the demographic factors, psychosocial measures, and disease activity markers associated with HRQoL. Methods Adult patients newly diagnosed with CD or UC were prospectively enrolled. HRQoL was measured using the Short Form 36 (SF-36) and Norwegian Inflammatory Bowel Disease Questionnaires. Clinical significance was assessed using Cohen’s d effect size and further compared with a Norwegian reference population. Associations between HRQoL and symptom scores, demographic factors, psychosocial measures, and disease activity markers were analyzed. Results Compared with the Norwegian reference population, patients with CD and UC reported significantly lower scores in all SF-36 dimensions, except for physical functioning. Cohen’s d effect sizes for men and women in all SF-36 dimensions were at least moderate, except for bodily pain and emotional role for men with UC and physical functioning for both sexes and diagnoses. In the multivariate regression analysis, depression subscale scores ≥ 8 on the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, substantial fatigue, and high symptom scores were associated with reduced HRQoL. Conclusion Patients newly diagnosed with CD and UC reported statistically and clinically significantly lower scores in seven of the eight SF-36 dimensions than the reference population. Symptoms of depression, fatigue, and elevated symptom scores were associated with poorer HRQoL.publishedVersio

An agentic perspective on teachers’ enactment of professional digital competence

Understanding digital competence in teaching is challenging because technology and teachers’ workdays are moving targets. Previous research suggests using professional digital competence (PDC) as an approach for better understanding how teachers develop a deep understanding of technology, learning processes and subjects. Accordingly, inspired by a short-term design-based research methodology, a project was conceived to have a group of teachers and teacher educators collaborate on developing digital teaching environments using Microsoft Class Teams and OneNote Class Notebook at a lower secondary school in Norway. To investigate the outcomes, this paper adopts an agentic socio-cultural perspective to examine how the teachers enacted digital teaching environments to develop PDC. The results show that the teachers employed negotiation strategies and used different material and immaterial resources in their local school contexts to enact digital teaching environments. The study suggests adding new research to two emerging and relevant research streams—teachers’ digital competence and Microsoft Class Teams and the OneNote Class Notebook—by emphasising a strong human-centric agency approach and that teachers’ digital competence can be made visible through acts of collaboration.publishedVersio

Identification and classification of transportation disaster tweets using improved bidirectional encoder representations from transformers

Social Media today has become the most relevant and affordable platform to express one’s views in real-time. The #Endsars protest in Nigeria and the COVID-19 pandemic have proven how important and reliant both government agencies and individuals are on social media. This research uses tweets collected from Twitter API to identify and classify transportation disasters in Nigeria. Information such as the user, location, and time of the tweet makes identification and classification of transportation disasters available in real-time. Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) uses a transformer that includes two separate mechanisms, a decoder that produces a prediction for the task and an encoder that reads the text input. It learns contextual relations between words (sub-words) in a text. This research applied BERT with a combination of AdamW optimizers. AdamW is an improved version of stochastic gradient descent that computes an adaptive learning rate for each parameter. Our proposed model produces an accuracy of 82%. It was concluded that our approach outperformed the existing algorithm: BERT having an accuracy of 64%.publishedVersio