Developing the vision: preparing teachers to deliver a digital world-class education system

In 2008 Australians were promised a \u27Digital Education Revolution\u27 by the government to dramatically change classroom education and build a \u27world-class education system\u27. Eight billion dollars have been spent providing computer equipment for upper secondary classrooms, yet there is little evidence that a revolution has occurred in Australian schools. Transformation of an education system takes more than a simplistic hardware solution. Revolutions need leaders and leaders need vision. In this paper, I argue that we must first develop educational leaders by inspiring future teachers with a vision and by designing our teacher-education courses as technology-rich learning-spaces. A multi-layered scenario is developed as the inspiration for a vision of a future-orientated teacher-education system that prepares teachers to deliver a \u27worldclass digital education\u27 for every Australian child. Although written for the Australian context this paper has broad relevance internationally for teacher education

Character and Impact of Social Innovation in Higher Education.

This article offers a strategic multi-layered model for assessing the character and impact of social innovation in higher education connecting social and economic benefit. Whilst research to date has recognised the varying importance of the social and economic benefit of social and technological innovation, the literature is mostly silent on the contribution of purpose and strategy in achieving effective social innovation or how a regionally embedded university can maximise its impact in its community and the wider society. Whilst technological innovation is a critical component of future economic growth, social innovation is equally important in building social capital and in improving life chances. Governments have widely recognised that a university provides economic, environmental and cultural benefits to its community and, critically, should play a central role in re-balancing the economy of a community under stress and promoting growth in one that is prosperous. In the absence of well-documented, convincing examples of such re-balancing, this article offers a case study of The Hive, the first combined University and Public Library in Europe, an example of a strategic approach to social innovation in higher education that is bringing current and potential social and economic benefit to the community in which it is located. A measure of impact is proposed that is multi-layered and reflects the range of qualitative and quantitative impacts of social innovation. This paper has value to all those concerned to identify, plan and maximise the beneficial impact of social innovation in higher education institutions both on their economies and their communities

A neural network approach to audio-assisted movie dialogue detection

A novel framework for audio-assisted dialogue detection based on indicator functions and neural networks is investigated. An indicator function defines that an actor is present at a particular time instant. The cross-correlation function of a pair of indicator functions and the magnitude of the corresponding cross-power spectral density are fed as input to neural networks for dialogue detection. Several types of artificial neural networks, including multilayer perceptrons, voted perceptrons, radial basis function networks, support vector machines, and particle swarm optimization-based multilayer perceptrons are tested. Experiments are carried out to validate the feasibility of the aforementioned approach by using ground-truth indicator functions determined by human observers on 6 different movies. A total of 41 dialogue instances and another 20 non-dialogue instances is employed. The average detection accuracy achieved is high, ranging between 84.78%±5.499% and 91.43%±4.239%

Self-regulated learning in higher education : identifying key component processes

The concept of self-regulated learning is becoming increasingly relevant in the study of learning and academic achievement, especially in higher education, where quite distinctive demands are placed on students. Though several key theoretical perspectives have been advanced for self-regulated learning, there is consensus regarding the central role played by student perceptions of themselves as learners. There are two general aims of this positional article. The first is to emphasise self-regulated learning as a relevant and valuable concept in higher education. The second is to promote the study of those constituent elements considered most likely to develop our understanding beyond a mere description of those processes thought to be involved in self-regulated learning. A case is presented for learning style, academic control beliefs and student self-evaluation as key constructs which contribute to an increased understanding of student self-regulated learning and which facilitate the application of self-regulated learning in pedagogy by enhancing its tangibility and utility

Evaluation of social personalized adaptive E-Learning environments : end-user point of view

The use of adaptations, along with the social affordances of collaboration and networking, carries a great potential for improving e-learning experiences. However, the review of the previous work indicates current e-learning systems have only marginally explored the integration of social features and adaptation techniques. The overall aim of this research, therefore, is to address this gap by evaluating a system developed to foster social personalized adaptive e-learning experiences. We have developed our first prototype system, Topolor, based on the concepts of Adaptive Educational Hypermedia and Social E-Learning. We have also conducted an experimental case study for the evaluation of the prototype system from different perspectives. The results show a considerably high satisfaction of the end users. This paper reports the evaluation results from end user point of view, and generalizes our method to a component-based evaluation framework

Utilising ontology-based modelling for learning content management

Learning content management needs to support a variety of open, multi-format Web-based software applications. We propose multidimensional, model-based semantic annotation as a way to support the management of access to and change of learning content. We introduce an information architecture model as the central contribution that supports multi-layered learning content structures. We discuss interactive query access, but also change management for multi-layered learning content management. An ontology-enhanced traceability approach is the solution