Engineers for the future; accounting for diversity

tailoring engineering and STEM education to meet the needs of all stakeholders. (External Industry requirement) a. Educational institutions must consider an increasingly diverse group of stakeholders, including students, staff, industry, and the wider community. How can educational activities expand our horizons beyond classroom and industry experience

Researching intercultural participatory design

What impact does culture have on tools and techniques that are used to\ud facilitate cooperation amongst stakeholders in Information Communication\ud Technology (ICT) design projects? This is a question facing the ICT development\ud activities at the World Maritime University in Malmö, Sweden. At the university\ud around 300 staff and students from 90 different countries come together every\ud year. Continuously finding ways to improve how they can actively participate in\ud design activities of useful and usable ICT support to benefit their everyday work\ud is a prioritized area. This short paper presents a case that illustrates the\ud intertwined and negotiated characteristics of culture when working with tools and\ud techniques for cooperation in a student ICT design project. Using the case, an\ud ethnographically based research cycle is explored to make sense of and ultimately\ud further improve the interactions between the actors in an intercultural application\ud domain

Introduction To Research Methods In The Social Sciences (SOCI 016B) Syllabus

Introduction To Research Methods In The Social Sciences course description:An overview of research methods in the social science, with an emphasis on practicing a variety of techniques/methodologies, and thinking about designing good research questions and assessing answers

Digitally deconstructing a pícaro: examining the role of the Digital Humanities in the L2 learning and teaching of Lazarillo de Tormes

Master of ArtsDepartment of Modern LanguagesRebecca BenderThis paper addresses different digital strategies taken from an L2 perspective in the analysis of the classic picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). I combine the strengths of two digital humanities tools in order to better bridge the cultural divide that may stand between the L2 learner and the narrative’s pícaro. This study aims to blend the use of LIWC, a digital sentiment analysis tool, with Storymap, a digital mapping software from Knightlab, in order to create a robust linguistic, historic and geographic analysis. The combination of software platforms will quantify and display the emotional associations that Lázaro, the protagonist of the novel, expresses towards each physical landmark he mentions. This analysis aims to reveal the strategies used in the first-person narrative to tie emotions, either positive or negative, to each specific location mentioned in central Spain. By plotting each place that appears in the narrative and reviewing the data of the sentiment analysis, my project is designed to better understand why the protagonist is so specific when mentioning, sites, towns, and cities both in Spain and abroad. This study effectively blends Digital Humanities tools and traditional literary analyses in order to show how the inclusion of advanced technologies in the L2 classroom has the potential to unlock cultural, historical and geographical information hidden in the target culture’s literature

Does the Geometry of Word Embeddings Help Document Classification? A Case Study on Persistent Homology Based Representations

We investigate the pertinence of methods from algebraic topology for text data analysis. These methods enable the development of mathematically-principled isometric-invariant mappings from a set of vectors to a document embedding, which is stable with respect to the geometry of the document in the selected metric space. In this work, we evaluate the utility of these topology-based document representations in traditional NLP tasks, specifically document clustering and sentiment classification. We find that the embeddings do not benefit text analysis. In fact, performance is worse than simple techniques like $\textit{tf-idf}$, indicating that the geometry of the document does not provide enough variability for classification on the basis of topic or sentiment in the chosen datasets.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. Rep4NLP workshop at ACL 201

Experiences of learning through collaborative evaluation from a masters programme in professional education

This paper presents findings from a collaborative evaluation project within a masters programme in professional education. The project aimed to increase knowledge of research methodologies and methods through authentic learning where participants worked in partnership with the tutor to evaluate the module which they were studying. The project processes, areas of the course evaluated and the data collection methods are outlined. The findings focus on key themes from evaluating the effectiveness of using a collaborative evaluation approach, including: enhanced student engagement; creativity of the collaborative evaluation approach; equality between the tutor and students; and enhanced research skills. Discussion focuses on the outcomes and effectiveness of the project and tutor reflections on adopting a collaborative approach. This paper highlights lessons from the project relevant to those interested in staff-student partnership approaches and those facilitating postgraduate learning and teaching programmes and educational research courses

The social sciences and the web : From ‘Lurking’ to interdisciplinary ‘Big Data’ research

Acknowledgements This research is supported by the award made by the RCUK Digital Economy theme to the dot.rural Digital Economy Hub (award reference: EP/G066051/1) and the UK Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) (award reference: ES/M001628/1).Peer reviewedPublisher PD