Examining Student Learning and Perceptions in Social Annotation-Based Translation Activities

Limited research has been conducted on how to incorporate computer-supported collaborative learning into translation instruction despite the potential benefits. A study was conducted with a group of college English majors in China to examine the effects of using a social annotation tool to encourage student interaction during translation activities. The results showed that students made greater improvement when they completed the translation assignments with the support of a social annotation tool than when they completed the assignments in the traditional way. In addition, students had a positive attitude toward the use of the social annotation tool

Using Critical Questions to Improve Perspective Taking Online

As technology continues to change human interactions, it has become increasingly important to create computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments that enhance perspective taking to support constructive groupwork. To meet these aims, this study examined perspective taking before and after a social annotation activity that incorporated critical questions in the experimental condition. Results from 163 undergraduate students showed that using critical questions improved the quality of perspective taking in written dialogue and using social annotation increased perspective taking over time for all participants. Findings offer important research implications in the CSCL and collaborative argumentation fields, as well as broaden opportunities for 21st century skill development in underserved student populations

Image-Enabled Discourse: Investigating the Creation of Visual Information as Communicative Practice

Anyone who has clarified a thought or prompted a response during a conversation by drawing a picture has exploited the potential of image making as an interactive tool for conveying information. Images are increasingly ubiquitous in daily communication, in large part due to advances in visually enabled information and communication technologies (ICT), such as information visualization applications, image retrieval systems and visually enabled collaborative work tools. Human abilities to use images to communicate are however far more sophisticated and nuanced than these technologies currently support. In order to learn more about the practice of image making as a specialized form of information and communication behavior, this study examined face-to-face conversations involving the creation of ad hoc visualizations (i.e., napkin drawings ). A model of image-enabled discourse is introduced, which positions image making as a specialized form of communicative practice. Multimodal analysis of video-recorded conversations focused on identifying image-enabled communicative activities in terms of interactional sociolinguistic concepts of conversational involvement and coordination, specifically framing, footing and stance. The study shows that when drawing occurs in the context of an ongoing dialogue, the activity of visual representation performs key communicative tasks. Visualization is a form of social interaction that contributes to the maintenance of conversational involvement in ways that are not often evident in the image artifact. For example, drawing enables us to coordinate with each other, to introduce alternative perspectives into a conversation and even to temporarily suspend the primary thread of a discussion in order to explore a tangential thought. The study compares attributes of the image artifact with those of the activity of image making, described as a series of contrasting affordances. Visual information in complex systems is generally represented and managed based on the affordances of the artifact, neglecting to account for all that is communicated through the situated action of creating. These finding have heuristic and best-practice implications for a range of areas related to the design and evaluation of virtual collaboration environments, visual information extraction and retrieval systems, and data visualization tools

The ternary distinction of sound cinema

This thesis addresses the problematic categorization of film music in terms of a reductive diegetic/nondiegetic distinction (‘the binary’) and presents an alternative analytical framework. Following the law of parsimony, we reconstruct this original binary distinction in order to establish a new tripartite schema that accounts for the many otherwise ambiguous categories of sound that had occupied an unknown or indeterminate region of the binary zones. Drawing on the works of Bordwell, Kassabian, and Neumeyer in particular, the thesis seeks to put an end to the theoretical indeterminacy that haunts the binary distinction by introducing a new and inclusive ternary schema of sound cinema