CHORUS Deliverable 4.3: Report from CHORUS workshops on national initiatives and metadata

Minutes of the following Workshops: • National Initiatives on Multimedia Content Description and Retrieval, Geneva, October 10th, 2007. • Metadata in Audio-Visual/Multimedia production and archiving, Munich, IRT, 21st – 22nd November 2007 Workshop in Geneva 10/10/2007 This highly successful workshop was organised in cooperation with the European Commission. The event brought together the technical, administrative and financial representatives of the various national initiatives, which have been established recently in some European countries to support research and technical development in the area of audio-visual content processing, indexing and searching for the next generation Internet using semantic technologies, and which may lead to an internet-based knowledge infrastructure. The objective of this workshop was to provide a platform for mutual information and exchange between these initiatives, the European Commission and the participants. Top speakers were present from each of the national initiatives. There was time for discussions with the audience and amongst the European National Initiatives. The challenges, communalities, difficulties, targeted/expected impact, success criteria, etc. were tackled. This workshop addressed how these national initiatives could work together and benefit from each other. Workshop in Munich 11/21-22/2007 Numerous EU and national research projects are working on the automatic or semi-automatic generation of descriptive and functional metadata derived from analysing audio-visual content. The owners of AV archives and production facilities are eagerly awaiting such methods which would help them to better exploit their assets.Hand in hand with the digitization of analogue archives and the archiving of digital AV material, metadatashould be generated on an as high semantic level as possible, preferably fully automatically. All users of metadata rely on a certain metadata model. All AV/multimedia search engines, developed or under current development, would have to respect some compatibility or compliance with the metadata models in use. The purpose of this workshop is to draw attention to the specific problem of metadata models in the context of (semi)-automatic multimedia search

Just Writing Center Work in the Digital Age: De Facto Multiliteracy Centers in Dialogue with Questions of Social Justice

Multiliteracy, new media writing, and multimodality: in some form or another, the kind of sleek, technological world these terms conjure emerges as a subject of conversation in current writing center work. When I began teaching a writing center theory course at the University of Michigan’s Sweetland Center for Writing, I scheduled about three-days worth of formal space for the stuff of multiliteracy. Among other essays, students read David Sheridan’s “Words, Images, Sounds: Writing Centers as Multiliteracy Centers,” a piece about how Sheridan helped start a “technology-rich” multiliteracy center staffed by tech- and multimodal-rhetoric-savvy consultants at the University of Michigan (“Words, Images, Sounds” 341). I was met with what I soon learned was a typical response to the essay: “So, where is it? Where’s the multiliteracy center?” “Gone,” was my answer, and in an official sense, it was: it dissipated after only a few years,1 and, what remains, among other Sweetland services, is the Peer Tutoring Center, an apparently far cry from the futuristic spaces that visions like Sheridan’s evoke. With computers too old and too few in number, our windowless, underground tutoring space looks like days of writing center past, not writing center future. And despite an understanding of our own institutional privilege, our collective affect resembles that of colleagues at less privileged institutions: many of us still feel like we are a long way off from the kind of cutting-edge multiliteracy center that Sheridan describes.University Writing Cente

The textuality of learning contexts

A significant aspect of learning contexts is the way in which semiotic artefacts mediate learning within them. The Literacies for Learning in Further Education (LfLFE) project is researching the role of texts and associated communicative practices in constructing and mediating teaching and learning, in shaping communities, in constructing and sustaining relationships, and in helping students to achieve their goals. A particular aim of the project is to identify ways in which people can bring literacy practices from one context into another to act as resources for learning in the new context. In this paper we explain what we mean by ‘literacy practices’, demonstrate the textuality of learning contexts through examples from contrasting curriculum areas, and show how learning can be enhanced by mobilising literacy practices from one context to another

MLM: A Benchmark Dataset for Multitask Learning with Multiple Languages and Modalities

In this paper, we introduce the MLM (Multiple Languages and Modalities) dataset - a new resource to train and evaluate multitask systems on samples in multiple modalities and three languages. The generation process and inclusion of semantic data provide a resource that further tests the ability for multitask systems to learn relationships between entities. The dataset is designed for researchers and developers who build applications that perform multiple tasks on data encountered on the web and in digital archives. A second version of MLM provides a geo-representative subset of the data with weighted samples for countries of the European Union. We demonstrate the value of the resource in developing novel applications in the digital humanities with a motivating use case and specify a benchmark set of tasks to retrieve modalities and locate entities in the dataset. Evaluation of baseline multitask and single task systems on the full and geo-representative versions of MLM demonstrate the challenges of generalising on diverse data. In addition to the digital humanities, we expect the resource to contribute to research in multimodal representation learning, location estimation, and scene understanding

Asymmetries of Knowledge and Epistemic Change in Social Gaming Interaction

While a growing number of studies investigate the role of knowledge and interactional management of knowledge asymmetries in conversation analysis, the epistemic organization of multilingual and second language interactions is still largely unexplored. This article addresses this issue by investigating how knowledge asymmetries and changing positions with regard to knowledge impact social interaction in multilingual gaming activities. Drawing on a collection of video recordings of social gaming sessions collected over a two year period and involving the same two participants, we examine how the participants orient to knowledge and deal with knowledge asymmetries while solving game-related problems and tasks. In addition to detailed analysis of local aspects of epistemic organization, we examine how the participants’ epistemic positions change over time. Findings show that epistemic changes impact the social organization of the gaming activities and constitute the situation as a learning event.Peer reviewe

New Media, Multiliteracies, and the Globalized Classroom

New Media, Multiliteracies, and the Globalized Classroom contends that changing demographic diversity in American higher education and increasing globalization call for curricular and pedagogical transformation of writing courses. The writing curriculum for globalized classrooms should be responsive to the resources students bring with them to the classroom and cultivate in them the multiple literacies--both old and new--needed to successfully navigate an increasingly global workplace and a complexly interwoven world. The scaffolding of students\u27 natural meaning making capacities, and teaching of multiple literacies, such as visual, academic, critical, digital, multimodal, and intercultural, should take place simultaneously in the writing classes for new literacies are in a synergistic, reciprocal, and constantly evolving relationship with older literacies (Swenson et al. 357). The interplay of new and old literacies in literate activities in the academy and professions can lead to productive interactions and work. In fact, this study is an experiment with and investigation into how diverse students in a sophomore level writing class in a large research university in the U.S. North East responded to a curriculum and pedagogical approach framed around the idea of multiple literacies. The pilot course drew insights and resources from some closely aligned fields of new media, globalization, World Englishes, intercultural communication, literacy studies, and media studies, exploring and exploiting the potentials these intersecting fields have for improving the practice of teaching writing to a diverse body of students. It took a multiliterate approach to teaching writing in its expanded sense with assignments in multiple media and modes-- alphabetic and digital literacy narratives, rhetorical analysis of a digital artifact (music video, ad, cartoon/movie clip etc.), argument essay, remediation of argument essay into web forms for local and global audiences, collaborative documentary production, blogging, and small group presentations

‘It becomes increasingly complex to deal with multiple channels’: materialised communicative competence and digital inequality in English-medium higher education in the digital era

This article explores university students’ communicative competence for English-Medium Instruction (EMI) at a Swedish university in the era of digitalisation and blended learning. Based on a linguistic ethnography, we present an argument for communicative competence as repertoire assemblages orchestrating digital materiality and human language to construct meanings. The study shows how diverse digital multimodalities and AI-language tools are essential features of spatial repertoires for academic communication, and how they cooperate with and mediate students’ personal repertoires to accomplish interactive learning tasks in EMI contexts. The study also highlights how digital diversity in EMI causes a ‘digital divide’, potentially impacting power relations among students. These findings underline the importance of acknowledging the communicative value of digital materiality and negotiating difference and normativity for intercultural academic communication in EMI

Enhancing Plagiarism Detection: The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Upholding Academic Integrity

Plagiarism poses a significant threat to academic integrity, requiring effective measures for its detection and prevention. This paper explores the efficacy of plagiarism detection tools in upholding academic integrity, with a specific focus on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. The abstract introduces the concept of plagiarism and its impact on scholarly work. It highlights the importance of reliable and accurate plagiarism detection methods and emphasizes the role of AI in enhancing the effectiveness of such tools. The abstract briefly outlines the main points covered in the paper, including the use of AI techniques such as text matching algorithms and natural language processing, the application of machine learning in plagiarism detection, and the challenges and advancements in cross-language detection. The abstract concludes by emphasizing the importance of promoting ethical scholarship and academic integrity in educational institution

Multiliteracies Pedagogy in Second Language Learning: Examining How Canadian Elementary ESL Classrooms Can Empower Diverse English Language Learners

Canada\u27s socio-cultural landscape is changing every day due to the transitional migration of demographics from all over the world. The immigrant and refugee populations who enter Canadian society are mostly allophones who do not speak English or French- Canada\u27s two official languages as their mother tongue. The allophone students who belong to this migrator group must learn the official languages to get equal access to the country\u27s social and economic sectors. Thus, Canadian schools are entitled to provide adequate support in teaching English and French to these immigrant students to ensure their merging in broader society. But these immigrant students have diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Therefore, they are essentially various in their second language learning needs. For this reason, it is challenging for educators to support these learners considering their linguistic and cultural diversity. The given research paper conducts a systematic literature review with authentic, peer-reviewed resources to examine how multiliteracies pedagogy can inform second language teaching and learning in elementary classrooms of Ontario, Canada. This study deals with the English language learning of multilingual and multicultural allophone English Language Learners (ELLs) in the English as a Second Language (ESL) programs of Ontario elementary schools. This research paper reflects upon different aspects of multiliteracies approaches. It concludes that multiliteracies pedagogy has numerous potentials to address ELL’s diversity and the educators of Ontario elementary ESL programs can offer a better English language learning environment to the ELLs by ensuring proper implementation of multiliteracies pedagogy in their teaching-learning process

Foundational Practices of Online Writing Instruction

This is an Open Textbook available through the Open Textbook Library: https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/foundational-practices-of-online-writing-instruction. Reviews are available there. Foundational Practices in Online Writing Instruction (OWI) addresses the questions and decisions that administrators and instructors most need to consider when developing online writing programs and courses. Written by experts in the field (members of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Committee for Effective Practices in OWI and other experts and stakeholders).... The editors believe that the field of writing studies is on a trajectory in which most courses will be mediated online to various degrees; therefore the principles detailed in this collection may become the basis for future writing instruction practices. ... [Amazon.com]https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/english_books/1017/thumbnail.jp