Helping students connect: architecting learning spaces for experiential and transactional reflection

Given the complex and varied contexts that inform students’ consciousness and occasion their learning, learning spaces are more than physical and virtual spaces. Learning spaces are also a range of situations sedimented in our continuum of experiences that shape our philosophical orientations. As such, this article, written from the perspectives of two faculty members in an English department at a four-year public university, describes our efforts to do the following. First, to draw upon models of instructional design we have experienced in our own educational backgrounds; and equally importantly, to develop learning spaces that support learning that is continuous, situated, and personal. Specifically, we critique the ways in which learning has been segregated from the rest of our life contexts for us throughout our educational histories. The irony is that this de-segregation has motivated us to create diverse learning spaces that provide our students with a more realistic set of tools and techniques for integrative life-long learning

Dating Texts without Explicit Temporal Cues

This paper tackles temporal resolution of documents, such as determining when a document is about or when it was written, based only on its text. We apply techniques from information retrieval that predict dates via language models over a discretized timeline. Unlike most previous works, we rely {\it solely} on temporal cues implicit in the text. We consider both document-likelihood and divergence based techniques and several smoothing methods for both of them. Our best model predicts the mid-point of individuals' lives with a median of 22 and mean error of 36 years for Wikipedia biographies from 3800 B.C. to the present day. We also show that this approach works well when training on such biographies and predicting dates both for non-biographical Wikipedia pages about specific years (500 B.C. to 2010 A.D.) and for publication dates of short stories (1798 to 2008). Together, our work shows that, even in absence of temporal extraction resources, it is possible to achieve remarkable temporal locality across a diverse set of texts

Web 2.0 technologies for learning: the current landscape – opportunities, challenges and tensions

This is the first report from research commissioned by Becta into Web 2.0 technologies for learning at Key Stages 3 and 4. This report describes findings from an additional literature review of the then current landscape concerning learner use of Web 2.0 technologies and the implications for teachers, schools, local authorities and policy makers

Learning Language from a Large (Unannotated) Corpus

A novel approach to the fully automated, unsupervised extraction of dependency grammars and associated syntax-to-semantic-relationship mappings from large text corpora is described. The suggested approach builds on the authors' prior work with the Link Grammar, RelEx and OpenCog systems, as well as on a number of prior papers and approaches from the statistical language learning literature. If successful, this approach would enable the mining of all the information needed to power a natural language comprehension and generation system, directly from a large, unannotated corpus.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures, research proposa

Are anonymity-seekers just like everybody else? An analysis of contributions to Wikipedia from Tor

User-generated content sites routinely block contributions from users of privacy-enhancing proxies like Tor because of a perception that proxies are a source of vandalism, spam, and abuse. Although these blocks might be effective, collateral damage in the form of unrealized valuable contributions from anonymity seekers is invisible. One of the largest and most important user-generated content sites, Wikipedia, has attempted to block contributions from Tor users since as early as 2005. We demonstrate that these blocks have been imperfect and that thousands of attempts to edit on Wikipedia through Tor have been successful. We draw upon several data sources and analytical techniques to measure and describe the history of Tor editing on Wikipedia over time and to compare contributions from Tor users to those from other groups of Wikipedia users. Our analysis suggests that although Tor users who slip through Wikipedia's ban contribute content that is more likely to be reverted and to revert others, their contributions are otherwise similar in quality to those from other unregistered participants and to the initial contributions of registered users.Comment: To appear in the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy, May 202

Web-based collaborative writing in L2 contexts: Methodological insights from text mining

The increasingly widespread use of social software (e.g., Wikis, Google Docs) in second language (L2) settings has brought a renewed attention to collaborative writing. Although the current methodological approaches to examining collaborative writing are valuable to understand L2 students’ interactional patterns or perceived experiences, they can be insufficient to capture the quantity and quality of writing in networked online environments. Recently, the evolution of techniques for analyzing big data has transformed many areas of life, from information search to marketing. However, the use of data and text mining for understanding writing processes in language learning contexts is largely underexplored. In this article, we synthesize the current methodological approaches to researching collaborative writing and discuss how new text mining tools can enhance research capacity. These advanced methods can help researchers to elucidate collaboration processes by analyzing user behaviors (e.g., amount of editing, participation equality) and their link to writing outcomes across large numbers of exemplars. We introduce key research examples to illustrate this potential and discuss the implications of integrating the tools for L2 collaborative writing research and pedagogy

A literature review of the use of Web 2.0 tools in Higher Education

This review focuses on the use of Web 2.0 tools in Higher Education. It provides a synthesis of the research literature in the field and a series of illustrative examples of how these tools are being used in learning and teaching. It draws out the perceived benefits that these new technologies appear to offer, and highlights some of the challenges and issues surrounding their use. The review forms the basis for a HE Academy funded project, ‘Peals in the Cloud’, which is exploring how Web 2.0 tools can be used to support evidence-based practices in learning and teaching. The project has also produced two in-depth case studies, which are reported elsewhere (Galley et al., 2010, Alevizou et al., 2010). The case studies focus on evaluation of a recently developed site for learning and teaching, Cloudworks, which harnesses Web 2.0 functionality to facilitate the sharing and discussion of educational practice. The case studies aim to explore to what extent the Web 2.0 affordances of the site are successfully promoting the sharing of ideas, as well as scholarly reflections, on learning and teaching

Mediating boundaries between knowledge and knowing: ICT and R4D praxis

Research for development (R4D) praxis (theory-informed practical action) can be underpinned by the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) which, it is claimed, provide opportunities for knowledge working and sharing. Such a framing implicitly or explicitly constructs a boundary around knowledge as reified, or commodified – or at least able to be stabilized for a period of time (first order knowledge). In contrast ‘third-generation knowledge’ emphasizes the social nature of learning and knowledge-making; this reframes knowledge as a negotiated social practice, thus constructing a different system boundary. This paper offers critical reflections on the use of a wiki as a data repository and mediating technical platform as part of innovating in R4D praxis. A sustainable social learning process was sought that fostered an emergent community of practice among biophysical and social researchers acting for the first time as R4D co-researchers. Over time the technologically mediated element of the learning system was judged to have failed. This inquiry asks: How can learning system design cultivate learning opportunities and respond to learning challenges in an online environment to support R4D practice? Confining critical reflection to the online learning experience alone ignores the wider context in which knowledge work took place; therefore the institutional setting is also considered