The comprehension revolution : a twenty-year history of process and practice related to reading comprehension

Includes bibliographie

Finding your way into an open online learning community

Making educational materials freely available on the web is not only a noble enterprise, but also fits the call of helping people to become lifelong learners; a call which gets louder and louder every day. The world is rapidly changing, requiring us to continuously update our knowledge and skills. A problem with this approach to lifelong learning is that the materials that are made available are often both incomplete and unsuitable for independent learning in an online setting. The OpenER (Open Educational Resources) project at the Open Universiteit Nederland makes more than 20 short courses, originally developed for independent-study, freely available from the website www.opener.ou.nl. For our research we start from an envisioned online learning environment now under development. We use backcasting to select research topics that form steps from the current to the ultimate situation. The two experiments we report on here are an extension to standard forum software and the use of student notes to annotate learning materials: two small steps towards our ultimate open learning environment

Sometimes the Internet reads the question wrong: children’s search strategies & difficulties

When children search for information on a given topic, how do they go about searching for and retrieving information? What can their information seeking strategies tell us about the development of search interfaces for children's digital libraries, search engines and information repositories? We interviewed New Zealand (NZ) school children to seek insights into how they are conducting information searches during their education

Are happiness and productivity lower among university students with newly-divorced parents? : an experimental approach

We live in a high-divorce age. Parents worry about the possibility of negative effects upon their children. This paper tests whether recent parental-divorce has deleterious consequences for grown children. Under controlled conditions, it measures students’ happiness with life, and their productivity in a standardized laboratory task. No negative effects from divorce can be detected. If anything, happiness and productivity are greater, particularly among males, if they have experienced parental divorce. Using longitudinal BHPS data -- to control for fixed effects -- we cross-check this result on happiness. Again, the evidence suggests that young people’s mental well-being improves after parental divorce

A Librarian Looks At American Publishing

How does, and how should, a librarian look at publishing in 1967? As a minor customer buying a small part of the output of a large industry? As a fellow member of the nation's communications apparatus ? As one of the last of the Mohicans upon whom the tribe of McLuhanites is about to count coup? Is the librarian like one of a boatload of frantic voyagers in immediate danger of drowning in a roaring river of print loosed by publishers? Or may librarians and publishers be thought of as linked in a symbiotic relationship like that of the Egyptian plover and the crocodile? The plover helps the crocodile as lookout and oral hygienist. In return he gets the delicious leeches he finds along the crocodile's gums. Both partners benefit. However one describes the publisher -librarian relationship it is obvious we each have important functions in the series of processes from the writing of a book to its publishing, and on to its selection, acquisition and presentation to the reader. We share in the crucial responsibilities of maintaining our country's information network.published or submitted for publicatio

Effect of Tuned Parameters on a LSA MCQ Answering Model

This paper presents the current state of a work in progress, whose objective is to better understand the effects of factors that significantly influence the performance of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). A difficult task, which consists in answering (French) biology Multiple Choice Questions, is used to test the semantic properties of the truncated singular space and to study the relative influence of main parameters. A dedicated software has been designed to fine tune the LSA semantic space for the Multiple Choice Questions task. With optimal parameters, the performances of our simple model are quite surprisingly equal or superior to those of 7th and 8th grades students. This indicates that semantic spaces were quite good despite their low dimensions and the small sizes of training data sets. Besides, we present an original entropy global weighting of answers' terms of each question of the Multiple Choice Questions which was necessary to achieve the model's success.Comment: 9 page