Are digital natives a myth or reality?: Students’ use of technologies for learning

This paper outlines the findings of a study investigating the extent and nature of use of digital technologies by undergraduate students in Social Work and Engineering, in two British universities. The study involved a questionnaire survey of students (n=160) followed by in-depth interviews with students (n=8) and lecturers and support staff (n=8) in both institutions. Firstly, the findings suggest that students use a limited range of technologies for both learning and socialisation. For learning, mainly established ICTs are used- institutional VLE, Google and Wikipedia and mobile phones. Students make limited, recreational use of social technologies such as media sharing tools and social networking sites. Secondly, the findings point to a low level of use of and familiarity with collaborative knowledge creation tools, virtual worlds, personal web publishing, and other emergent social technologies. Thirdly, the study did not find evidence to support the claims regarding students adopting radically different patterns of knowledge creation and sharing suggested by some previous studies. The study shows that students’ attitudes to learning appear to be influenced by the approaches adopted by their lecturers. Far from demanding lecturers change their practice, students appear to conform to fairly traditional pedagogies, albeit with minor uses of technology tools that deliver content. Despite both groups clearly using a rather limited range of technologies for learning, the results point to some age differences, with younger, engineering students making somewhat more active, albeit limited, use of tools than the older ones. The outcomes suggest that although the calls for radical transformations in educational approaches may be legitimate it would be misleading to ground the arguments for such change solely in students’ shifting expectations and patterns of learning and technology use

Open educational resources : conversations in cyberspace

172 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.Libro ElectrónicoEducation systems today face two major challenges: expanding the reach of education and improving its quality. Traditional solutions will not suffice, especially in the context of today's knowledge-intensive societies. The Open Educational Resources movement offers one solution for extending the reach of education and expanding learning opportunities. The goal of the movement is to equalize access to knowledge worldwide through openly and freely available online high-quality content. Over the course of two years, the international community came together in a series of online discussion forums to discuss the concept of Open Educational Resources and its potential. This publication makes the background papers and reports from those discussions available in print.--Publisher's description.A first forum : presenting the open educational resources (OER) movement. Open educational resources : an introductory note / Sally Johnstone -- Providing OER and related issues : an introductory note / Anne Margulies, ... [et al.] -- Using OER and related issues : in introductory note / Mohammed-Nabil Sabry, ... [et al.] -- Discussion highlights / Paul Albright -- Ongoing discussion. A research agenda for OER : discussion highlights / Kim Tucker and Peter Bateman -- A 'do-it-yourself' resource for OER : discussion highlights / Boris Vukovic -- Free and open source software (FOSS) and OER -- A second forum : discussing the OECD study of OER. Mapping procedures and users / Jan Hylén -- Why individuals and institutions share and use OER / Jan Hylén -- Discussion highlights / Alexa Joyce -- Priorities for action. Open educational resources : the way forward / Susan D'Antoni

REBA: A Refinement-Based Architecture for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in Robotics

This paper describes an architecture for robots that combines the complementary strengths of probabilistic graphical models and declarative programming to represent and reason with logic-based and probabilistic descriptions of uncertainty and domain knowledge. An action language is extended to support non-boolean fluents and non-deterministic causal laws. This action language is used to describe tightly-coupled transition diagrams at two levels of granularity, with a fine-resolution transition diagram defined as a refinement of a coarse-resolution transition diagram of the domain. The coarse-resolution system description, and a history that includes (prioritized) defaults, are translated into an Answer Set Prolog (ASP) program. For any given goal, inference in the ASP program provides a plan of abstract actions. To implement each such abstract action, the robot automatically zooms to the part of the fine-resolution transition diagram relevant to this action. A probabilistic representation of the uncertainty in sensing and actuation is then included in this zoomed fine-resolution system description, and used to construct a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). The policy obtained by solving the POMDP is invoked repeatedly to implement the abstract action as a sequence of concrete actions, with the corresponding observations being recorded in the coarse-resolution history and used for subsequent reasoning. The architecture is evaluated in simulation and on a mobile robot moving objects in an indoor domain, to show that it supports reasoning with violation of defaults, noisy observations and unreliable actions, in complex domains.Comment: 72 pages, 14 figure

Collaborative yet independent: Information practices in the physical sciences

In many ways, the physical sciences are at the forefront of using digital tools and methods to work with information and data. However, the fields and disciplines that make up the physical sciences are by no means uniform, and physical scientists find, use, and disseminate information in a variety of ways. This report examines information practices in the physical sciences across seven cases, and demonstrates the richly varied ways in which physical scientists work, collaborate, and share information and data. This report details seven case studies in the physical sciences. For each case, qualitative interviews and focus groups were used to understand the domain. Quantitative data gathered from a survey of participants highlights different information strategies employed across the cases, and identifies important software used for research. Finally, conclusions from across the cases are drawn, and recommendations are made. This report is the third in a series commissioned by the Research Information Network (RIN), each looking at information practices in a specific domain (life sciences, humanities, and physical sciences). The aim is to understand how researchers within a range of disciplines find and use information, and in particular how that has changed with the introduction of new technologies

Spartan Daily December 3, 2009

Volume 133, Issue 47https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/1314/thumbnail.jp

Spartan Daily, September 1, 2004

Volume 123, Issue 4https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/10008/thumbnail.jp

What? How? Why? Resource Use by Michigan Two-Year College Instructors When Planning and Teaching the Fundamental Theorem of Calulus

This dissertation examines the resources that two-year college instructors use to aide their teaching. In particular, this dissertation is an investigation into the resources used by two-year college calculus instructors in Michigan when they plan and teach the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus (FTC), how they use those resources and why they use them. Resources are broadly defined as assets that instructors access that impact their planning and instruction. While there are many resources available for teaching the FTC, they are often minimally used. The FTC connects the two major calculus concepts of differentiation and integration, yet it is difficult for students to understand the significance of the theorem. Traditionally, the FTC is presented as two theorems, in one section of one chapter of a textbook. One theorem describes the inverse relationship between differentiation and integration, and the other theorem explains how to calculate a definite integral. Theoretical underpinnings for this study come from documentational and instrumental genesis, as articulated by Gueudet and Trouche (2009). This theory articulates the dual understanding of how instructors use resources and how resources affect instructors. The study uses a mixed method design with three levels of data collection: a survey of all community college calculus instructors at all the Michigan community colleges; 14 interviews with instructors, selected to represent a variety of experience levels; and two classroom observations of instructors who identified the FTC as important and identified themselves as comfortable teaching it. Findings from this dissertation indicated that most instructors use the textbook for planning and homework, and use their personal background and student feedback when teaching a lesson on the FTC. Despite the calculus reform movement in the 1980s that encouraged teachers to incorporate technology into their classroom, and the availability of technologies that would help explain concepts vital to understanding the FTC, this study found that the theorem is often presented without technology. An examination of instructor descriptions of the importance of the FTC revealed that instructors tended to consider the FTC as two disconnected theorems, similar to how it was presented in the textbooks. Instructors also allocated the same amount of time to the FTC as they did to other sections of the textbook. One implication from these findings is that if instructors wished to emphasize the FTC in their calculus classes by spending more time on it, the resources that they use may be inadequate. This dissertation contributes to research that focuses more broadly on higher education mathematics curriculum research.PHDEducational StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147597/1/lleckron_1.pd

Spartan Daily, March 5, 1990

Volume 94, Issue 26https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/7956/thumbnail.jp