INVESTIGATING THE ASSOCIATIONS BETWEEN CREDIBILITY ASSESSMENTS AND INFORMATION USE TASKS WITH RESPECT TO DOCUMENT GENRES IN THE CONTEXT OF UNIVERSITY TEACHING

Higher education requires intense information practices for knowledge diffusion, application, and innovation. Faculty assess and use a variety of documents when they teach their students. They make complex credibility assessments, and they use information with varying degrees of perceived credibility to achieve their teaching goals. Unfortunately, existing credibility research often stops once documents are selected. Our knowledge of the associations between credibility assessments and information use remains limited. Additionally, scholars agree professional tasks are associated with the genres of the documents used to accomplish these tasks. For example, instructional genres – including tutorials and lesson plans – are particularly useful to tasks related to educational pursuits. Despite the potential benefits that the identification of genres might provide in searching, navigation, and comprehension of information, researchers rarely exploit it to facilitate faculty’s document assessments and information use in support of their teaching. To solve the above problems, this study aimed at uncovering the associations between credibility assessments and information use tasks with respect to document genres in the context of university teaching. Specifically, it investigated whether there were associations: (1) between the criteria faculty employed to assess the credibility of the documents they used to support their teaching and the genres of these documents; (2) between the credibility criteria they employed to assess and the information use tasks they performed to use these documents; and (3) between the genres of these documents and the information use tasks they performed. Understanding the above associations could enhance our knowledge of the roles of document genres in making credibility assessments and information use decisions in the context of university teaching. This study took a mixed-method, bottom-up approach to uncovering the above associations. It first employed qualitative citation analysis to identify the genres of the documents faculty used in their courses based on the citations in their teaching materials (e.g., syllabi, lecture slides, lab notes, and links to resources). Customized genre repertoires that detailed the contexts in which different genres were used in Excel format were created. Semi-structured interviews were then implemented to collect data about the courses included in this study, the general criteria faculty employed to select documents for their courses, the tasks they performed to use the information in the genres this study selected for in-depth interviews, and the criteria they employed to assess the selected genres. Interviews were fully transcribed for qualitative content analysis. The results of this study indicate the criteria faculty employed served as function enablers that bridged the selected genres and the information use tasks they performed to use these genres. Credibility was one of the function enablers that enabled faculty to use the selected genres to perform different tasks. It played different roles in different tasks. It played a leading role in teaching tasks that developed students’ advanced learning skills and helped students to continue their learning. It also played a leading role in information use tasks that involved subject experts, professional orginations, and diverse genres originated from heterogeneous sources. The results also indicate the information use tasks faculty performed served as inclusion and exclusion criteria for genres. The information use tasks determined the information characteristics of genres that mattered in faculty’s task performance. This study shed new light on existing knowledge about genre-task associations by: (1) Exploring these associations in the context of university teaching; (2) Explicating these associations through the perception of credibility; and (3) Adding the criterion-genre and criterion-task associations to complement these associations. This study also enhanced our understanding of credibility in the context of university teaching. Finally, this study made several methodological contributions, including: (1) Transforming citation analysis from bibliographic records to research tools that engaged participants and ensured the accuracy of data; (2) Transforming citation analysis from bibliographic records to customized genre repertoires that preserved the contexts of information use; and (3) Developing rules to consistently select genres for investigating task-genre associations across disciplinary boundaries

Neural Graph Transfer Learning in Natural Language Processing Tasks

Natural language is essential in our daily lives as we rely on languages to communicate and exchange information. A fundamental goal for natural language processing (NLP) is to let the machine understand natural language to help or replace human experts to mine knowledge and complete tasks. Many NLP tasks deal with sequential data. For example, a sentence is considered as a sequence of works. Very recently, deep learning-based language models (i.e.,BERT \citep{devlin2018bert}) achieved significant improvement in many existing tasks, including text classification and natural language inference. However, not all tasks can be formulated using sequence models. Specifically, graph-structured data is also fundamental in NLP, including entity linking, entity classification, relation extraction, abstractive meaning representation, and knowledge graphs \citep{santoro2017simple,hamilton2017representation,kipf2016semi}. In this scenario, BERT-based pretrained models may not be suitable. Graph Convolutional Neural Network (GCN) \citep{kipf2016semi} is a deep neural network model designed for graphs. It has shown great potential in text classification, link prediction, question answering and so on. This dissertation presents novel graph models for NLP tasks, including text classification, prerequisite chain learning, and coreference resolution. We focus on different perspectives of graph convolutional network modeling: for text classification, a novel graph construction method is proposed which allows interpretability for the prediction; for prerequisite chain learning, we propose multiple aggregation functions that utilize neighbors for better information exchange; for coreference resolution, we study how graph pretraining can help when labeled data is limited. Moreover, an important branch is to apply pretrained language models for the mentioned tasks. So, this dissertation also focuses on the transfer learning method that generalizes pretrained models to other domains, including medical, cross-lingual, and web data. Finally, we propose a new task called unsupervised cross-domain prerequisite chain learning, and study novel graph-based methods to transfer knowledge over graphs

Visual literacy for libraries: A practical, standards-based guide

When we step back and think about how to situate visual literacy into a library context, the word critical keeps coming up: critical thinking, critical viewing, critical using, critical making, and the list goes on. To understand our approach, start with your own practice, add images, and see where it takes you. Do you encourage students to think critically as they research? How can you extend this experience to images? Do you embrace critical information literacy? Can you bring visual content to enrich that experience? Do you teach students to critically evaluate sources? How can you expand that practice to images? You’ll see a lot of questions in this book, because our approach is inquiry- driven. This is not to say that we don’t cover the basics of image content. Curious about color? Covered. Not sure where to find great images? We’ll show you. Wondering what makes a good presentation? We talk about that too. But what we really want you to get out of this book is a new understanding of how images fit into our critical (there it is again) practice as librarians and how we can advance student learning with our own visual literacy. This book grounds visual literacy in your everyday practice—connecting it to what you know and do as a librarian who engages in reflective practice. Heidi Jacobs put it well when she argued that, for information literacy pedagogy, “one of the best ways for us to encourage students to be engaged learners is for us to become engaged learners, delve deeply into our own problem posing, and embody the kind of engagement we want to see in our students” (Jacobs 2008). We extend this viewpoint to visual literacy pedagogy and provide many opportunities for you to embody the kind of visual literacy that you want to develop in your learners

Music Encoding Conference Proceedings

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Metacognitive Writing Strategies for Emerging Dancer-Scholars: Uncovering Supportive Links Between Academic Writing and Choreographic Processes

Canadian graduate programs in Dance at the Masters level frequently accept students with long professional careers in dance but limited academic background in writing essays. Writing term papers, with perhaps only dim memories of high school writing instruction to draw from, can pose challenging experiences for such emerging dancer-scholars. While long standing metacognitive reading strategies are commonly available to assist those new to graduate studies with interpreting their academic readings, no comparable metacognitive writing strategies appear in the literature to support an academic writing process. However, metacognition theory regarding the role of affect in monitoring and controlling ones progress through the completion of a task offers potential applications to support academic writing. Furthermore, re-imagining academic writing as an experience deeply informed by affect resonates with recent research into articulating the affective or felt sense understanding of ones creative processes in composing a choreographic work. Investigating connections between how dancers process composition tasks in the two disciplines revealed metacognitive processing parallels. The findings implied several considerations for designing a writing pedagogy specific to the needs of emerging dancer-scholars. This dissertation research with graduate dance students in Canada and the US incorporated ethnographic and educational action research approaches for identifying, addressing and documenting participants perceived essay writing problems. Initial group workshops prepared the participants for individual Case Study research sessions, which were characterized by practice-led research/research-led practice methods of generating, developing, performing and theorizing. The research investigated the howness of each participants writing process across a series of analytical writing assignments. Participants and I collaborated in uncovering the focus and potential structure for each paper using visual-spatial-dialoguing techniques. Participants expressed affective experiences during these video- or audio-taped sessions and in emailed reflections. Their gestural and verbal metaphors generated metacognitive knowledge about the source of writing frustrations versus the support provided by using familiar processing techniques from their choreographic practices. Their retrospective analyses demonstrated the participants metacognitive evolution from personal awareness to co- and self-regulated learning about the characteristic processing traits underlying their writing and choreographic practices. A comparative analysis of three Case Studies suggested metacognitive writing strategies for supporting emerging dancer-scholars

ENGL 2311 - Technical and Professional Writing - Language and Communication

This OER packet contains the course materials for ENGL 2311 - Technical and Professional Writing that introduce you to some of the most important aspects of writing in the worlds of science, technology, and business—in other words, the kind of writing that scientists, nurses, doctors, computer specialists, government officials, engineers, and other professionals do as a part of their regular work. The skills learned in technical writing courses can be useful in other fields as well, including education and social sciences. Technical writing involves communicating complex information to a specific audience who will use it to accomplish some goal or task in a manner that is accurate, useful, and clear. Whether you write an email to your professor or supervisor, develop a presentation or report, design a sales flyer, or create a webpage, you are a technical communicator.https://digitalcommons.pvamu.edu/pv-open-education-resources/1001/thumbnail.jp

TLAD 2010 Proceedings:8th international workshop on teaching, learning and assesment of databases (TLAD)

This is the eighth in the series of highly successful international workshops on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD 2010), which once again is held as a workshop of BNCOD 2010 - the 27th International Information Systems Conference. TLAD 2010 is held on the 28th June at the beautiful Dudhope Castle at the Abertay University, just before BNCOD, and hopes to be just as successful as its predecessors.The teaching of databases is central to all Computing Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems and Information Technology courses, and this year, the workshop aims to continue the tradition of bringing together both database teachers and researchers, in order to share good learning, teaching and assessment practice and experience, and further the growing community amongst database academics. As well as attracting academics from the UK community, the workshop has also been successful in attracting academics from the wider international community, through serving on the programme committee, and attending and presenting papers.This year, the workshop includes an invited talk given by Richard Cooper (of the University of Glasgow) who will present a discussion and some results from the Database Disciplinary Commons which was held in the UK over the academic year. Due to the healthy number of high quality submissions this year, the workshop will also present seven peer reviewed papers, and six refereed poster papers. Of the seven presented papers, three will be presented as full papers and four as short papers. These papers and posters cover a number of themes, including: approaches to teaching databases, e.g. group centered and problem based learning; use of novel case studies, e.g. forensics and XML data; techniques and approaches for improving teaching and student learning processes; assessment techniques, e.g. peer review; methods for improving students abilities to develop database queries and develop E-R diagrams; and e-learning platforms for supporting teaching and learning