The Value of Learning Groups to the 1st Year Undergraduate Experience for Students of Early Childhood.

Learning networks, groups or communities are seen as having the potential to provide supportive, integrative and deep learning processes which can enhance student performance and support transition to university (Peat, Dalziel and Grant 2001; Zhao and Kuh 2004). The provision of a learning environment with opportunities for meaningful academic and social interactions is characteristic of higher education and collaborative learning strategies are frequently used to encourage student selfmanagement, independence and the general development of group skills. Whilst the value-added potential of learning groups is well documented (Peat et al. 2001; Zhao and Kuh 2004; Lizzio and Wilson, 2006), the nature of the course subject is rarely considered as potentially significant to the effectiveness of the group process; the emphasis in research studies being more frequently concerned with generic academic or pastoral functions. The Early Childhood degree at the University of Worcester established learning groups in 2002 as a specific learning and teaching strategy aligning the pedagogic and andragogic philosophy of the subject to promote academic and professional characteristics required as transferable skills for work in the sector. The social constructivist philosophy underpinning the subject and practice of early childhood provided the common, connecting thread for learning groups to have relevance and meaning for personal, academic and professional development. This study investigated the experience and perceived value of learning groups for the first cohort in 2002/3 through a questionnaire, and by interviews focussed more openly on their general first year experience with a sample group of year 1 students in 2008. The findings revealed an overall highly positive perception indicating that learning groups had scope and value as a forum for:- • Building strong relationships and social identity • Co-construction of a learning culture • Reciprocal learning and skill development • Empowerment of adult learners and development of confidence • Enhancing professional development The most useful transferable skills and knowledge gained during the first year came from sharing ideas and relationship building in small group work which gave the students confidence. The findings demonstrate that peer learning groups provide mutual support and learning opportunities which develop skill in working with others which, in turn, students regard as the predominant quality required for their future professional lives

From coincidence to purposeful flow? properties of transcendental information cascades

In this paper, we investigate a method for constructing cascades of information co-occurrence, which is suitable to trace emergent structures in information in scenarios where rich contextual features are unavailable. Our method relies only on the temporal order of content-sharing activities, and intrinsic properties of the shared content itself. We apply this method to analyse information dissemination patterns across the active online citizen science project Planet Hunters, a part of the Zooniverse platform. Our results lend insight into both structural and informational properties of different types of identifiers that can be used and combined to construct cascades. In particular, significant differences are found in the structural properties of information cascades when hashtags as used as cascade identifiers, compared with other content features. We also explain apparent local information losses in cascades in terms of information obsolescence and cascade divergence; e.g., when a cascade branches into multiple, divergent cascades with combined capacity equal to the original

LINE: Large-scale Information Network Embedding

This paper studies the problem of embedding very large information networks into low-dimensional vector spaces, which is useful in many tasks such as visualization, node classification, and link prediction. Most existing graph embedding methods do not scale for real world information networks which usually contain millions of nodes. In this paper, we propose a novel network embedding method called the "LINE," which is suitable for arbitrary types of information networks: undirected, directed, and/or weighted. The method optimizes a carefully designed objective function that preserves both the local and global network structures. An edge-sampling algorithm is proposed that addresses the limitation of the classical stochastic gradient descent and improves both the effectiveness and the efficiency of the inference. Empirical experiments prove the effectiveness of the LINE on a variety of real-world information networks, including language networks, social networks, and citation networks. The algorithm is very efficient, which is able to learn the embedding of a network with millions of vertices and billions of edges in a few hours on a typical single machine. The source code of the LINE is available online.Comment: WWW 201

Common vocabularies for collective intelligence - work in progress

Web based applications and tools offer a great potential to increase the efficiency of information flow and communication among different agents during emergencies. Among the different factors, technical and non technical, that hinder the integration of an information model in emergency management sector, is a lack of a common, shared vocabulary. This paper furthers previous work in the area of ontology development, and presents a summary and overview of the goal, process and methodology to construct a shared set of metadata that can be used to map existing vocabulary. This paper is a work in progress report

On the Measurement of Privacy as an Attacker's Estimation Error

A wide variety of privacy metrics have been proposed in the literature to evaluate the level of protection offered by privacy enhancing-technologies. Most of these metrics are specific to concrete systems and adversarial models, and are difficult to generalize or translate to other contexts. Furthermore, a better understanding of the relationships between the different privacy metrics is needed to enable more grounded and systematic approach to measuring privacy, as well as to assist systems designers in selecting the most appropriate metric for a given application. In this work we propose a theoretical framework for privacy-preserving systems, endowed with a general definition of privacy in terms of the estimation error incurred by an attacker who aims to disclose the private information that the system is designed to conceal. We show that our framework permits interpreting and comparing a number of well-known metrics under a common perspective. The arguments behind these interpretations are based on fundamental results related to the theories of information, probability and Bayes decision.Comment: This paper has 18 pages and 17 figure

Role and Discipline Relationships in a Transdisciplinary Biomedical Team: Structuration, Values Override and Context Scaffolding

Though accepted that "team science" is needed to tackle and conquer the health problems that are plaguing our society significant empirical evidence of team mechanisms and functional dynamics is still lacking in abundance. Through grounded methods the relationship between scientific disciplines and team roles was observed in a United States National Institutes of Health-funded (NIH) research consortium. Interviews and the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) were employed.. Findings show strong role and discipline idiosyncrasies that when viewed separately provide different insights into team functioning and change receptivity. When considered simultaneously, value-latent characteristics emerged showing self-perceived contributions to the team. This micro/meso analysis suggests that individual participation in team level interactions can inform the structuration of roles and disciplines in an attempt to tackle macro level problems.Comment: Presented at COINs13 Conference, Chile, 2013 (arxiv:1308.1028