LITERACY FOR LEARNING IN FURTHER EDUCATION IN THE UK: A SYMPOSIUM

The Literacies for Learning in Further Education (LfLFE) project, a collaboration between two universities – Stirling and Lancaster – and four further education colleges – Anniesland, Perth, Lancaster and Morecambe, and Preston, funded for three years from January 2004 as part of Phase 3 of the TLRP. The project draws on work already done on literacy practices engaged in by people in schools, higher education and the community and seeks to extend the insights gained from these studies into further education. It aims to explore the literacy practices of students and those practices developed in different parts of the curriculum and develop pedagogic interventions to support students’ learning more effectively. This project involves examining literacy across the many domains of people’s experiences, the ways in which these practices are mobilised and realised within different domains and their capacity to be mobilised and recontextualised elsewhere to support learning. A project such as this raises many theoretical, methodological and practical challenges, not least in ensuring validity across four curriculum areas in four sites drawing upon the collaboration of sixteen practitioner researchers. This symposium of four papers examines some of the challenges and findings from the first eighteen months of the project. The first paper explores some of the findings regarding students’ literacy practices in their everyday lives and those required of them in their college studies. The second focuses on one approach adopted by the project as a method through which to elicit student literacy practices. The other two papers focus on different aspects of partnership within the project, in particular the attempts to enable students and lecturers to be active researchers rather than simply respondent

\u3cem\u3eGRASP News\u3c/em\u3e, Volume 6, Number 1

A report of the General Robotics and Active Sensory Perception (GRASP) Laboratory, edited by Gregory Long and Alok Gupta

A survey on knowledge-enhanced multimodal learning

Multimodal learning has been a field of increasing interest, aiming to combine various modalities in a single joint representation. Especially in the area of visiolinguistic (VL) learning multiple models and techniques have been developed, targeting a variety of tasks that involve images and text. VL models have reached unprecedented performances by extending the idea of Transformers, so that both modalities can learn from each other. Massive pre-training procedures enable VL models to acquire a certain level of real-world understanding, although many gaps can be identified: the limited comprehension of commonsense, factual, temporal and other everyday knowledge aspects questions the extendability of VL tasks. Knowledge graphs and other knowledge sources can fill those gaps by explicitly providing missing information, unlocking novel capabilities of VL models. In the same time, knowledge graphs enhance explainability, fairness and validity of decision making, issues of outermost importance for such complex implementations. The current survey aims to unify the fields of VL representation learning and knowledge graphs, and provides a taxonomy and analysis of knowledge-enhanced VL models