ICT in primary education: A perspective study into the use and selection procedures of software designed to support the development of basic literacy skills for able and less able pupils (KS1)

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The British government is heavily committed to successfully applying technology in primary education through a series of expensive initiatives stressing the importance of technology in teaching across the curriculum and the belief that technology can contribute to pupils' academic achievement. One would assume that educators use it regularly in their classrooms in the subject of basic literacy. One of the factors that may impede the use of technology in teaching is the good quality software. There are numerous software available but of poor quality. Unfortunately, no criteria are available for teachers to select computer packages. Pupils' contribution to designing software is highly recommended but their views have been ignored in relation to what elements should be included in computer packages. This study was set: a) To explore the use and selection procedure of initial literacy software in primary / nursery schools, and b) To explore young pupils (KS1) thoughts on using basic literacy software and on the technical features and instructional characteristics in such programs. This inquiry investigated the above aims involving the views of the three stakeholders - teachers, developers, and children. Namely, 112 primary school teachers, mostly mature in age and experience, of five LEAs in Southwest area of London, 98 KSI (62 Yrl and 36 Yr2), and 10 software companies. The constructivist paradigm by Cuba & Lincoln was employed to reach joint constructions by comparing and contrasting differences, but mostly to give weight to the perspectives of the less power - children - to "give voice". The study has found that young pupils do not have frequent access to such programs, and to computers in general, though schools are equipped with computers and literacy software. The ratio of computers to pupils is large, 1: 13. Schools opt for the ICT suite in order to secure equal access. Just over half of the teachers feel sufficiently trained in using ICT. The older in age and in teaching experience teachers feel less confident in using technology. Developers share the view that teachers' ICT skills are poor. Half of the available software does not undergo any testing before reaching classrooms since only half of developers evaluate their products, and equally half of teachers preview it, but both without pupils involved. Young in the profession teachers and teachers who feel sufficiently trained tend to preview software more than the rest of their colleagues. No criteria are used in order to select computer packages and teachers feel that they need more skills for that reason. The older in the teaching profession educators find more influential software that has been tried out with children. The criteria found in this study are the same as the ones provided by the literature and the ones used by few teachers. Pupils like to work on computers. They believe that computers contribute to their learning, and equally literacy games contribute to the development of pre-reading skills. They like to work in pairs and explain why. The views of pupils on the difficulties they encounter match the views of teachers and developers. Regarding the software elements the study has shown differences between the two age groups (Yrl and Yr2). Similarly, differences are found between the three stakeholders in relation to technical features in software. The study provides a list of recommendations for classroom teachers.This study is partly funded by Brunel University

Visual Affect Around the World: A Large-scale Multilingual Visual Sentiment Ontology

Every culture and language is unique. Our work expressly focuses on the uniqueness of culture and language in relation to human affect, specifically sentiment and emotion semantics, and how they manifest in social multimedia. We develop sets of sentiment- and emotion-polarized visual concepts by adapting semantic structures called adjective-noun pairs, originally introduced by Borth et al. (2013), but in a multilingual context. We propose a new language-dependent method for automatic discovery of these adjective-noun constructs. We show how this pipeline can be applied on a social multimedia platform for the creation of a large-scale multilingual visual sentiment concept ontology (MVSO). Unlike the flat structure in Borth et al. (2013), our unified ontology is organized hierarchically by multilingual clusters of visually detectable nouns and subclusters of emotionally biased versions of these nouns. In addition, we present an image-based prediction task to show how generalizable language-specific models are in a multilingual context. A new, publicly available dataset of >15.6K sentiment-biased visual concepts across 12 languages with language-specific detector banks, >7.36M images and their metadata is also released.Comment: 11 pages, to appear at ACM MM'1

Automatic Detection of Vague Words and Sentences in Privacy Policies

Website privacy policies represent the single most important source of information for users to gauge how their personal data are collected, used and shared by companies. However, privacy policies are often vague and people struggle to understand the content. Their opaqueness poses a significant challenge to both users and policy regulators. In this paper, we seek to identify vague content in privacy policies. We construct the first corpus of human-annotated vague words and sentences and present empirical studies on automatic vagueness detection. In particular, we investigate context-aware and context-agnostic models for predicting vague words, and explore auxiliary-classifier generative adversarial networks for characterizing sentence vagueness. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed approaches. Finally, we provide suggestions for resolving vagueness and improving the usability of privacy policies.Comment: 10 page

Comparing the effectiveness of instructor-led training to stand-alone web-based training : a case study

Web-based Training (WBT) is still a relatively new technology, and the full extent of WBT functionality has yet to be realized. Most of corporate America recognizes the necessity of a well-trained workforce; however, instructor-led training is often difficult to implement due to a variety of logistical issues. These issue, include cost constraints, location issues, and limited resources. WBT has been touted in recent years as a viable alternative to traditional, instructor-led training. However, the effectiveness of WBT versus instructor-led training has been questioned by its many critics. This case study tested the effectiveness of a stand-alone web-based training program and compared the results to that of an identical instructor-led course. The course provided highly task-oriented instruction for a computer software package and was developed using a proven instructional design methodology. The data from this study indicate that WBT is as effective as instructor-led training for purposes of software application training

Culture teaching in EFL through computer/critical thinking

The purpose of this project is to develop computer-assisted language learning (CALL) lesson plans using the Internet and to offer an example for academic senior high school teachers in South Korea of exemplary treatment of cultural topics that promote critical thinking and incorporate crosscultural understanding based on cooperative learning