Approaches towards a Lexical Web: the role of Interoperability

After highlighting some of the major dimensions that are relevant for Language Resources (LR) and contribute to their infrastructural role, I underline some priority areas of concern today with respect to implementing an open Language Infrastructure, and specifically what we could call a ?Lexical Web?. My objective is to show that it is imperative to define an underlying global strategy behind the set of initiatives which are/can be launched in Europe and world-wide, and that it is necessary an allembracing vision and a cooperation among different communities to achieve more coherent and useful results. I end up mentioning two new European initiatives that in this direction and promise to be influential in shaping the future of the LR area

Planning the Future of Language Resources: The Role of the FLaReNet Network

In this paper we analyse the role of Language Resources (LR) and Language Technologies (LT) in today Human Language Technology field and try to speculate on some of the priorities for the next years, from the particular perspective of the FLaReNet project, that has been asked to act as an observatory to assess current status of the field on Language Resources and Technology and to indicate priorities of action for the future

Changing the game: public education and the discourses and practices of privatisation in educational technology policy and intervention

Privatisation in education is a contentious issue, inseparable from the shift in focus from community-based education initiatives to individualistic and economically driven ones (Ball and Youdell, 2007). This raises ethical issues with initiatives like the Western Cape Government's Game Changer initiatives, given the range of access issues that learners experience in the pervasive social inequity of South Africa. There is a lack of existing research on privatisation practices in public education in the Western Cape, specifically what linguistic strategies are utilized in the official texts promoting it. The Game Changer initiatives and their associated ‘Roadmaps' promote non-state collaboration in extra- curricular eLearning classes and broader technology rollout in under resourced public schools. Analysis of the Roadmap policy reveals discourses of fast capitalism, skills talk, datafication and digital nativism. These discourses were mirrored in the practices, text and talk generated in an after-school mathematics intervention run by an EdTech company, which I have called ZipEd, in a Cape Flats school between 2017-2018. The company prioritized their funder's mandate and to prove their software's efficacy, spun data to reflect largely positive results. In the rush to provide this data, ZipEd entered several schools without fulfilling ethical clearance requirements. Obtaining access to Game Changer pilot sites ensured ZipEd's product rollout, continued growth, and financial success, revealing the neoliberal approaches which dominate ZipEd's practices. The Game Changer policy texts and the intervention observed, treated languages as silo-ed entities, ignoring family or community approaches to literacy initiatives, curricular reform, trans-languaging strategies and inclusive language learning. While EdTech is a useful teaching tool, this promotion of “exogenous” (Ball and Youdell, 2007) privatisation in the Western Cape, blurs the lines between state and non-state involvement, ultimately resulting in the commodification of public schooling

CLARIN. The infrastructure for language resources

CLARIN, the "Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure", has established itself as a major player in the field of research infrastructures for the humanities. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the organization, its members, its goals and its functioning, as well as of the tools and resources hosted by the infrastructure. The many contributors representing various fields, from computer science to law to psychology, analyse a wide range of topics, such as the technology behind the CLARIN infrastructure, the use of CLARIN resources in diverse research projects, the achievements of selected national CLARIN consortia, and the challenges that CLARIN has faced and will face in the future. The book will be published in 2022, 10 years after the establishment of CLARIN as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium by the European Commission (Decision 2012/136/EU)

CLARIN

The book provides a comprehensive overview of the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure – CLARIN – for the humanities. It covers a broad range of CLARIN language resources and services, its underlying technological infrastructure, the achievements of national consortia, and challenges that CLARIN will tackle in the future. The book is published 10 years after establishing CLARIN as an Europ. Research Infrastructure Consortium

#COMMONCORE Project (2017) How Social Media is Changing the Politics of Education

Fueled by impassioned social media activists, the Common Core State Standards have been a persistent flashpoint in the debate over the direction of American education. In this innovative and interactive website we explore the Common Core debate on Twitter. Using a distinctive combination of social network analyses and psychological investigations we reveal both the underlying social structure of the conversation and the motivations of the participants. The central question guiding our investigation is: How are social mediaenabled social networks changing the discourse in American politics that produces and sustains social policy? ABOUT #COMMONCORE PROJECT In the #commoncore Project, authors Jonathan Supovitz, Alan Daly, Miguel del Fresno and Christian Kolouch examine the intense debate surrounding the Common Core State Standards education reform as it played out on Twitter. The Common Core, one of the major education policy initiatives of the early 21st century, sought to strengthen education systems across the United States through a set of specific and challenging education standards. Once enjoying bipartisan support, the controversial standards have become the epicenter of a heated national debate about this approach to educational improvement. By studying the Twitter conversation surrounding the Common Core, we shed light on the ways that social media social networks are influencing the political discourse that, in turn, produces public policy

CLARIN

The book provides a comprehensive overview of the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure – CLARIN – for the humanities. It covers a broad range of CLARIN language resources and services, its underlying technological infrastructure, the achievements of national consortia, and challenges that CLARIN will tackle in the future. The book is published 10 years after establishing CLARIN as an Europ. Research Infrastructure Consortium

EDU-COM 2004 International conference: new challenges for sustainability and growth in higher education

EDU-COM 2004, an international conference held in Khon Kaen, Thailand from the 24th to the 26th November, 2004 took the theme: New Challenges for Sustainability and Growth in Higher Education. EDU-COM 2004 was sponsored and organised by Edith Cowan University, Khon Kaen University and Bansomdejchaopraya Rajabhat University/ The Conference was structured to address five sub-themes pertinent to the challenges facing higher education worldwide: • Collaboration between campus and community in Higher Education • Collaboration targeting multi-cultural and cross-cultural issues in Higher Education • Collaboration through new teaching and learning technologies in Higher Education • Collaboration for quality: valuing and evaluating performance in Higher Education • Collaboration for effective governance in Higher Education Contributors were invited to address on or more of these sub-themes. All papers published in these proceedings reflect the drive for richer learning experiences, improved learning environments and recognition of the importance of the local community as technology enables us to think globally. Predictably perhaps, e-education brought the most substantial response, a clear indication of the perceived potential for new technologies to influence teaching, learning and administration in higher education. The papers also highlight some of the challenges and emerging expectations for higher education in a world that is increasingly characterised by international alliances, partnerships and tensions – a search for sustainability and equity in a period of rapid social and technological change. The Proceedings are in 3 sections. Section 1 – Keynote Speakers; Section 2 – Academic Peer Reviewed Papers: Section 3 - “Work in Progress”. EDU-COM 2004 was attended by delegates from Australia, Botswana, Cambodia, China, Denmark, England, Hong Kong, Iran, Ireland, Japan, Lao, Myanamar, Singapore, Tanzania, Thailand, Vietnam

Routine journeys, complex networks: media-centrism, the dispositif of road safety, and practices of commuting by car in everyday Ireland

Road safety is regarded as one of the most significant public health issues in the world. In Ireland, strategies for the mitigation of the effects of road traffic accidents appear in policy documents such as the Road Safety Strategy which is then disseminated via various media outlets. Such an approach highlights the centrality of mediation in the social acceptance of policy initiatives, relying on an assumption of media-centricity – that the mainstream media are central to social formation. This thesis problematizes this assumption. Drawing together the disparate elements of a dispositif of road safety in the under-researched Irish setting, this study explores the complex range of actors implicated in the mediation of policy. It examines the mediated policy context of the worst road accident in Irish history, as well as the introduction of a network of speed cameras, to explore how policy initiatives output in print media reports, as well as online discussion. Through analysis of car-commuters’ focus group interactions, it also examines the ways in which mediated policy understandings are immanent and circulate in how car-commuters talk about their commuting practices. The study highlights how mediated policy actions attempt to curb the unfettered expression of car-based freedoms through the construction of individual responsibility as the ultimate expression of road safety. However, commuters’ freedoms are also shaped and constrained by responsibilities in terms of work, study, and family, as well as by the types of social action automobility makes conceivable, facilitates, and disrupts. In addition, the research shows that while rational choices and rationality are a dominant framework within policy contexts, mediation about road safety is actually enmeshed in multiple rationalities that surface as circumstances require. Exploration of driving practices reveals how commuters are nodes in their own networks of rationalities around automobility that adhere and disjoin to varying degrees with the concerns of media representation. The study also highlights the mainstream media consensus constructed around speed cameras, even though forms of resistance to this consensus manifest, especially online. Commuters’ car-based activities can often also be resistant to discourses of road safety. Yet commuters fight to defend the space and time spent on forms of work performed in the car that reinforce the exigencies of neoliberalism. Overall, the thesis finds that media are but one of the many sets of actors that constitute the complex networks of neoliberal automobility in Ireland