Content without context is noise : Looking for curriculum harmony in primary arts education in Western Australia

Arts education in Western Australian primary schools consist of learning opportunities outlined by mandated curriculum. However, assumptions underlying this curriculum involving access, resources and support impact schools’ capacity to implement the curriculum without them being adequately addressed by the written curriculum. Drawing on the policy enactment theory of Ball, Maguire, and Braun (2012), four contextual variables (situated contexts, professional cultures, material contexts and external factors) are used to highlight the differences between the written published curriculum and the implemented, practised curriculum. Drawing on interviews with 24 participants across four schools issues of geographic location, use of arts specialists, appropriate learning spaces and the stresses associated with mandated literacy and numeracy testing are reported as contextual pressures by this study. This paper details the disruptive interference of these contextual pressures that we describe as ‘noise’. The provision of a better understanding of this contextual landscape brings schools and teachers away from the ‘noise’ of disruption and closer to curriculum harmony

Unsupervised Understanding of Location and Illumination Changes in Egocentric Videos

Wearable cameras stand out as one of the most promising devices for the upcoming years, and as a consequence, the demand of computer algorithms to automatically understand the videos recorded with them is increasing quickly. An automatic understanding of these videos is not an easy task, and its mobile nature implies important challenges to be faced, such as the changing light conditions and the unrestricted locations recorded. This paper proposes an unsupervised strategy based on global features and manifold learning to endow wearable cameras with contextual information regarding the light conditions and the location captured. Results show that non-linear manifold methods can capture contextual patterns from global features without compromising large computational resources. The proposed strategy is used, as an application case, as a switching mechanism to improve the hand-detection problem in egocentric videos.Comment: Submitted for publicatio

Arts curriculum implementation: Adopt and adapt as policy translation

This paper examines macro, meso and micro understandings of policy enactment within Western Australian primary school arts education where a new national arts curriculum is being revised and implemented through a process colloquially known as ‘adopt and adapt’. This paper focuses on how a government led implementation policy has influenced arts teaching and learning in unintended ways. It Includes a theoretical reflection and a consideration of the effects of such policies. Using policy enactment theory as the enquiry lens, four contextual variables are highlighted for their impact on teachers and schools. The variables include situated contexts, material contexts, professional cultures and external factors. Effects are discussed through the perspectives of eleven arts curriculum leaders drawn from in-depth semi-structured interviews. Marginalisation of the arts, the disconnection of schools and teachers to the arts and professional learning impacts are discussed as results of this policy translation

Integrating ICT in Kenyan secondary schools: an exploratory case study of a professional development program

This study explores the introduction of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Kenyan secondary schools. Specifically, it is a case study of four schools with no previous access to ICT. The professional development program from which data for this study were drawn was designed to support teachers learning to integrate ICT in the curriculum. Using a mixed method research approach, we collected data from multiple sources and triangulated the views of various stakeholders: questionnaires with teachers, focus groups with teachers, school leaders and ICT coordinators, field observations and document analysis. While the broader program focused on the use of ICT, the results highlighted in this study focus on the development of the four schools with respect to 1) vision building, 2) leadership, 3) collaboration, 4) expertise, and 5) access to adequate resources. The discussion centers on the challenges and opportunities inherent in understanding how to prepare schools in developing countries to integrate ICT in education

Evaluating the Underlying Gender Bias in Contextualized Word Embeddings

Gender bias is highly impacting natural language processing applications. Word embeddings have clearly been proven both to keep and amplify gender biases that are present in current data sources. Recently, contextualized word embeddings have enhanced previous word embedding techniques by computing word vector representations dependent on the sentence they appear in. In this paper, we study the impact of this conceptual change in the word embedding computation in relation with gender bias. Our analysis includes different measures previously applied in the literature to standard word embeddings. Our findings suggest that contextualized word embeddings are less biased than standard ones even when the latter are debiased