SCAFFOLDING COLOUR CODES AND SAW APPROACH IN ESL ACADEMIC WRITING

Past researches have shown that students use visual organizers to connect content and ideas in their writing. Graphic organizers serve as scaffolds to organize ideas in essays. The use of graphic organizers facilitates chunking of information and help in learning. Colour codes act as scaffolds (templates) for writers to transfer the information from the graphic organizers into paragraphs. The whole act of scaffolding knowledge to form new knowledge provides a learning experience to the learner. This research explores yet an alternative method for writers to learn to write paragraphs using colour codes as scaffolds. This method is rooted from the concepts of Selective Attention embedding colour codes as scaffolds. Colour codes are used to focus the learners’ attention during the learning of academic writing. Modelling is used so learners can imitate the expected behaviour by the teachers. Graphic organizers are used as scaffolds for learners to write their essay. After one semester of using the techniques such as modelling, and scaffolding in the writing classroom, learners were asked to respond to a survey. 32 students participated in this action research. They responded to a questionnaire to reveal what they feel about this approach to ESL academic writing. The findings of this study reveal how students perceive learning ESL academic writing using the selective attention writing approach.  Article visualizations

Service-Learning Times : semester 1, 2018/19

Service-Learning (S-L) is a pedagogy that drives learning, innovation, contribution and transformation. It provides experiential learning opportunities for students by connecting academic knowledge to impactful community service with ongoing reflection during the process. The diverse and insightful S-L experience enables students to discover their potential, address the challenges faced by the community, as well as transform beneficiaries’ lives by providing support to collaborating partners. This booklet highlights the courses with S-L elements offered this semester. Students wishing to experience the best of S-L should plan and act quickly while places are available.https://commons.ln.edu.hk/sl_times/1002/thumbnail.jp

Students' drafting strategies and text quality

The study reports an analysis of the drafts produced by two groups of students during an exam. Drafts were categorized as a function of some of their graphic features (e.g. their length), and of their different planning strategies used for their production (e.g. note draft, organized draft, composed draft). Grades obtained by the students on their essays related to the different categories of drafts. Results show that 2/3 of both groups of students made some kinds of draft. Drafts mostly consisted of note drafts or long composed drafts. Very few consisted of organized drafts. However, students that wrote these latter drafts obtained the best ratings. Drafting strategy was homogeneous for half of the students who used one category. The other half successively used two drafting modes. In that case they mostly associated writing with jotting down notes or with some marks of organization. Here, again, students who organized, even partially, their drafts obtained the highest grades. Very few corrections were brought to the long drafts and they concerned the surface (spelling or lexicon), not the content or the plan. This research shows that only a limited number of students used an efficient drafting (organized draft) even though such a strategy is generally associated with the highest ratings

Pedagogically informed metadata content and structure for learning and teaching

In order to be able to search, compare, gap analyse, recommend, and visualise learning objects, learning resources, or teaching assets, the metadata structure and content must be able to support pedagogically informed reasoning, inference, and machine processing over the knowledge representations. In this paper, we present the difficulties with current metadata standards in education: Dublin Core educational version and IEEELOM, using examples drawn from the areas of e-learning, institutional admissions, and learners seeking courses. The paper suggests expanded metadata components based on an e-learning system engineering model to support pedagogically informed interoperability. We illustrate some examples of the metadata relevant to competency in the nurse training domain

Media education technologies in developing students' professional competence

While pervasive healthcare systems bear the potential to provide patients with a new quality of medical homecare, the complexity of such systems raises fundamental questions of behavior, communication and technology acceptance. This is especially important, as users of future healthcare systems will be increasingly characterized by diversity. Relying only on highly experienced and technology-prone user groups, which might have been typical users in the last decades, is not sufficient anymore. Rather, elderly users, users with a completely different upbringing and domain knowledge, and ill or handicapped people will have to use the systems. Today, the understanding, in which way physical, emotional and cognitive abilities, caused by individual learning histories and health states, may impact the usage and acceptance of pervasive healthcare technologies, is restricted. This research contributes to this topic by investigating the acceptance motives of aged users with different health states regarding three different implementation concepts for medical technologies: medical technology implemented in mobile devices, smart environments and smart clothing. Using the questionnaire method, a total of 82 users between 40 and 92 years of age were examined regarding their usage motives and barriers with respect to the different technology concepts. Overall, it was revealed that acceptance issues and users' needs and wants should be considered in order to successfully design new medical technologies