Building literacy communities of practice across subject disciplines in secondary schools

This paper examines the relationship between communities of practice and literacy as a pedagogical focus in secondary schools in New Zealand in the light of Corson's arguments about critical conditions for effective language policy development in schools. It is also positioned within the current international emphasis (at least in English-speaking countries) on improving students' literacy in order to increase academic achievement. Part of this focus stems from an unbalanced relationship between learning mainly content (what) and learning processes (how and why) through content in secondary school classrooms. If teachers' work is centred on equipping students with the learning and thinking tools that allow them to navigate, make sense of and critically examine subject content, then literacy as a pedagogical focus can be seen as supporting that shift. However, shifting secondary teachers to a focus on learning and thinking processes can be difficult, because it implicates their pedagogical values, practices and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). How schools in New Zealand have developed this focus and made efforts to sustain it are examined through the concept of communities of practice

An Investigation into the Pedagogical Features of Documents

Characterizing the content of a technical document in terms of its learning utility can be useful for applications related to education, such as generating reading lists from large collections of documents. We refer to this learning utility as the "pedagogical value" of the document to the learner. While pedagogical value is an important concept that has been studied extensively within the education domain, there has been little work exploring it from a computational, i.e., natural language processing (NLP), perspective. To allow a computational exploration of this concept, we introduce the notion of "pedagogical roles" of documents (e.g., Tutorial and Survey) as an intermediary component for the study of pedagogical value. Given the lack of available corpora for our exploration, we create the first annotated corpus of pedagogical roles and use it to test baseline techniques for automatic prediction of such roles.Comment: 12th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA) at EMNLP 2017; 12 page

Encouraging Effective Group Work: The pedagogical challenges involved in designing a staff workshop

This paper discusses two main pedagogical challenges involved in designing a workshop for staff in the Schools of Arts and Social Sciences. While it may be simple to prepare a linear, teacher-driven presentation which can be delivered to an audience of any size, this misses the opportunity to design a flexible learning experience in which the participants play an active role. The design for the workshop, which is based on the pedagogical theories of facilitative teaching (Biggs 1999) and approaches to learning (Marton and Säljö 1984), is described, and several strategies for encouraging deep learning are detailed

Model-driven description and validation of composite learning content

Authoring of learning content for courseware systems is a complex activity requiring the combination of a range of design and validation techniques. We introduce the CAVIAr courseware models allowing for learning content description and validation. Model-based representation and analysis of different concerns such as the subject domain, learning context, resources and instructional design used are key contributors to this integrated solution. Personalised learning is particularly difficult to design as dynamic configurations cannot easily be predicted and tested. A tool-supported technique based on CAVIAr can alleviate this complexity through the validation of a set of pedagogical and non-pedagogical requirements. Courseware validation checks intra- and inter-content relationships and the compliance with requirements and educational theories

The Study of Pedagogical Practice of Mobile Learning in Russia

The analysis of Russian and International experience of mobile learning is given in the article, the components of mobile learning (mobile devices, net technologies, pedagogical technologies) are revealed, pedagogical conditions of introduction of mobile learning in practice of Russian school are formulated. The special attention is paid to importance of the use of mobile learning under conditions of transfer to the new educational standards, because the use of mobile devices at the lessons develops in pupils the ability to work with information, interact with a teacher and other pupils in net. It is demonstrated, that mobile learning is oriented on the attainment of meta-subject educational results, favors the formation of ability to study during the whole life. The existing practice of mobile learning (inverted lesson, park lesson, distant courses and so on) are analyzed. The importance of pedagogical technologies, oriented on the wide independent work of the pupils is proved. The prospects of further studies on this problem are described, the necessity of specialized training of teachers to the use of mobile learning at school is proved, the list of topics for the study in the system of qualification improvement of the teachers and forms of the work with them is given: webinars, qualification improvement courses and also informal improvement of qualification in net communities (blogs)

Teaching and learning in information retrieval

A literature review of pedagogical methods for teaching and learning information retrieval is presented. From the analysis of the literature a taxonomy was built and it is used to structure the paper. Information Retrieval (IR) is presented from different points of view: technical levels, educational goals, teaching and learning methods, assessment and curricula. The review is organized around two levels of abstraction which form a taxonomy that deals with the different aspects of pedagogy as applied to information retrieval. The first level looks at the technical level of delivering information retrieval concepts, and at the educational goals as articulated by the two main subject domains where IR is delivered: computer science (CS) and library and information science (LIS). The second level focuses on pedagogical issues, such as teaching and learning methods, delivery modes (classroom, online or e-learning), use of IR systems for teaching, assessment and feedback, and curricula design. The survey, and its bibliography, provides an overview of the pedagogical research carried out in the field of IR. It also provides a guide for educators on approaches that can be applied to improving the student learning experiences

A Framework for the Design and Implementation of Learning Objects: a Competence-based Approach

This paper presents a framework for the design and implementation of learning objects using a competence-based approach. This framework is illustrated by the development of a standalone Windows application (Trilho GOA) whose primary purpose is to create standardized pedagogical contents trough the aggregation and standardization of instructional resources in several formats that can be used later on a Learning Management System (LMS) supporting SCORM 1.2. The paper contains a brief introduction to the developed software, its system architecture, main features and several pedagogical advantages for its users