You can't see what you can't see: Experimental evidence for how much relevant information may be missed due to Google's Web search personalisation

The influence of Web search personalisation on professional knowledge work is an understudied area. Here we investigate how public sector officials self-assess their dependency on the Google Web search engine, whether they are aware of the potential impact of algorithmic biases on their ability to retrieve all relevant information, and how much relevant information may actually be missed due to Web search personalisation. We find that the majority of participants in our experimental study are neither aware that there is a potential problem nor do they have a strategy to mitigate the risk of missing relevant information when performing online searches. Most significantly, we provide empirical evidence that up to 20% of relevant information may be missed due to Web search personalisation. This work has significant implications for Web research by public sector professionals, who should be provided with training about the potential algorithmic biases that may affect their judgments and decision making, as well as clear guidelines how to minimise the risk of missing relevant information.Comment: paper submitted to the 11th Intl. Conf. on Social Informatics; revision corrects error in interpretation of parameter Psi/p in RBO resulting from discrepancy between the documentation of the implementation in R (https://rdrr.io/bioc/gespeR/man/rbo.html) and the original definition (https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1852106) as per 20/05/201

Conceptions of excellence in teaching and learning and implications for future policy and practice

Within a diverse and expanding system of higher education (HE), such as in the UK, discourse on teaching and student learning highlights tensions between different notions of excellence. For example, excellence as a positional good for students, an aspirational target for continuous quality enhancement, a form of reputational advantage for HE institutions or a means of achieving governmental economic and social goals. Concepts of excellence such as these also operate differently at the level of the individual, the academic unit, the institution and an HE system. Discussion about excellence usually focuses on teaching, and there is much less attention given to excellence in student learning, or even students’ perceptions of excellent teaching. The emphasis tends to be on process and form rather than content; so, what is being taught and learned has become increasingly obscured by concerns over whether teaching and learning are performed excellently. In the literature on pedagogy, there is a large body of writing that employs psychologised understandings of teaching and learning processes and which focuses on micro-level transactions between teachers and students. Though there is some conflicting evidence surrounding the idea of a hierarchy of approaches to learning and teaching – surface, deep and strategic – there seems to be consensus that excellence in pedagogy is associated with more sophisticated conceptions of learning and even, perhaps, of knowledge and its construction. However, it is clear that the dynamics of the relationship between teaching and learning are mediated by students’ perceptions of their environment and by their own motivations to study: excellence in student learning may or may not require excellent teaching. Concepts of teaching excellence are linked to two other notions, viz. the scholarship of teaching and the expert teacher, with some suggestion that excellence should be an attribute of any professional teacher – perhaps confusing excellence with notions of good (enough) teaching or even ‘fitness for purpose’. Much has also been written about institutional mechanisms for recognising and rewarding excellent teaching and the need for these to reflect an institution’s values, missions and culture. A recurring critical theme within the literature contends that the current focus on teaching (and to a lesser extent learning) excellence is symptomatic of a ubiquitous contemporary desire to measure HE performance by means of standardised criteria and quasi-scientific practices. Reinforced by the marketisation of HE and the repositioning of students as consumers, commercial publishers draw on these performance measures to compile institutional rankings, which construct broader notions of ‘excellence’ and ‘world class’ qualities in particular ways. These aggregations of available data appear to be biased towards research reputation and academic prestige, and reduce teaching ‘excellence’ to the numerical ratios between students and academic faculty, and learning to the results of student satisfaction surveys. The biases in favour of particular notions of ‘excellence’ are even more apparent in the increasingly influential world rankings of institutions: with Western, English language and ‘big science’ values predominating. This paper draws on two recent research studies undertaken by the UK Open University’s Centre for Higher Education Research and Information: a review of literature on teaching and learning to elicit conceptions of excellence; and research on league tables (rankings) and their impacts on HE institutions in England. It looks at how the term ‘excellence’ is used in the context of teaching and the student learning experience in: policy documents, research literatures, guidance material and the publicity surrounding commercially published institutional rankings. It examines the key concepts underlying such usage and considers the implications of these for future policies for developing and promoting excellence in a diverse system as it moves beyond mass to universal HE

Personalised Learning: Developing a Vygotskian Framework for E-learning

Personalisation has emerged as a central feature of recent educational strategies in the UK and abroad. At the heart of this is a vision to empower learners to take more ownership of their learning and develop autonomy. While the introduction of digital technologies is not enough to effect this change, embedding the affordances of new technologies is expected to offer new routes for creating personalised learning environments. The approach is not unique to education, with consumer technologies offering a 'personalised' relationship which is both engaging and dynamic, however the challenge remains for learning providers to capture and transpose this to educational contexts. As learners begin to utilise a range of tools to pursue communicative and collaborative actions, the first part of this paper will use analysis of activity logs to uncover interesting trends for maturing e-learning platforms across over 100 UK learning providers. While personalisation appeals to marketing theories this paper will argue that if learning is to become personalised one must ask what the optimal instruction for any particular learner is? For Vygotsky this is based in the zone of proximal development, a way of understanding the causal-dynamics of development that allow appropriate pedagogical interventions. The second part of this paper will interpret personalised learning as the organising principle for a sense-making framework for e-learning. In this approach personalised learning provides the context for assessing the capabilities of e-learning using Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development as the framework for assessing learner potential and development

Diversity, Assortment, Dissimilarity, Variety: A Study of Diversity Measures Using Low Level Features for Video Retrieval

In this paper we present a number of methods for re-ranking video search results in order to introduce diversity into the set of search results. The usefulness of these approaches is evaluated in comparison with similarity based measures, for the TRECVID 2007 collection and tasks [11]. For the MAP of the search results we find that some of our approaches perform as well as similarity based methods. We also find that some of these results can improve the P@N values for some of the lower N values. The most successful of these approaches was then implemented in an interactive search system for the TRECVID 2008 interactive search tasks. The responses from the users indicate that they find the more diverse search results extremely useful

Age group, location or pedagogue: factors affecting parental choice of kindergartens in Hungary

Hungary has experienced significant political, economic, demographic and social changes since the end of Soviet domination in the 1990s. The gradual move towards liberal-democracy has been accompanied by growing emphasis on individualism, choice and diversity. Universal kindergarten provision for 5-6 year olds is a long established feature of the Hungarian education system, but little is known about parental choice (Török, 2004). A case study (Yin, 2004) of factors influencing parental choice and satisfaction was undertaken in one Hungarian town. This was based on a survey of 251 parents of children attending both mixed-age and same-age groups across 12 kindergartens. Parents suggested that the most important influences were geographical location and the individual pedagogue(s). Given that traditionally each pedagogue follows ‘their’ cohort from kindergarten entry to primary school, their influence appears heightened. Although generally satisfied with their chosen arrangement, parents from same-age groups expressed significantly more confidence and satisfaction, particularly in relation to cognitive development and preparation for school. Parents appear less convinced about the trend towards mixed-age groups and questions are raised about sufficiency of evidence of their benefits in a Hungarian context and the driving factors behind change

From Personalization to Adaptivity: Creating Immersive Visits through Interactive Digital Storytelling at the Acropolis Museum

Storytelling has recently become a popular way to guide museum visitors, replacing traditional exhibit-centric descriptions by story-centric cohesive narrations with references to the exhibits and multimedia content. This work presents the fundamental elements of the CHESS project approach, the goal of which is to provide adaptive, personalized, interactive storytelling for museum visits. We shortly present the CHESS project and its background, we detail the proposed storytelling and user models, we describe the provided functionality and we outline the main tools and mechanisms employed. Finally, we present the preliminary results of a recent evaluation study that are informing several directions for future work