172 research outputs found

    Uncovering the Myths of Shared Reading English Picture Books for Chinese Families: A Narrative Inquiry

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    This doctoral research explored the experiences of Chinese parents in parent-child shared reading on English picture books (EPBs). It was unique in its approach, taking the perspective and standpoint of the parents as the research stance, and was one of the few studies in the existing literature to do so. The Narrative Inquiry proposed by Polkinghorne (1995) was adopted to explore Chinese parents\u27 voices, especially the unspoken ones. The study aimed to learn from Chinese parents\u27 experiences, provided valuable insights into their reflections and expectations of their family literacy activities, and contributed to the limited research on English family literacy in the Chinese context. The findings of this study suggest that, in the current Chinese context, parent-child shared reading practices on EPBs were influenced by their beliefs about literacy, which were highly shaped by their own literacy experiences, as well as the socio-cultural environment, SES, and educational level in which they were situated. The results contributed to a better understanding of how Chinese parents explore their literacy beliefs to reflect their experience of the parent-child shared EPBs reading by making these activities unique, relevant, and meaningful. In addition, the study revealed that these parents showed open-mindedness and inclusiveness towards topics, such as language skills and pedagogical framework, related to shared reading and had a solid learning awareness and motivation to implement family literacy practices. However, the study also highlighted the deficiencies in their socialized family literacy support system. And the impact of the unregulated commercialized environment of education on their implementation of English family literacy activities. The study provided more background literature for future research on English family literacy in China and further insight into future exploration of parent-child shared reading on EPBs and English family literacy in the Chinese context

    Novel Datasets, User Interfaces and Learner Models to Improve Learner Engagement Prediction on Educational Videos

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    With the emergence of Open Education Resources (OERs), educational content creation has rapidly scaled up, making a large collection of new materials made available. Among these, we find educational videos, the most popular modality for transferring knowledge in the technology-enhanced learning paradigm. Rapid creation of learning resources opens up opportunities in facilitating sustainable education, as the potential to personalise and recommend specific materials that align with individual users’ interests, goals, knowledge level, language and stylistic preferences increases. However, the quality and topical coverage of these materials could vary significantly, posing significant challenges in managing this large collection, including the risk of negative user experience and engagement with these materials. The scarcity of support resources such as public datasets is another challenge that slows down the development of tools in this research area. This thesis develops a set of novel tools that improve the recommendation of educational videos. Two novel datasets and an e-learning platform with a novel user interface are developed to support the offline and online testing of recommendation models for educational videos. Furthermore, a set of learner models that accounts for the learner interests, knowledge, novelty and popularity of content is developed through this thesis. The different models are integrated together to propose a novel learner model that accounts for the different factors simultaneously. The user studies conducted on the novel user interface show that the new interface encourages users to explore the topical content more rigorously before making relevance judgements about educational videos. Offline experiments on the newly constructed datasets show that the newly proposed learner models outperform their relevant baselines significantly

    Development of an Augmented Reality Interface for Intuitive Robot Programming

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    As the demand for advanced robotic systems continues to grow, the need for new technologies and techniques that can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of robot programming is imperative. The latter relies heavily on the effective communication of tasks between the user and the robot. To address this issue, we developed an Augmented Reality (AR) interface that incorporates Head Mounted Display (HMD) capabilities, and integrated it with an active learning framework for intuitive programming of robots. This integration enables the execution of conditional tasks, bridging the gap between user and robot knowledge. The active learning model with the user's guidance incrementally programs a complex task and after encoding the skills, generates a high level task graph. Then the holographic robot is visualising individual skills of the task in order to increase the user's intuition of the whole procedure with sensory information retrieved from the physical robot in real-time. The interactive aspect of the interface can be utilised in this phase, by providing the user the option of actively validating the learnt skills or potentially changing them and thus generating a new skill sequence. Teaching the real robot through teleoperation by using the HMD is also possible for the user to increase the directness and immersion factors of teaching procedure while safely manipulating the physical robot from a distance. The evaluation of the proposed framework is conducted through a series of experiments employing the developed interface on the real system. These experiments aim to assess the degree of intuitiveness provided by the interface features to the user and to determine the extent of similarity between the virtual system's behavior during the robot programming procedure and that of its physical counterpart

    Audio-Visual Egocentric Action Recognition

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    Maine State Government Administrative Report 1987-1988

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    https://digitalmaine.com/me_annual_reports/1014/thumbnail.jp
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