3,281 research outputs found
E-learning usage from a social constructivist learning approach: perspectives of Iraqi Kurdistan students in social studies classrooms
Background: Many schools in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region have incorporated information and communication technologies (ICT) into their environments. However, the results have shown that computer usage has had only a minimal effect on the classroom environment and learning outcomes. This minimal effect could be attributed to the teaching and learning of social studies subjects, which often rely on a traditional vision of teaching and an excessive inclusion of facts and dates in school textbooks. Consequently, students feel compelled to memorize all the information to pass tests. Yet, merely employing technology alongside traditional teaching and assessment approaches, such as lecturing or having students study in isolation without any form of collaborative learning, does not foster the development of students' higher-order thinking skills. It's time to revitalize school curricula and teaching practices to embrace a more contemporary, open-minded approach to social science education. This approach should incorporate a social constructivist perspective with technology to better instill international moral values such as democracy, respect for differences, and learning to live harmoniously with others. Aim: This cross-sectional study aims to investigate the impact of a social constructivist learning approach on the acceptance of technology and its influence on perceived e-learning outcomes among students in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region. Additionally, this study examines the differences in the effects of the social constructivist learning approach and dimensions of technology acceptance on perceived e-learning outcomes between students studying social studies in Arabic and those studying social studies in English. Setting and participants: Data were gathered from both public and private schools in Erbil governorate, situated in northern Iraq and affiliated with the Ministry of Education-Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government. To select participants, a random sampling technique was employed, encompassing students in grades 8 through 12 of both genders. The data were obtained through a self-administered paper-based questionnaire. Instruments: Data were collected using a social constructivist learning environment survey (personal relevance, critical voice, shared control, uncertainty, student negotiation), dimensions of the attitude toward technology (attitude toward technology use, perceived usefulness, feeling ease of use, learning facility condition, and subjective norms), some additional external variables (investigation, respect for difference, student economic ability, and perceived e-learning outcomes), and socio-demographic data. Conclusion: This study is intended to emphasize the significance of employing constructivist pedagogy to enhance the technology acceptance model and improve learning outcomes. The findings of the study showed that a social constructivist learning environment had a favorable influence on perceived e-learning outcomes as well as ease of use, perceived usefulness, investigation, and respect for difference. Attitude towards technology use and perceived usefulness are contributory factors to the positive perceived e-learning outcomes. Furthermore, feeling ease of use technology has a positive effect on both attitude towards technology use and perceived usefulness. Perceived usefulness also has a direct positive impact on attitudes towards technology use. Finally, students’ technological experience is positively correlated with feeling ease of use but not with perceived usefulness. Additionally, regarding the comparison between students studying social studies in Arabic and those in English, the findings demonstrated that students studying social studies in English showed stronger positive effects from the social constructivist learning environment on their perceived e-learning outcomes. Conversely, students studying social studies in Arabic demonstrated a more potent positive effect of perceived usefulness on their attitudes towards technology. Moreover, the positive impact of an attitude towards technology use on perceived e-learning outcomes was more pronounced among the Arabic students compared to their English counterparts. Additionally, the influence of the learning facility on the perceived ease of use, as well as the perceived usefulness of technology, differed between the two groups. The English group experienced a more substantial positive impact. However, there was no significant difference observed in the effect of feeling ease of use on attitudes towards technology use between the English and Arabic student groups. Furthermore, no significant difference was observed in the effect of perceived usefulness on the social constructivist learning environment for either group. The findings from this research are expected to contribute to the development of effective and efficient counseling and support intervention programs. These programs can play a crucial role in transforming teachers
Multidisciplinary perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and the law
This open access book presents an interdisciplinary, multi-authored, edited collection of chapters on Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) and the Law. AI technology has come to play a central role in the modern data economy. Through a combination of increased computing power, the growing availability of data and the advancement of algorithms, AI has now become an umbrella term for some of the most transformational technological breakthroughs of this age. The importance of AI stems from both the opportunities that it offers and the challenges that it entails. While AI applications hold the promise of economic growth and efficiency gains, they also create significant risks and uncertainty. The potential and perils of AI have thus come to dominate modern discussions of technology and ethics – and although AI was initially allowed to largely develop without guidelines or rules, few would deny that the law is set to play a fundamental role in shaping the future of AI. As the debate over AI is far from over, the need for rigorous analysis has never been greater. This book thus brings together contributors from different fields and backgrounds to explore how the law might provide answers to some of the most pressing questions raised by AI. An outcome of the Católica Research Centre for the Future of Law and its interdisciplinary working group on Law and Artificial Intelligence, it includes contributions by leading scholars in the fields of technology, ethics and the law.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Digitalization and Development
This book examines the diffusion of digitalization and Industry 4.0 technologies in Malaysia by focusing on the ecosystem critical for its expansion. The chapters examine the digital proliferation in major sectors of agriculture, manufacturing, e-commerce and services, as well as the intermediary organizations essential for the orderly performance of socioeconomic agents.
The book incisively reviews policy instruments critical for the effective and orderly development of the embedding organizations, and the regulatory framework needed to quicken the appropriation of socioeconomic synergies from digitalization and Industry 4.0 technologies. It highlights the importance of collaboration between government, academic and industry partners, as well as makes key recommendations on how to encourage adoption of IR4.0 technologies in the short- and long-term.
This book bridges the concepts and applications of digitalization and Industry 4.0 and will be a must-read for policy makers seeking to quicken the adoption of its technologies
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum
Digital Innovations for a Circular Plastic Economy in Africa
Plastic pollution is one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century that requires innovative and varied solutions. Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, this book brings together interdisciplinary, multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder perspectives exploring challenges and opportunities for utilising digital innovations to manage and accelerate the transition to a circular plastic economy (CPE).
This book is organised into three sections bringing together discussion of environmental conditions, operational dimensions and country case studies of digital transformation towards the circular plastic economy. It explores the environment for digitisation in the circular economy, bringing together perspectives from practitioners in academia, innovation, policy, civil society and government agencies. The book also highlights specific country case studies in relation to the development and implementation of different innovative ideas to drive the circular plastic economy across the three sub-Saharan African regions. Finally, the book interrogates the policy dimensions and practitioner perspectives towards a digitally enabled circular plastic economy.
Written for a wide range of readers across academia, policy and practice, including researchers, students, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), digital entrepreneurs, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and multilateral agencies, policymakers and public officials, this book offers unique insights into complex, multilayered issues relating to the production and management of plastic waste and highlights how digital innovations can drive the transition to the circular plastic economy in Africa.
The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license
Machine Learning-powered Course Allocation
We introduce a machine learning-powered course allocation mechanism.
Concretely, we extend the state-of-the-art Course Match mechanism with a
machine learning-based preference elicitation module. In an iterative,
asynchronous manner, this module generates pairwise comparison queries that are
tailored to each individual student. Regarding incentives, our machine
learning-powered course match (MLCM) mechanism retains the attractive
strategyproofness in the large property of Course Match. Regarding welfare, we
perform computational experiments using a simulator that was fitted to
real-world data. Our results show that, compared to Course Match, MLCM
increases average student utility by 4%-9% and minimum student utility by
10%-21%, even with only ten comparison queries. Finally, we highlight the
practicability of MLCM and the ease of piloting it for universities currently
using Course Match
Advances and Applications of DSmT for Information Fusion. Collected Works, Volume 5
This fifth volume on Advances and Applications of DSmT for Information Fusion collects theoretical and applied contributions of researchers working in different fields of applications and in mathematics, and is available in open-access. The collected contributions of this volume have either been published or presented after disseminating the fourth volume in 2015 in international conferences, seminars, workshops and journals, or they are new. The contributions of each part of this volume are chronologically ordered.
First Part of this book presents some theoretical advances on DSmT, dealing mainly with modified Proportional Conflict Redistribution Rules (PCR) of combination with degree of intersection, coarsening techniques, interval calculus for PCR thanks to set inversion via interval analysis (SIVIA), rough set classifiers, canonical decomposition of dichotomous belief functions, fast PCR fusion, fast inter-criteria analysis with PCR, and improved PCR5 and PCR6 rules preserving the (quasi-)neutrality of (quasi-)vacuous belief assignment in the fusion of sources of evidence with their Matlab codes.
Because more applications of DSmT have emerged in the past years since the apparition of the fourth book of DSmT in 2015, the second part of this volume is about selected applications of DSmT mainly in building change detection, object recognition, quality of data association in tracking, perception in robotics, risk assessment for torrent protection and multi-criteria decision-making, multi-modal image fusion, coarsening techniques, recommender system, levee characterization and assessment, human heading perception, trust assessment, robotics, biometrics, failure detection, GPS systems, inter-criteria analysis, group decision, human activity recognition, storm prediction, data association for autonomous vehicles, identification of maritime vessels, fusion of support vector machines (SVM), Silx-Furtif RUST code library for information fusion including PCR rules, and network for ship classification.
Finally, the third part presents interesting contributions related to belief functions in general published or presented along the years since 2015. These contributions are related with decision-making under uncertainty, belief approximations, probability transformations, new distances between belief functions, non-classical multi-criteria decision-making problems with belief functions, generalization of Bayes theorem, image processing, data association, entropy and cross-entropy measures, fuzzy evidence numbers, negator of belief mass, human activity recognition, information fusion for breast cancer therapy, imbalanced data classification, and hybrid techniques mixing deep learning with belief functions as well
Workshop Proceedings of the 12th edition of the KONVENS conference
The 2014 issue of KONVENS is even more a forum for exchange: its main topic is the interaction between Computational Linguistics and Information Science, and the synergies such interaction, cooperation and integrated views can produce. This topic at the crossroads of different research traditions which deal with natural language as a container of knowledge, and with methods to extract and manage knowledge that is linguistically represented is close to the heart of many researchers at the Institut für Informationswissenschaft und Sprachtechnologie of Universität Hildesheim: it has long been one of the institute’s research topics, and it has received even more attention over the last few years
Cross-Supply Chain Collaboration Platform for Pallet Management
Standardized pallets are an important factor in today's logistics sector to enable efficient processes in transport, storage and handling. By using an open exchange pool for pallets, additional opportunities arise for horizontal and vertical collaboration of various actors from different supply chains. The dissertation "Cross-Supply Chain Collaboration Platform for Pallet Management" investigates the potential of a digital platform for such cross-actor collaboration in pallet management. The designed platform has special mechanisms for balancing pallet debts that arise in the network and for joint planning of empty pallet flows. Therefore, the impact of the designed platforms on logistic processes, especially transports, is explored using simulation modeling. Furthermore, blockchain technology is investigated, which could be used for the implementation of the platform concept and could generate trust in a network of unknown actors. In this context, an empirical online-experiment is used to analyze in a differentiated way which specific features of the blockchain technology generate trust in technology and how these features interact with each other
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