An e-learning instructional design framework for mobile devices in Africa

English text, with summaries in English, Afrikaans and ZuluThis study aims to propose an e-learning framework for mobile devices in Africa to help improve enrolment rates and education standards in the FET (Further Education and Training) phase. The study is qualitative in nature and employs document analysis as main research method. An overview of the South African education context with supporting statistical data to motivate why an e-learning alternative is crucial for improving South African and African education is provided. The literature review includes a descriptive analysis of 7 existing e- and m-learning frameworks, with key features highlighted for possible adaptation or incorporation into an e-learning framework for Africa. Behaviourism, Constructivism and Connectivism are discussed as applicable learning theories to pedagogically underpin this proposed e-learning framework. Thereafter, a critical evaluation of current South African education policy documents (White Papers, the Norms and Standards for Educators and the Draft Policy for the Provision and Management of Learning Teaching and Support Materials) is conducted to determine whether these policies support and enable e-learning effectively. Part 2 of Chapter 5 comprises a critical analysis and comparison of education systems and applicable legislation in the USA, Finland and Malawi to establish how education is structured and how e-learning is administered in these countries to make relevant recommendations for South Africa and to inform the design of an e-learning framework for Africa. Research findings are presented as answers to the research questions posed and the proposed e-learning framework with further recommendations are presented to the South African Department of Basic Education, teachers and researchers.Die doel van hierdie studie is om ‘n e-onderrig-en-leer raamwerk vir mobiele toestelle vir Afrika voor te stel, sodat inskrywingsgetalle en onderrig- en leerstandaarde in die Verdere Onderrig en Opleidings (VOO) fase verbeter kan word. Dit is ‘n kwalitatiewe studie en dokumentanalise word as navorsingsmetode toegepas. ‘n Oorsig van die huidige Suid-Afrikaanse onderwysstelsel en konteks met ondersteunende statistiese bevindinge word verduidelik om e-onderrig-en-leer as noodsaaklike alternatief vir Suid-Afrika en Afrika te motiveer. Die literatuuroorsig sluit ‘n beskrywende analise van sewe bestaande e- en m-onderrig-en-leer (mobiele-onderrig-en-leer) raamwerke in. Hoofkenmerke van elke raamwerk word uitgelig vir moontlike aanpassing en inkorporering in ‘n e-onderrig-en-leer raamwerk vir die Afrika-konteks. Leerteorië, nl Behaviourisme, Konstruktivisme en Konnektivisme (Connectivism) word in diepte bespreek as pedagogies fundamenteel om die e-onderrig-en-leer raamwerk te onderbou en te ondersteun. ‘n Kritiese evaluasie van Suid-Afrikaanse onderwysbeleid (d.w.s. Witskrifte, die Norme and Standaarde vir Onderwysers en die konsepdokument oor die Voorsiening en Bestuur van Onderrig-, Leer- en Ondersteuningsmateriaal) is gedoen om vas te stel of die beleid wel e-onderrig-en-leer effektief ondersteun en prakties moontlik maak. ‘n Krities analitiese en vergelykende studie van die VSA (Verenigde State van Amerika), Finland en Malawi se onderwysstelsels- en wetgewing is gedoen in hoofstuk 5 deel 2 om te bepaal hoe dié lande onderwys struktureer en hoe e-onderrig-en–leer geadministreer word, sodat relevante voorstelle vir Suid-Afrika gemaak kan word en om insae te lewer in die ontwerp van ‘n e-onderrig-en-leer raamwerk toepaslik vir die Afrika-kontinent. Navorsingsbevindinge word voorgelê aan die Suid-Afrikaanse Departement van Basiese Onderwys, onderwysers sowel as aan navorsers.Lolu cwaningo luhlose ukuphakamisa uhlaka lwe-e-learning lamadivaysi eselula e-Afrika ukusiza ukuthuthukisa izinga lokubhalisa nezindinganiso zemfundo kwiSigaba se-FET (Further Education and Training). Ucwaningo luyimfanelo enemvelo futhi lusebenzisa ukuhlaziywa kwedokhumenti njengendlela yokucwaninga eyinhloko. Ukuhlolisisa umongo wezemfundo waseNingizimu Afrika ngokusekela imniningwane yezibalo ukugqugquzela ukuthi kungani enye yokufunda email ibalulekile ekuthuthukiseni imfundo yaseNingizimu Afrika ne-Afrika. Ukubuyekezwa kwezincwadi kuhlanganisa ukuhlaziywa okuchazayo kwezinhlaka eziyisikhombisa ezisekhona ze-e- e-m-learning, nezici eziyinhloko eziqokonyiswe ukukhishwa kwe-adaption noma ukufakwa kwisakhiwo se-e-learning se-Afrika. Ukuzikhethela, Ukwakhiwa kwe-Constructivism (Kwe Zokwakha) kanye ne-Connectivism (Kwe Zokuxhumana) kuxoxwa njengezifundo ezifanele zokufunda ukusekela lolu hlelo oluhlongozwayo lwe-e-learning. Ngemuva kwaloko, ukuhlolwa okubalulekile kwemibhalo yamanje yemfundo yaseNingizimu Afrika (Amaphepha Asemhlophe, Imigomo Nemigomo Yabafundisi kanye neNqubomgomo Yohlaka Lokufundiswa Nezifundo Nokusekela) kwenziwa ukuze kutholakale ukuthi lezi zinqubomgomo zisekela futhi zikwazi yini ukufundisa nge-e-ephumelelayo. Ingxenye yesibili yeSahluko sesihlanu iqukethe ukuhlaziywa okubucayi kanye nokuqhathaniswa kwezinhlelo zemfundo kanye nemithetho esebenzayo eMelika, eFinland nase Malawi ukuqinisekisa ukuthi imfundo ihlelwe kanjani nokuthi i-e-learning inikezwa kanjani ukwenza izincomo ezifanele eNingizimu Afrika nokwazisa ukuklama uhlaka lwe-e-learning lwe-Afrika. Imiphumela yokucwaninga inikezwa njengezimpendulo zemibuzo yokucwaninga ephakanyisiwe kanye nohlaka oluhlongozwayo lwe-e-learning kanye nezincomo ezengeziwe ezethulwa eMnyangweni wezemfundo Eyisisekelo, othisha nabacwaningi baseNingizimu Afrika.Curriculum and Instructional StudiesM. Ed. (Curriculum Studies

Concept Development In Relation To The Biology Of Reproduction In Secondary Science : A Vygotskyan Perspective

The study of concept development in biology comes from a professional concern that arose in my classroom teaching - an inability, after many years practice of the techniques of ‘discovery science’, to accept the theoretical base of the individual secondary school pupil constructing science concepts mainly through experiment. From this concern arose my research question - the extent to which a developmental space could be defined in which the development of science concepts could take place. The instance for examining such a space would be science concepts of reproduction. To develop a model for such a space I looked at the work of Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky and a number of other theorists concerned with the issue of innate learning mechanisms and of constructivism and social constructivism. I adopted Vygotsky’s dialectical materialist approach in assessing the concepts involved. To test the emerging model I decided on a case study approach, defined in terms of both the case as instance and the case as issue - instance in that the focus would be a year 8 (Britain year 7) science class, with interviews across the year group The study would involve the case as issue in that I intended to walk through the process of concept formation in plant and human reproduction with the pupils. I applied a mixture of semi-structured interview and classroom observation, linked through the development of ‘structured situations’ in which models and materials were made available in specific social settings in the expectation that the pupils would construct meaning. The outcome of the investigation did not support the initial model, but it did suggest in outline a new model of a developmental space. This suggested that the different goals of teacher and pupils expressed themselves as implicit and explicit elements of the situation, often resolved by the pupils completing tasks without thought. This indicated that a common outcome of schooling was ‘encapsulation’, formal mental constructs lacking meaning. Elements of a new model would be the role of emotion and of the goal of activity

Developing Keywords Using Automated Clustering of Event Descriptions

This study investigated the use of automated clustering of event descriptions as a tool for developing a keyword taxonomy for a database product. Automatically-generated cluster labels were translated into keywords and domain experts reviewed the keywords alongside corresponding event descriptions. The experts evaluated the keywords for a) relevance to the event descriptions and b) goodness or use value as keywords. The results show that the keywords performed better in terms of goodness than in terms of relevance. In addition, data mining techniques showed that many of the keywords correlated closely with classifications already in use for the database

Improving the outcome of the critically ill with cortico- and sex-steroids employing clinico-transcriptomics approaches

Sepsis and septic shock exhibit a broad spectrum of immunological disorders with a very heterogeneous clinical manifestation. The heterogeneity makes understanding of pathomechanisms extremely difficult. With an aim to improve the outcome, this study employed clinico-transcriptomics approaches that effectively combine clinical and transcriptomics information to derive reproducible observations. The first clinico-transcriptomics approach was built to identify a subset ofpatients that might benefit from hydrocortisone (HC) treatment in septic shock patients. Serum ratio of IFNγ and IL-10 was found to be the best marker to make this treatment decision. It was validated further on three independent datasets. High ratio indicated better survival without HC treatment while a benefit was observed for low ratio when HC treatment was initiated. Transcriptomic evidence suggested that the patients with high ratio might be immunologicallyfit due to the presence of greater extent of activated macrophages and T-cells. The second clinico-transcriptomics approach was developed to reveal sex-based pathomechanisms in the trauma patients. The findings were validated in another dataset of patients with burn injuries. The approach included the synchronization of the time lapse of the profiles based on the temporal severity score of each patient. Females showed a better transcriptomic response in the mechanisms involving innate immunity, adaptive immunity, bio-energetic tolerance and wound healing. Sex-hormone receptor modulation in males by the treatment of Atraric acid and Flutamide have been shown to improve outcome in animal septic models. The transcriptomic evidence gathered in this thesis argued that such modulation might have enhanced the tolerance in the septic male mice. The insights provided by the clinico-transcriptomics approaches may significantly contribute to improving the outcome in critically ill patients with cortico- and sex- steroids

Using musical structures to communicate emotion

Includes bibliographical references.This study investigates the hypothesis that music has the ability to strongly influence emotions in listeners. It begins by challenging the accuracy of this presumption, provides a general psychological and philosophical overview of human emotions and their relation to music, and hypothesises a theory that accounts for the numerous different findings by authors around this topic. The study then attempts to investigate in what manner specific musical structures are linked to the expression of certain emotions; firstly through a literature review and secondly through the execution of empirical tests. These findings are summarised in the Conclusion. An Annexure to this study provides graphic representations of specific musical structures on valence x arousal diagrams that are of value to composers of music

Distributional Semantic Models of Attribute Meaning in Adjectives and Nouns

Hartung M. Distributional Semantic Models of Attribute Meaning in Adjectives and Nouns. Heidelberg: Universität Heidelberg; 2015

Distributional Semantic Models of Attribute Meaning in Adjectives and Nouns

Attributes such as SIZE, WEIGHT or COLOR are at the core of conceptualization, i.e., the formal representation of entities or events in the real world. In natural language, formal attributes find their counterpart in attribute nouns which can be used in order to generalize over individual properties (e.g., 'big' or 'small' in case of SIZE, 'blue' or 'red' in case of COLOR). In order to ascribe such properties to entities or events, adjective-noun phrases are a very frequent linguistic pattern (e.g., 'a blue shirt', 'a big lion'). In these constructions, attribute meaning is conveyed only implicitly, i.e., without being overtly realized at the phrasal surface. This thesis is about modeling attribute meaning in adjectives and nouns in a distributional semantics framework. This implies the acquisition of meaning representations for adjectives, nouns and their phrasal combination from corpora of natural language text in an unsupervised manner, without tedious handcrafting or manual annotation efforts. These phrase representations can be used to predict implicit attribute meaning from adjective-noun phrases -- a problem which will be referred to as attribute selection throughout this thesis. The approach to attribute selection proposed in this thesis is framed in structured distributional models. We model adjective and noun meanings as distinct semantic vectors in the same semantic space spanned by attributes as dimensions of meaning. Based on these word representations, we make use of vector composition operations in order to construct a phrase representation from which the most prominent attribute(s) being expressed in the compositional semantics of the adjective-noun phrase can be selected by means of an unsupervised selection function. This approach not only accounts for the linguistic principle of compositionality that underlies adjective-noun phrases, but also avoids inherent sparsity issues that result from the fact that the relationship between an adjective, a noun and a particular attribute is rarely explicitly observed in corpora. The attribute models developed in this thesis aim at a reconciliation of the conflict between specificity and sparsity in distributional semantic models. For this purpose, we compare various instantiations of attribute models capitalizing on pattern-based and dependency-based distributional information as well as attribute-specific latent topics induced from a weakly supervised adaptation of Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Moreover, we propose a novel framework of distributional enrichment in order to enhance structured vector representations by incorporating additional lexical information from complementary distributional sources. In applying distributional enrichment to distributional attribute models, we follow the idea to augment structured representations of adjectives and nouns to centroids of their nearest neighbours in semantic space, while keeping the principle of meaning representation along structured, interpretable dimensions intact. We evaluate our attribute models in several experiments on the attribute selection task framed for various attribute inventories, ranging from a thoroughly confined set of ten core attributes up to a large-scale set of 260 attributes. Our results show that large-scale attribute selection from distributional vector representations that have been acquired in an unsupervised setting is a challenging endeavor that can be rendered more feasible by restricting the semantic space to confined subsets of attributes. Beyond quantitative evaluation, we also provide a thorough analysis of performance factors (based on linear regression) that influence the effectiveness of a distributional attribute model for attribute selection. This investigation reflects strengths and weaknesses of the model and sheds light on the impact of a variety of linguistic factors involved in attribute selection, e.g., the relative contribution of adjective and noun meaning. In conclusion, we consider our work on attribute selection as an instructive showcase for applying methods from distributional semantics in the broader context of knowledge acquisition from text in order to alleviate issues that are related to implicitness and sparsity

Towards a phenomenology of dyslexia

In this thesis I apply Merleau-Ponty's brand of existential phenomenology to the developmental language disorder 'dyslexia'. Developmental dyslexia is marked by an unexpected failure to acquire written language skills, in particularly reading, spelling and aspects of writing, and has primarily been studied by experimental cognitive psychology, physiology, and more recently, the neurosciences. The current explanatory paradigm holds the view that symptoms of dyslexia are caused by deficits in phonological skills, in particularly verbal memory and phoneme awareness. As a means of facilitating previous research, I take a phenomenological approach to the pre-reflective, lived experience of dyslexia by studying the peculiar style of intentional relationships that are developed by dyslexics in linguistic situations. This approach adopts a non-causal, descriptive methodology which attends to the manner in which dyslexics not only have a disrupted experience of the written word, but also a meaningful relationship with language. Using the notion of the 'lived body', I propose that dyslexics are marked by a loosening of body intentionality in linguistic situations, and this is further interpreted as an incohesive sedimentation of skills. I apply these general findings to the topics of spatiality, expression and temporality, and conclude that dyslexics exhibit a different style of being-in-the-world. This difference in style is characterised as an interaction between the propensity to foreclose the transitional and differential structures of perceptual experience, and moreover, the possibility of sustaining a provisional relationship with language through the development of compensatory strategies, the latter of these observations prompting a new line of future qualitative research

The temporality of language : Kant's legacy in the work of Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin

Contrary to the idea that there are fundamental differences between the work of Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, the thesis shows that there exists a profound similarity in the direction of their projects, by exploring how they took up Kant's critical legacy concerning the temporality of language: the belonging together of language and time. The ground of Kant's system and of the necessity of systematicity - the three-fold synthesis which 'generates' time under the direction of conceptuality - is elucidated via the Second Analogy and the Critique of Teleological Judgment. It is argued that Kant's understanding of language and time remains fixed within a circular justification of Newtonian Science, which prevented him from taking up the critical resources of his treatment of teleological concepts and applying it to his idea of the critical system itself. Heidegger's and Benjamin's work may be understood as taking up the hermeneutic circularity of Kant's philosophical system, though freeing it from its appeal to a limited time determination. They both develop notions of a more originary temporality in conjunction with a linguistic phenomenology. They further allow this more critical thinking of language and time to reflexively fall back on the writing of philosophy itself. Their understanding of the temporality of language is explored through the way 'translation' focuses, in each case, a thinking of tradition and of linguistic works. The thesis rejects attempts to separate Heidegger's early work from his later approach, and further rejects a tendency to focus on Benjamin's style of writing in isolation from its theoretical basis. The thesis concludes by arguing that the work of both Heidegger and Benjamin points to a rethinking of Kant's legacy of the necessity of system, in terms of system as the inescapable belonging together of language and time

Organisational change from the perspectives of translation : a case study of transformation in the Libyan banking system

This study examines an organisational change process in its real-time. Two theoretical approaches have inspired a search for explanations to the process of change occurring as part of large transforming the Libyan banking sector to become compliant with the Islamic Banking and Finance (IBF) model. The first is change as fluxing reality (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). The second theoretical approach reflects insights mainly from new translation embodied in process philosophy and neo-institutionalist perspectives as articulated by Czarniawska and Joerges (1996). The two theoretical views are seen as complementary to empirical investigations that seek to capture the dynamic unfolding nature of organisational change. The study draws upon a cross sectional case-study approach in the banking sector in Libya and qualitative abductive reasoning.The methodology of this study incorporates qualitative thematic analysis situated within the theoretical framework underpinning this study. This study is an exploratory in nature, consequently, the unit of analysis revolves around the idea of IBF and its associated processes which designed to transform the idea into organisational practice. This includes, the change process subsequent process associated with this change and the unintended consequences of such complicated large scale program. The study combines different research method and data sources, including interviews, IBF literature and literature on the Libyan banking system.The outcome of the research can be considered as a contribution to the knowledge of change and translation as well as the field of IBF. The current study, through adopting a processual analytical mind-set has described for the first time the organisational change process in the context of Islamic banking. Thereby, opening up a field which is in need of further and extensive research. The key findings of this study were in fluctuation with the translation model. This fluctuation due partly to the different nature of the change process in the Libyan banking context. In this regard, it can be argued that the translation model depicts change as utterly an open-ended process. However, this research has revealed that change process is constructed and translated within various historical social and institutional limitations