Exploring the impacts of wiki collaborative technologies within the english writing environment

The use of technology in the writing classroom has been a staple since the early-1990’s when the personal computer made its way onto the desks of teachers and students across America. Since that time, the challenge has been for educators to incorporate the most recent technologies in an effort to stimulate student writing. This study examined the effects the use of a web-based wiki technology can have on the writings of high school students. The primary goal of this study was to explore how the web-based collaborative technology in Google Docs and used in a secondary English IV classroom can impact the writing skills of twelfth grade students dually enrolled in a freshman level writing class of a local university. Specifically, the study explored how students writing levels and processes were affected, how they perceived themselves as writers, and the challenges and successes they faced through the wiki-style inclusion. A mixed methods case study design was used. One intact twelfth grade English IV classroom was used for the study (n=15). During the Fall 2009 and the Spring 2010 semesters, data were collected from observations, student interviews, two essays, and two student surveys. Quantitative data were collected from all the 15 class members via student perception surveys and rubric-based assessments of two essays. Qualitative data included open-ended questions on the writing surveys from all of the students; teacher observations of student interactions with each other, the wiki, and the writing; and interviews with six students at three ability levels. Results showed that wiki-based technologies can impact students’ writing processes and their essay results. Strategies inherent to the wiki process can motivate students to be better participants when they know someone else is depending on their input. Another factor was the ease of access. Finally, what seemed especially prevalent in student comments and observation was how peer editing may have contributed to students’ writing progress. The findings of this study support those of previous research. They also underscore the importance of continuing to incorporate modern technologies into the classroom. Other implications for practice are also discussed

Detection, Modelling and Visualisation of Georeferenced Emotions from User-Generated Content

In recent years emotion-related applications like smartphone apps that document and analyse the emotions of the user, have become very popular. But research also can deal with human emotions in a very technology-driven approach. Thus space-related emotions are of interest as well which can be visualised cartographically and can be captured in different ways. The research project of this dissertation deals with the extraction of georeferenced emotions from the written language in the metadata of Flickr and Panoramio photos, thus from user-generated content, as well as with their modelling and visualisation. Motivation is the integration of an emotional component into location-based services for tourism since only factual information is considered thus far although places have an emotional impact. The metadata of those user-generated photos contain descriptions of the place that is depicted within the respective picture. The words used have affective connotations which are determined with the help of emotional word lists. The emotion that is associated with the particular word in the word list is described on the basis of the two dimensions ‘valence’ and ‘arousal’. Together with the coordinates of the respective photo, the extracted emotion forms a georeferenced emotion. The algorithm that was developed for the extraction of these emotions applies different approaches from the field of computer linguistics and considers grammatical special cases like the amplification or negation of words. The algorithm was applied to a dataset of Flickr and Panoramio photos of Dresden (Germany). The results are an emotional characterisation of space which makes it possible to assess and investigate specific features of georeferenced emotions. These features are especially related to the temporal dependence and the temporal reference of emotions on one hand; on the other hand collectively and individually perceived emotions have to be distinguished. As a consequence, a place does not necessarily have to be connected with merely one emotion but possibly also with several. The analysis was carried out with the help of different cartographic visualisations. The temporal occurrence of georeferenced emotions was examined detailed. Hence the dissertation focuses on fundamental research into the extraction of space-related emotions from georeferenced user-generated content as well as their visualisation. However as an outlook, further research questions and core themes are identified which arose during the investigations. This shows that this subject is far from being exhausted.:Statement of Authorship I Acknowledgements II Abstract III Zusammenfassung V Table of Contents VII List of Figures XI List of Tables XIV List of Abbreviations XV 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation 1 1.2 Research Questions 3 1.3 Thesis Structure 4 1.4 Underlying Publications 4 2 State of the Art 6 2.1 Emotions 6 2.1.1 Definitions and Terms 6 2.1.2 Emotion Theories 7 2.1.2.1 James-Lange Theory 9 2.1.2.2 Two-Factor Theory 9 2.1.3 Structuring Emotions 9 2.1.3.1 Dimensional Approaches 10 2.1.3.2 Basic Emotions 11 2.1.3.3 Empirical Similarity Categories 12 2.1.4 Acquisition of Emotions 14 2.1.4.1 Verbal Procedures 14 2.1.4.2 Non-Verbal Procedures 14 2.1.5 Relation between Emotions and Places 15 2.1.6 Emotions in Language 17 2.1.7 Affect Analysis and Sentiment Analysis 20 2.2 User-Generated Content 22 2.2.1 Definition and Characterisation 22 2.2.2 Advantages and Disadvantages 23 2.2.3 Tagging 24 2.2.4 Inaccuracies 28 2.2.5 Flickr and Panoramio 29 2.2.5.1 Flickr 30 2.2.5.2 Panoramio 31 2.3 Related Work on Georeferenced Emotions 32 2.3.1 Emotional Data Resulting from Biometric Measurements 33 2.3.1.1 Bio Mapping 33 2.3.1.2 EmBaGIS 34 2.3.1.3 Ein emotionales Kiezportrait 35 2.3.2 Emotional Data Resulting from Empirical Surveys 35 2.3.2.1 EmoMap 35 2.3.2.2 WiMo 36 2.3.2.3 ECDESUP 37 2.3.2.4 Map of World Happiness 38 2.3.2.5 Emotional Study of Yeongsan River Basin 39 2.3.3 Emotional Data Resulting from User-Generated Content 40 2.3.3.1 Emography 40 2.3.3.2 Twittermood 40 2.3.3.3 Tweetbeat 42 2.3.3.4 Beautiful picture of an ugly place 42 2.3.4 Visualisation in the Related Work 43 3 Methods 45 3.1 Approach for Extracting Georeferenced Emotions from the Metadata of Flickr and Panoramio Photos 45 3.2 Implemented Algorithm 45 3.3 Grammatical Special Cases 47 3.3.1 Degree Words 48 3.3.2 Negation 52 3.3.2.1 Syntactic Negation in English Language 55 3.3.2.2 Syntactic Negation in German Language 57 3.3.3 Modification of Words Affected by Grammatical Special Cases 60 4 Visualisation and Analysis of Extracted Georeferenced Emotions 62 4.1 Data Basis 62 4.2 Density Maps 67 4.3 Inverse Distance Weight 71 4.4 3D Visualisation 73 4.5 Choropleth Mapping 74 4.6 Point Symbols 78 4.7 Impact of Considering Grammatical Special Cases 80 5 Investigation in Temporal Aspects 85 5.1 Annually Occurrence of Emotions 85 5.2 Periodic Events 87 5.3 Single Events 91 5.4 Dependence of Georeferenced Emotions on Different Periods of Time 93 5.4.1 Seasons 95 5.4.2 Months 96 5.4.3 Weekdays 98 5.4.4 Times of Day 99 5.5 Potentials and Limits of Temporal Analyses 99 6 Discussion 100 6.1 Evaluation 100 6.2 Weaknesses and Problems 102 7 Conclusions and Outlook 105 7.1 Answers to the Research Questions 105 7.2 Outlook and Future Work 107 8 Bibliography 112 Appendices XVIIn den letzten Jahren sind emotionsbezogene Anwendungen, wie Apps, die die Emotionen des Nutzers dokumentieren und analysieren, sehr populär geworden. Ebenfalls in der Forschung sind Emotionen in einem sehr technologiegetriebenen Ansatz ein Thema. So auch ortsbezogene Emotionen, die sich somit kartographisch darstellen lassen und auf verschiedene Art und Weisen gewonnen werden können. Das Forschungsvorhaben der Dissertation befasst sich mit der Extraktion von georeferenzierten Emotionen aus geschriebener Sprache unter Verwendung von Metadaten verorteter Flickr- und Panoramio-Fotos, d.h. aus nutzergenerierten Inhalten, sowie deren Modellierung und Visualisierung. Motivation hierfür ist die Einbindung einer emotionalen Komponente in ortsbasierte touristische Dienste, da diese bisher nur faktische Informationen berücksichtigen, obwohl Orte durchaus eine emotionale Wirkung haben. Die Metadaten dieser nutzergenerierten Inhalte stellen Beschreibungen des auf dem Foto festgehaltenen Ortes dar. Die dafür verwendeten Wörter besitzen affektive Konnotationen, welche mit Hilfe emotionaler Wortlisten ermittelt werden. Die Emotion, die mit dem jeweiligen Wort in der Wortliste assoziiert wird, wird anhand der zwei Dimensionen Valenz und Erregung beschrieben. Die extrahierten Emotionen bilden zusammen mit der geographischen Koordinate des jeweiligen Fotos eine georeferenzierte Emotion. Der zur Extraktion dieser Emotionen entwickelte Algorithmus bringt verschiedene Ansätze aus dem Bereich der Computerlinguistik zum Einsatz und berücksichtigt ebenso grammatikalische Sonderfälle, wie Intensivierung oder Negation von Wörtern. Der Algorithmus wurde auf einen Datensatz von Flickr- und Panoramio-Fotos von Dresden angewendet. Die Ergebnisse stellen eine emotionale Raumcharakterisierung dar und ermöglichen es, spezifische Eigenschaften verorteter Emotionen festzustellen und zu untersuchen. Diese Eigenschaften beziehen sich sowohl auf die zeitliche Abhängigkeit und den zeitlichen Bezug von Emotionen, als auch darauf, dass zwischen kollektiv und individuell wahrgenommenen Emotionen unterschieden werden muss. Das bedeutet, dass ein Ort nicht nur mit einer Emotion verbunden sein muss, sondern möglicherweise auch mit mehreren. Die Auswertung erfolgte mithilfe verschiedener kartographischer Visualisierungen. Eingehender wurde das zeitliche Auftreten der ortsbezogenen Emotionen untersucht. Der Fokus der Dissertation liegt somit auf der Grundlagenforschung zur Extraktion verorteter Emotionen aus georeferenzierten nutzergenerierten Inhalten sowie deren Visualisierung. Im Ausblick werden jedoch weitere Fragestellungen und Schwerpunkte genannt, die sich im Laufe der Untersuchungen ergeben haben, womit gezeigt wird, dass dieses Forschungsgebiet bei Weitem noch nicht ausgeschöpft ist.:Statement of Authorship I Acknowledgements II Abstract III Zusammenfassung V Table of Contents VII List of Figures XI List of Tables XIV List of Abbreviations XV 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation 1 1.2 Research Questions 3 1.3 Thesis Structure 4 1.4 Underlying Publications 4 2 State of the Art 6 2.1 Emotions 6 2.1.1 Definitions and Terms 6 2.1.2 Emotion Theories 7 2.1.2.1 James-Lange Theory 9 2.1.2.2 Two-Factor Theory 9 2.1.3 Structuring Emotions 9 2.1.3.1 Dimensional Approaches 10 2.1.3.2 Basic Emotions 11 2.1.3.3 Empirical Similarity Categories 12 2.1.4 Acquisition of Emotions 14 2.1.4.1 Verbal Procedures 14 2.1.4.2 Non-Verbal Procedures 14 2.1.5 Relation between Emotions and Places 15 2.1.6 Emotions in Language 17 2.1.7 Affect Analysis and Sentiment Analysis 20 2.2 User-Generated Content 22 2.2.1 Definition and Characterisation 22 2.2.2 Advantages and Disadvantages 23 2.2.3 Tagging 24 2.2.4 Inaccuracies 28 2.2.5 Flickr and Panoramio 29 2.2.5.1 Flickr 30 2.2.5.2 Panoramio 31 2.3 Related Work on Georeferenced Emotions 32 2.3.1 Emotional Data Resulting from Biometric Measurements 33 2.3.1.1 Bio Mapping 33 2.3.1.2 EmBaGIS 34 2.3.1.3 Ein emotionales Kiezportrait 35 2.3.2 Emotional Data Resulting from Empirical Surveys 35 2.3.2.1 EmoMap 35 2.3.2.2 WiMo 36 2.3.2.3 ECDESUP 37 2.3.2.4 Map of World Happiness 38 2.3.2.5 Emotional Study of Yeongsan River Basin 39 2.3.3 Emotional Data Resulting from User-Generated Content 40 2.3.3.1 Emography 40 2.3.3.2 Twittermood 40 2.3.3.3 Tweetbeat 42 2.3.3.4 Beautiful picture of an ugly place 42 2.3.4 Visualisation in the Related Work 43 3 Methods 45 3.1 Approach for Extracting Georeferenced Emotions from the Metadata of Flickr and Panoramio Photos 45 3.2 Implemented Algorithm 45 3.3 Grammatical Special Cases 47 3.3.1 Degree Words 48 3.3.2 Negation 52 3.3.2.1 Syntactic Negation in English Language 55 3.3.2.2 Syntactic Negation in German Language 57 3.3.3 Modification of Words Affected by Grammatical Special Cases 60 4 Visualisation and Analysis of Extracted Georeferenced Emotions 62 4.1 Data Basis 62 4.2 Density Maps 67 4.3 Inverse Distance Weight 71 4.4 3D Visualisation 73 4.5 Choropleth Mapping 74 4.6 Point Symbols 78 4.7 Impact of Considering Grammatical Special Cases 80 5 Investigation in Temporal Aspects 85 5.1 Annually Occurrence of Emotions 85 5.2 Periodic Events 87 5.3 Single Events 91 5.4 Dependence of Georeferenced Emotions on Different Periods of Time 93 5.4.1 Seasons 95 5.4.2 Months 96 5.4.3 Weekdays 98 5.4.4 Times of Day 99 5.5 Potentials and Limits of Temporal Analyses 99 6 Discussion 100 6.1 Evaluation 100 6.2 Weaknesses and Problems 102 7 Conclusions and Outlook 105 7.1 Answers to the Research Questions 105 7.2 Outlook and Future Work 107 8 Bibliography 112 Appendices XV

Baltic Journal of English Language, Literature and Culture, vol.2

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether social counselling via chat conversations could meet the criteria for a professional conversation, and how the six social workers who were interviewed felt that it had affected the profession and the clients who are seeking their help. Communication, professionality, power, roles and regions are the key topics of this study. A hermeneutic approach has not only influenced the interviews but also the content analysis that was used to encode the results. The interviews revealed that the chat conversations was a successful tool but not entirely without difficulties. The initial contact making between the client and the social worker favours the client, since she/he remains anonymous and that was the main advantage of the method. The biggest concern however was that in the anonymity it is not possible to report cases that the social worker are obligated to. The changing of forum does not necessarily affect the professionality but due to the faceless chat conversation an entire dimension of communication disappears because the loss of body language. Therefore, the traditional face-to-face conversation contains a value that is hard to replac

Script acquisition : a crowdsourcing and text mining approach

According to Grice’s (1975) theory of pragmatics, people tend to omit basic information when participating in a conversation (or writing a narrative) under the assumption that left out details are already known or can be inferred from commonsense knowledge by the hearer (or reader). Writing and understanding of texts makes particular use of a specific kind of common-sense knowledge, referred to as script knowledge. Schank and Abelson (1977) proposed Scripts as a model of human knowledge represented in memory that stores the frequent habitual activities, called scenarios, (e.g. eating in a fast food restaurant, etc.), and the different courses of action in those routines. This thesis addresses measures to provide a sound empirical basis for high-quality script models. We work on three key areas related to script modeling: script knowledge acquisition, script induction and script identification in text. We extend the existing repository of script knowledge bases in two different ways. First, we crowdsource a corpus of 40 scenarios with 100 event sequence descriptions (ESDs) each, thus going beyond the size of previous script collections. Second, the corpus is enriched with partial alignments of ESDs, done by human annotators. The crowdsourced partial alignments are used as prior knowledge to guide the semi-supervised script-induction algorithm proposed in this dissertation. We further present a semi-supervised clustering approach to induce script structure from crowdsourced descriptions of event sequences by grouping event descriptions into paraphrase sets and inducing their temporal order. The proposed semi-supervised clustering model better handles order variation in scripts and extends script representation formalism, Temporal Script graphs, by incorporating "arbitrary order" equivalence classes in order to allow for the flexible event order inherent in scripts. In the third part of this dissertation, we introduce the task of scenario detection, in which we identify references to scripts in narrative texts. We curate a benchmark dataset of annotated narrative texts, with segments labeled according to the scripts they instantiate. The dataset is the first of its kind. The analysis of the annotation shows that one can identify scenario references in text with reasonable reliability. Subsequently, we proposes a benchmark model that automatically segments and identifies text fragments referring to given scenarios. The proposed model achieved promising results, and therefore opens up research on script parsing and wide coverage script acquisition.Gemäß der Grice’schen (1975) Pragmatiktheorie neigen Menschen dazu, grundlegende Informationen auszulassen, wenn sie an einem Gespräch teilnehmen (oder eine Geschichte schreiben). Dies geschieht unter der Annahme, dass die ausgelassenen Details bereits bekannt sind, oder vom Hörer (oder Leser) aus Weltwissen erschlossen werden können. Besonders beim Schreiben und Verstehen von Text wird Verwendung einer spezifischen Art von solchem Weltwissen gemacht, welches auch Skriptwissen genannt wird. Schank und Abelson (1977) erdachten Skripte als ein Modell menschlichen Wissens, welches im menschlichen Gedächtnis gespeichert ist und häufige Alltags-Aktivitäten sowie deren typischen Ablauf beinhaltet. Solche Skript-Aktivitäten werden auch als Szenarios bezeichnet und umfassen zum Beispiel Im Restaurant Essen etc. Diese Dissertation widmet sich der Bereitstellung einer soliden empirischen Grundlage zur Akquisition qualitativ hochwertigen Skriptwissens. Wir betrachten drei zentrale Aspekte im Bereich der Skriptmodellierung: Akquisition ition von Skriptwissen, Skript-Induktion und Skriptidentifizierung in Text. Wir erweitern das bereits bestehende Repertoire und Skript-Datensätzen in 2 Bereichen. Erstens benutzen wir Crowdsourcing zur Erstellung eines Korpus, das 40 Szenarien mit jeweils 100 Ereignissequenzbeschreibungen (Event Sequence Descriptions, ESDs) beinhaltet, und welches somit größer als bestehende Skript- Datensätze ist. Zweitens erweitern wir das Korpus mit partiellen ESD-Alignierungen, die von Hand annotiert werden. Die partiellen Alignierungen werden dann als Vorwissen für einen halbüberwachten Algorithmus zur Skriptinduktion benutzt, der im Rahmen dieser Dissertation vorgestellt wird. Wir präsentieren außerdem einen halbüberwachten Clusteringansatz zur Induktion von Skripten, basierend auf Ereignissequenzen, die via Crowdsourcing gesammelt wurden. Hierbei werden einzelne Ereignisbeschreibungen gruppiert, um Paraphrasenmengen und der deren temporale Ordnung abzuleiten. Der vorgestellte Clusteringalgorithmus ist im Stande, Variationen in der typischen Reihenfolge in Skripte besser abzubilden und erweitert damit einen Formalismus zur Skriptrepräsentation, temporale Skriptgraphen. Dies wird dadurch bewerkstelligt, dass Equivalenzklassen von Beschreibungen mit "arbiträrer Reihenfolge" genutzt werden, die es erlauben, eine flexible Ereignisordnung abzubilden, die inhärent bei Skripten vorhanden ist. Im dritten Teil der vorliegenden Arbeit führen wir den Task der SzenarioIdentifikation ein, also der automatischen Identifikation von Skriptreferenzen in narrativen Texten. Wir erstellen einen Benchmark-Datensatz mit annotierten narrativen Texten, in denen einzelne Segmente im Bezug auf das Skript, welches sie instantiieren, markiert wurden. Dieser Datensatz ist der erste seiner Art. Eine Analyse der Annotation zeigt, dass Referenzen zu Szenarien im Text mit annehmbarer Akkuratheit vorhergesagt werden können. Zusätzlich stellen wir ein Benchmark-Modell vor, welches Textfragmente automatisch erstellt und deren Szenario identifiziert. Das vorgestellte Modell erreicht erfolgversprechende Resultate und öffnet damit einen Forschungszweig im Bereich des Skript-Parsens und der Skript-Akquisition im großen Stil

Blogging, journalism and the public sphere: assessing the value of the 'blogosphere' as a new form of the public sphere : a case study of the Mail & Guardian Online's Blogmark

The study seeks to investigate whether weblogs can act as virtual public spheres, where people can meet to discuss issues of interest to them. It uses the Mail & Guardian Online’s Blogmark as a case study. Weblogs – highly interactive online journals comprised of links and postings in reverse chronological order – are fast becoming an avenue of choice for many internet users wanting to share opinions and news with others online. Because of their unique read-and-write characteristics, some have equated them to the 18th century coffeehouses, around which the early forms of citizen involvement in public affairs began in early capitalist Europe. Despite their growing popularity, however, not much scholarly work has been dedicated to the practice of blogging in Africa, and particularly in South Africa. The study’s theoretical framework is drawn from Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the public sphere. While noting some of the criticisms of the Habermasian model, it is argued that the concept is instrumental in our understanding of the relationship between the media and democracy. The study, however, adopted a re-worked model of the concept of the public sphere. This model argues for the need to have a multiplicity of public sphericules (instead of one single public sphere as advocated by Habermas), around which individuals can congregate to discuss issues of common concern to them. Using a combination of qualitative content analysis, self-completion questionnaires and a semi-structured interview, the study found Blogmark to be an example of how emerging internet genres such as weblogs can be vehicles of citizen involvement in public life. A range of issues were discussed in the blog, from politics, race and ii i gender issues, to personal anecdotes, relationships, and sex. However, while some posts exhibited high levels of interactivity, with many bloggers joining in to offer their opinions, some read like online monologues. The study argues that although blogging is a practice that is still limited to a few privileged individuals, with the everrising size of the ‘blogosphere’, weblogs such as Blogmark are making a small but not insignificant contribution to the number of voices that can be heard in the public realm

Collaborative Learning and New Media

This book is an essential resource for researchers in the field of applied linguistics as well as practising teachers and teacher trainees in secondary and higher education. It explores collaboration in the foreign language classroom through the use of new media. Combining theoretical, empirical and practical insights into this intricate area of research, the contributions take different approaches across a wide range of international contexts