Advances in Teaching & Learning Day Abstracts 2004

Proceedings of the Advances in Teaching & Learning Day Regional Conference held at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston in 2004

A Review of the "Digital Turn" in the New Literacy Studies

Digital communication has transformed literacy practices and assumed great importance in the functioning of workplace, recreational, and community contexts. This article reviews a decade of empirical work of the New Literacy Studies, identifying the shift toward research of digital literacy applications. The article engages with the central theoretical, methodological, and pragmatic challenges in the tradition of New Literacy Studies, while highlighting the distinctive trends in the digital strand. It identifies common patterns across new literacy practices through cross-comparisons of ethnographic research in digital media environments. It examines ways in which this research is taking into account power and pedagogy in normative contexts of literacy learning using the new media. Recommendations are given to strengthen the links between New Literacy Studies research and literacy curriculum, assessment, and accountability in the 21st century

The effectiveness of asking behaviors among 9-11 year-old children in increasing home availability and children's intake of fruit and vegetables : results from the Squire's Quest II self-regulation game intervention

Background: Home environment has an important influence on children's fruit and vegetable (FV) consumption, but children may in turn also impact their home FV environment, e.g. by asking for FV. The Squire's Quest II serious game intervention aimed to increase asking behaviors to improve home FV availability and children's FV intake. This study's aims were to assess: 1) did asking behaviors at baseline predict home FV availability at baseline (T0) (RQ1); 2) were asking behaviors and home FV availability influenced by the intervention (RQ2); 3) did increases in asking behaviors predict increased home FV availability (RQ3); and 4) did increases in asking behaviors and increases in home FV availability mediate increases in FV intake among children (RQ4)? Methods: This is a secondary analysis of a study using a randomized controlled trial, with 4 groups (each n = 100 child-parent dyads). All groups were analyzed together for this paper since groups did not vary on components relevant to our analysis. All children and parents (n = 400 dyads) received a self-regulation serious game intervention and parent material. The intervention ran for three months. Measurements were taken at baseline, immediately after intervention and at 3-month follow-up. Asking behavior and home FV availability were measured using questionnaires; child FV intake was measured using 24-h dietary recalls. ANCOVA methods (research question 1), linear mixed-effect models (research question 2), and Structural Equation Modeling (research questions 3 and 4) were used. Results: Baseline child asking behaviors predicted baseline home FV availability. The intervention increased child asking behaviors and home FV availability. Increases in child asking behaviors, however, did not predict increased home FV availability. Increased child asking behaviors and home FV availability also did not mediate the increases in child FV intake. Conclusions: Children influence their home FV environment through their asking behaviors, which can be enhanced via a serious game intervention. The obtained increases in asking behavior were, however, insufficient to affect home FV availability or intake. Other factors, such as child preferences, sample characteristics, intervention duration and parental direct involvement may play a role and warrant examination in future research

Cyber Commodification

When it comes to commodification on the Internet, it is a wild, wild World Wide Web. Researching encyclopedia articles for Wikipedia is an unpaid labor of love, but connecting to your friends on Facebook is a $100 billion enterprise. Newspaper classified advertisements are definitely commercial, but their equivalent on Craigslist was mostly non-commercial – until the Delaware Chancery Court stepped in. Selling your organs is prohibited in the United States, whereas selling hair promises to rescue third-world citizens from poverty. Selling sex is illegal as prostitution, but selling adultery online is a hot new business model. And a small company offering a free service to academics has quietly become the dominant method for disseminating academic legal research, quietly beating massive commercial data providers without anyone initially noticing. This Article explores these and other recent developments by discussing the challenging legal issues raised by Internet commodification of what is often unpaid labor

Emotional Labor in the Moderation of Online Communities

Emotional labor is an essential component of knowledge work. As knowledge work increasingly moves online, we need to understand emotional labor performed online. Extant emotion research cautions against blindly applying insights about emotional labor from a face-to-face context to an online context. Yet, we know little about emotional labor performed online. We raise the following questions about emotional labor by community moderators: What constitutes “appropriate emotional displays” in online communities? How do community members’ emotional displays interact with use of technology features to influence moderators’ displays? Our findings suggest that the high-/low-energy dimension of emotion is more salient to the emotional labor performed by community moderators than is the conventionally-studied positive versus negative affect dimension. Findings further reveal the tendency for community members’ use of technology features in stylizing their posts to induce mindfulness in moderators’ emotional displays in response to those posts

Design of an E-learning system using semantic information and cloud computing technologies

Humanity is currently suffering from many difficult problems that threaten the life and survival of the human race. It is very easy for all mankind to be affected, directly or indirectly, by these problems. Education is a key solution for most of them. In our thesis we tried to make use of current technologies to enhance and ease the learning process. We have designed an e-learning system based on semantic information and cloud computing, in addition to many other technologies that contribute to improving the educational process and raising the level of students. The design was built after much research on useful technology, its types, and examples of actual systems that were previously discussed by other researchers. In addition to the proposed design, an algorithm was implemented to identify topics found in large textual educational resources. It was tested and proved to be efficient against other methods. The algorithm has the ability of extracting the main topics from textual learning resources, linking related resources and generating interactive dynamic knowledge graphs. This algorithm accurately and efficiently accomplishes those tasks even for bigger books. We used Wikipedia Miner, TextRank, and Gensim within our algorithm. Our algorithm‘s accuracy was evaluated against Gensim, largely improving its accuracy. Augmenting the system design with the implemented algorithm will produce many useful services for improving the learning process such as: identifying main topics of big textual learning resources automatically and connecting them to other well defined concepts from Wikipedia, enriching current learning resources with semantic information from external sources, providing student with browsable dynamic interactive knowledge graphs, and making use of learning groups to encourage students to share their learning experiences and feedback with other learners.Programa de Doctorado en Ingeniería Telemática por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: Luis Sánchez Fernández.- Secretario: Luis de la Fuente Valentín.- Vocal: Norberto Fernández Garcí