Promoting conceptual change of learning sorting algorithm through the diagnosis of mental models: The effects of gender and learning styles

It has been advocated that pedagogical content knowledge as well as subject matter knowledge are important for improving classroom instructions. To develop pedagogical content knowledge, it is argued that understanding of students' mental representations of concepts is deemed necessary. Yet assessing and comparing mental model of each individual is very tedious and time consuming. This study attempted to use gender and learning styles to associate mental models in learning sorting algorithm. The Gregorc Style Delineator (GSD) was used to measure learning styles of the participants. Mental models were assessed using the Pathfinder Scaling Algorithm (PSA). Results indicated that females showed greater similarity in mental models than males and concrete learners also exhibited closer resemblance to the expert mental model than abstract learners. These suggest that gender and learning styles can be meaningfully used to associate mental models in order to provide a group-based instead of individual-based diagnosis and thus promote conceptual change in learning. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.postprin

A Dedication of Machine Learning for Trend of Digital HRM

The digital world has inevitably entered various fields of human life in carrying out their duties as world leaders. Technology is an important tool to ease the human workload, including in this discourse is human resource management. Machine Learning is a technology that allows machines to learn and adapt quickly from given data without having to be explicitly programmed. Machine Learning has found its place in many industries and has great potential to improve the efficiency of human resources within organizations. This research is a literature review of several articles related to machine learning. The review was conducted from some of the recent research efforts that utilize machine learning. Furthermore, this review is derived from multiple literacies and includes an attempt at problem solving efforts that are divided into section areas from the perspective of each machine learning category. Machine learning can change the way the human resource management domain functions in an organization. It is making changes in all aspects of human resource management starting from human resource planning. Enormous data is available in human resource information systems (HRIS) available in organizations

Learning About Metadata and Machines: Teaching Students Using a Novel Structured Database Activity

Machines produce and operate using complex systems of metadata that need to be catalogued, sorted, and processed. Many students lack the experience with metadata and sufficient knowledge about it to understand it as part of their data literacy skills. This paper describes an educational and interactive database activity designed for teaching undergraduate communication students about the creation, value, and logic of structured data. Through a set of virtual instructional videos and interactive visualizations, the paper describes how students can gain experience with structured data and apply that knowledge to successfully find, curate, and classify a digital archive of media artifacts. The pedagogical activity, teaching materials, and archives are facilitated through and housed in an online resource called Fabric of Digital Life (fabricofdigitallife.com). We end by discussing the activity’s relevance for the emerging field of human-machine communication

Lightweight creativity methods for idea generation and evaluation in the conceptual phase of lightweight and sustainable design

Regarding the implementation of lightweight design in products, there are various guidelines, principles and methods that support the developers methodically throughout the entire design process. Such methods often pursue the goal of optimizing an existing product by reducing the amount of consumed material (e.g., topology optimization). A more effective way to apply lightweight design lies in fostering the creativity and intuitiveness of engineers to develop miscellaneous concepts with the capability to provide far greater mass reductions in contrast to smaller efficiency enhancements. Supported through the breakdown of assemblies via thinking in terms of functions along the paradigm of systems engineering, existing creativity techniques (e.g., “brainstorming” or “6-hats-method”) and evaluation methods (e.g., “point scoring”) for idea generation and evaluation have been analyzed and rethought from a lightweight and sustainable design perspective resulting in so called lightweight creativity methods (LWCM). The methods were tested on a use case from the field of robotics, which enabled the identification of the potential of LWCM for a lightweight and sustainable design

The Value of Technics: An Ontogenetic Approach to Money, Markets, and Networks

This thesis investigates the impact of the digitalization of monetary and financial flows on the political-economic sphere in order to provide a novel perspective on the relations between economic and technological forces at the present global juncture. In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis and with the rise of the cryptoeconomy, an increasing number of scholars have highlighted the immanence of market logic to cultural and social life. At the same time, speculative practices have emerged that attempt to challenge the political economy through financial experiments. This dissertation complements these approaches by stressing the need to pair the critical study of finance with scholarship in the philosophy of technology that emphasizes the value immanent to technics and technology – i.e. the normative and genetic role of ubiquitous algorithmic networks in the organization of markets and socius. In order to explore these events, I propose an interdisciplinary theoretical framework informed largely by Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation and technics and the contemporary literature on the ontology of computation, supported by insights drawn from the history of finance and economic theory. This novel framework will provide the means to investigate the ontogenetic processes at work in the techno-cultural ecosystem following the digitalization of monetary and financial flows. Through an exploration of the fleeting materiality and multifaceted character of digital fiat money, the social power of algorithmic financial logic, and the new possibilities offered by the invention of the Bitcoin protocol, this research aims to challenge some of the bedrocks of the economic orthodoxy – economic and monetary value, liquidity, market rationality – in order to move beyond the overarching narrative of capitalism as a monolithic system. The thesis instead foregrounds the techno-historical contingencies that have led to the contemporary power formation. Furthermore, it argues that the ontogenetic character of algorithmic technology ushers in novel possibilities for the speculative engineering of alternative networks of value creation and distribution that have the potential to reverse the current balance of power

Technology from the Perspective of Society and Public Interest

The ultimate goals of this study were to determine ways to reconcile technology with public interest and to understand the relationship between what we know and how we feel about technology. To achieve the goals, related literatures were reviewed; the mechanism of technology development was described with empirical data; and human perception of technology was tested with a survey. The duality of technology that implied technological inherencies of technical reason and social meanings was the principle assumption of the study. Neutrality of technology becomes a myth with the presence of social meanings embodied in technology. Given the huge impact of technology on human societies, the absence of neutrality is, in turn, attributed to the necessity for policy. Analyses of eight empirical cases of technology in history based on the method of grounded theory provided core categories of technical progress, economic values, and social inclinations. Upon the core categories and concepts corroborated by the cases, the mechanism of technology development appeared to be a concatenation of the interactions between technical progress and social demand of either economic values or social inclinations. Technology that is pertinent to public interest, in this context, will be possible if a social inclination toward public interest can be built. The state can shape a social inclination of the kind and intervene in the mechanism of technology development. Furthermore, such an intervention could be accelerated by the potency of the collective actions of citizens. If successful, technology will incorporate the social value of public interest and the paradigm of technology will embrace it. Survey responses indicated that the biggest misconception of technology was in the concept of technological knowledge, which especially was supposed to be distinguished from scientific knowledge; technology was perceived to have a distinctive kind of knowledge and to be practical, but still to be a part of science pursuing the knowledge of nature. Technology still seemed to be a mere part of science with more emphasis on practical purpose in everyday life, which was concurred with the term applied science. The respondents agreed on the idea of value-ladeness of technology and, thus, necessity for human control over technology. However, they appeared to have relatively passive attitudes toward technology. The conflict between the necessity for control and the paucity of faith in the ability to control technology by themselves must attribute respondents’ dependency toward experts. The correlation between understanding of technology and will to control technology was statistically significant but weak. The control variables of academic affiliation and department were found to have significant effects on the results

“A More Perfect World”: Posthumanism and Technological Integration in A Memory Called Empire

This thesis considers the relationship of technology to the human through a posthumanist lens, questioning what will become of the human an increasingly more-than-human world through an examination of the novel A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine. Through an examination of the imago device from the novel, the thesis evaluates the human experience of memory and the influence of empire. The thesis advances four key concepts: 1. The collapsed divide between the human and the technic through memory and imagination; 2. Technology’s development and use; 3. The user that is integrated with the technic; and 4. The poisonous influence of empire. The thesis argues that these four ideas are significant because of the power of the imagination to shape the future, the influence of empire on these imaginings, and the danger of an anthropocentric approach to these imaginations. Ultimately, posthumanism explored in A Memory Called Empire presents a potential model for the integration of technology with the human, an integration that can affirm the human qualities of memory and imagination and can integrate with the technic

Resource conservation by means of lightweight design and design for circularity—A concept for decision making in the early phase of product development

Lightweight design can contribute to savings of consumed material in products and enhancing their energy efficiency during the use phase but also to a higher resource consumption at the beginning- and the end-of-life, challenging the implementation of a circular economy. Hence, this publication methodologically addresses the synergies and conflicts of lightweight design and design for circularity. The concept of the ‘functional life cycle energy analysis’ is presented, which foresees the division of a product architecture into functions with allocated energy consumptions as cross-stage indicator for the expected resource consumption along the entire product life cycle. Holistic optimization potentials within three life cycle stages can thus be derived as recommendations for action for future product generations. This allows engineers to rethink functional principles and supports decision making in the early design phases of implementing lightweight design and design for circularity. The methodology is illustrated by means of a robotics use case