Children searching information on the Internet: Performance on children's interfaces compared to Google

Children frequently make use of the Internet to search for information. However, research shows that children experience many problems with searching and browsing the web. The last decade numerous search environments have been developed, especially for children. Do these search interfaces support children in effective information-seeking? And do these interfaces add value to today’s popular search engines, such as Google? In this explorative study, we compared children’s search performance on four interfaces designed for children, with their performance on Google. We found that the children did not perform better on these interfaces than on Google. This study also uncovered several problems that children experienced with these search interfaces, which can be of use for designers of future search interfaces for children

Text 4 Health: Addressing Consumer Health Information Needs via Text Reference Service

This study seeks to provide empirical evidence about how health-related questions are answered in text reference service in order to further the understanding of how to best use texting as a reference service venue to fulfill people’s health information needs. Two hundred health reference transactions from My Info Quest, the first nation-wide collaborative text reference service, were analyzed identify the types of questions, length of transactions, question-answering behavior, and information sources used in the transactions. Findings indicate that texting-based health reference transactions are usually brief, and cover a wide variety of topics. The most popular questions are those seeking general factual information about human body, medical/health conditions, diseases, or medical concepts/jargons. Great variance is discovered among the question-answering behavior, with only a little more than half of the answers containing citation to information sources. The study will inform the practice of health reference service via texting, and help libraries make evidence-based decisions on establishing service policies and procedures, providing training for librarians, and ultimately implementing the service successfully

Harnessing technology: local authorities

The report presents and analyses the findings from the 2007-08 survey of local authorities covering their provision and support for ICT in schools. The accompanying file contains the technical analysis and copies of the research instrument used in the survey

Harnessing technology local authorities survey 2007

The report presents and analyses the findings from the 2006-07 survey of local authorities covering their provision and support for ICT in schools

Search Process as Transitions Between Neural States

Search is one of the most performed activities on the World Wide Web. Various conceptual models postulate that the search process can be broken down into distinct emotional and cognitive states of searchers while they engage in a search process. These models significantly contribute to our understanding of the search process. However, they are typically based on self-report measures, such as surveys, questionnaire, etc. and therefore, only indirectly monitor the brain activity that supports such a process. With this work, we take one step further and directly measure the brain activity involved in a search process. To do so, we break down a search process into five time periods: a realisation of Information Need, Query Formulation, Query Submission, Relevance Judgment and Satisfaction Judgment. We then investigate the brain activity between these time periods. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), we monitored the brain activity of twenty-four participants during a search process that involved answering questions carefully selected from the TREC-8 and TREC 2001 Q/A Tracks. This novel analysis that focuses on transitions rather than states reveals the contrasting brain activity between time periods – which enables the identification of the distinct parts of the search process as the user moves through them. This work, therefore, provides an important first step in representing the search process based on the transitions between neural states. Discovering more precisely how brain activity relates to different parts of the search process will enable the development of brain-computer interactions that better support search and search interactions, which we believe our study and conclusions advance

QuAC : Question Answering in Context

We present QuAC, a dataset for Question Answering in Context that contains 14K information-seeking QA dialogs (100K questions in total). The dialogs involve two crowd workers: (1) a student who poses a sequence of freeform questions to learn as much as possible about a hidden Wikipedia text, and (2) a teacher who answers the questions by providing short excerpts from the text. QuAC introduces challenges not found in existing machine comprehension datasets: its questions are often more open-ended, unanswerable, or only meaningful within the dialog context, as we show in a detailed qualitative evaluation. We also report results for a number of reference models, including a recently state-of-the-art reading comprehension architecture extended to model dialog context. Our best model underperforms humans by 20 F1, suggesting that there is significant room for future work on this data. Dataset, baseline, and leaderboard available at http://quac.ai.Comment: EMNLP Camera Read

Decision making in product design – bridging the gap between inception and reality

Product Design in the modern world is a complex multifaceted discipline comprising of many skills and applications. It also operates in cross-disciplinary contexts both in direct teams but also contributing to strategic business of manufacturers, government/councils and not for profit organisations. It is no longer a purely creative problem solving activity where a good idea or innovation is enough to push forward a new product. For the majority of the design profession the days of design on the back of an envelope are gone. Today design is a structured activity with recognizable and repeatable methodologies and processes. Within this the profession is acknowledging and aligning with the principles of business management. A consequence is that designers are capable of undertaking ever increasingly complex challenges. Education needs to train designers to recognise and operate in these complex situations. As a response Universities now include project or design management within curriculum. ‘The new programme should equip the students with not only the ability to design, manufacture and test design solutions; but also with a firm knowledge of business strategy’ [1] However the authors have recognized a gap within the profession and education for a more structured and validated approach to decision making within the design process. This paper outlines a pilot study within a student project whereby professional decision making tools are introduced to final year students and used to validate selection of appropriate designs from initial concepts against a hierarchy of criteria.Peer reviewe

Student’s management – educational activity orientation for supporting and student’s consciousness

The importance of investigation the students’ management comes from the effect they generate through graduation (known as „image wearerâ€) on prestige, aptness and quality of the university. The evaluation of the viewpoint of the students from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca on main activities, educational activities and other information in regards of students’ management was conducted. A survey was used in collecting data. The results allowed investigation of students view points on the main aspects of students’ management and provided information for academic managers for orientation of educational activity towards knowledge assimilation and professional development.educational activity, students management, student’s supporting and consciouness.

Using Evaluation to Improve Grantmaking: What's Good for the Goose is Good for the Grantor

Over the past decade, evaluation has become an increasingly prominent (albeit vexing) function within philanthropy. More and more foundations are beginning to devote at least minimal levels of resources to evaluate the programs they fund. The topic of evaluation appears more and more at professional conferences. Membership in Grantmakers Evaluation Network -- an "affinity group" of foundation representatives interested in promoting evaluation -- has mushroomed to over 400. As the "demand" for evaluation has increased among foundations, the market has begun to fill up with a mixed bag of consultants (from both academia and the private sector) willing to supply their services. Particularly this last indicator suggests that evaluation will take root in the philanthropic sector. Yet, although evaluation is becoming a more popular activity among foundations, its potential is far from being realized