Linking Teams With Technology: Integrating Databases in Experiential Exercises in an Introductory Business Course

The arrival of the “virtual generation” on campus has shifted the pedagogy in most business courses. Students in this generation not only are adept in navigating an array of mobile devices, but also have distinct preferences for courses that enable them to leverage their technology skills. Despite their affinity for technology, many of these students may not be as aware of the nuances related to digital content and often rely upon familiar but less relevant online resources to support course projects. This article presents several experiential exercises developed to enable students to leverage technology via database hyperlinks in an introductory business course. Each experiential exercise and related hyperlink was designed to support interdisciplinary discussion related to various components of a business plan in the introductory course. Factors that impact student use of databases, as well as contextual issues that support databases in this interdisciplinary course, are also reviewed

Improving Categorisation in Social Media Using Hyperlinks to Structured Data Sources

Abstract. Social media presents unique challenges for topic classifica-tion, including the brevity of posts, the informal nature of conversations, and the frequent reliance on external hyperlinks to give context to a con-versation. In this paper we investigate the usefulness of these external hyperlinks for categorising the topic of individual posts. We focus our analysis on objects that have related metadata available on the Web, either via APIs or as Linked Data. Our experiments show that the in-clusion of metadata from hyperlinked objects in addition to the original post content significantly improved classifier performance on two dis-parate datasets. We found that including selected metadata from APIs and Linked Data gave better results than including text from HTML pages. We investigate how this improvement varies across different top-ics. We also make use of the structure of the data to compare the use-fulness of different types of external metadata for topic classification in a social media dataset

A study of the concept of interactivity as it applies to online newspapers

This project examines how frequently a sampling of online newspapers incorporates interactive features into online content. The newspapers for the study represent the eastern, western and central regions of the United States. The analysis focused on the amount of links and their destination, opportunities for feedback and the use of images, video and audio. The study found that the sampled newspapers do not frequently use links, images, video and audio or give users opportunities to give feedback

Assessment of students\u27 motivation to use computer tools in a Web -enhanced counseling course

Increasing numbers of professional counseling educators recognize the importance of information technology in counselor education, but the majority of members in the counseling community still lack interest in using computer tools for their professional development. How to motivate them to acquire these necessary skills is a problem in counselor education. This study provided a motivating web-based instructional (WBI) design for a web-enhanced course and examined counseling students\u27 motivation to use computer tools in the course. It focused on four research questions that examined (1) how students\u27 use of computers changed; (2) the impact of web-based instructional (WBI) features on their motivation to learn; (3) the relationship between their motivation to learn and learning experiences; and (4) indicators of their adoption of computer tools.;The results of this study showed that students were motivated to learn in this web-enhanced environment. Most students increased their use of computer tools, became more confident using computer tools, and had more positive attitudes regarding the use of computers. WBI features that consider learners\u27 needs and learning outcomes can motivate students to learn to use computer tools. This study concluded that motivation to learn computer skills is a complicated matter which is related to several variables, including improved computer skills, web performance, emotion regarding computer use, and learning satisfaction. Students were more likely to continue to use computer tools in the future if they had positive experiences using computer tools. All indicators of adoption supported the belief that students were likely to adopt computer tools in the future.;This study implies that students will improve their computer skills and become motivated to continue to use computer tools in the future, if they are exposed to a learning environment similar to that in Coun 620. Students will be motivated to learn to use computer tools if they have access to a course web site that includes active hyperlinks, an organized structure, intuitive navigation, and the integration of computer tools that includes at least instructors and instructional designers is required to design a course that features a motivating WBI design. Further studies should seek to understand how counseling students can be convinced to become competent computer users through the use of a WBI environment

Integration of the Internet in career exploration in education

The basis of this thesis is a discussion of the pros and cons of incorporating the Internet as an educational tool for exploring career pathways

Style and Electronic Communication: The Accommodation of Scientific Risks in the Sierra Magazine

This thesis focuses on how style accommodates scientific risks for public audiences in Magazine articles. Language has previously been unexplored in risk communication; in accommodation research, style has not been investigated. Responding to these gaps in research, this study combines two unexplored dimensions--risk communication and accommodation--to show how syntax, diction, and metaphor resituate technical language and ideas in scientific risk studies for readers. First, interviews with editors and writers will provide a rich understanding of how their editing and composition practices influence accommodation processes. From there, an electronic communication analysis will illustrate how this medium can accommodate beyond text to give readers active roles and responsibilities to learn about and engage with scientific risks. Finally, Gibson\u27s Style Machine will determine the style writers and editors use to address their implied readers, while diction and metaphor analyses will demonstrate how style shapes technical knowledge around these readers\u27 values, needs, and interests

Grounding event references in news

Events are frequently discussed in natural language, and their accurate identification is central to language understanding. Yet they are diverse and complex in ontology and reference; computational processing hence proves challenging. News provides a shared basis for communication by reporting events. We perform several studies into news event reference. One annotation study characterises each news report in terms of its update and topic events, but finds that topic is better consider through explicit references to background events. In this context, we propose the event linking task which—analogous to named entity linking or disambiguation—models the grounding of references to notable events. It defines the disambiguation of an event reference as a link to the archival article that first reports it. When two references are linked to the same article, they need not be references to the same event. Event linking hopes to provide an intuitive approximation to coreference, erring on the side of over-generation in contrast with the literature. The task is also distinguished in considering event references from multiple perspectives over time. We diagnostically evaluate the task by first linking references to past, newsworthy events in news and opinion pieces to an archive of the Sydney Morning Herald. The intensive annotation results in only a small corpus of 229 distinct links. However, we observe that a number of hyperlinks targeting online news correspond to event links. We thus acquire two large corpora of hyperlinks at very low cost. From these we learn weights for temporal and term overlap features in a retrieval system. These noisy data lead to significant performance gains over a bag-of-words baseline. While our initial system can accurately predict many event links, most will require deep linguistic processing for their disambiguation