Fine screen faunal analysis from the Hartley Site (FaNp-19)

"It's not your blue blood, your pedigree or your college degree. It's what you do with your life that counts. "-Millard Fuller (1935--), co-founder of Habitat for Humanity. The Hartley site (FaNp-19) is a Late Prehistoric multicomponent habitation site located just south of the city of Saskatoon proper, but within the city-limits. The site is located in a series of stabilized sand dunes with slightly rolling terrain. The Hartley site is part of the original larger Preston Avenue site first recognized by Ken Cronk. There were a number of questions that were to be answered in this study, in regard to the fine screen assemblage. 1) How would using just the available material affect the analysis?, 2) How would the different methodologies affect the results? Taking those variables into account, what information could be acquired regarding subsistence strategy, seasonality and the paleoecology at the site? There were two amphibians, one reptile, six varieties of gastropods and a number of small and micro-mammals that were identified. It is interesting to note: that there was also a mini projectile point recovered in the fine screen material made of Swan River chert. Previous conclusions from Grant Clarke's (1995) thesis regarding what species were consumed were confirmed. The recovery of specimens from animals that hibernate in the winter have provided additional information regarding the seasonality at the site, suggesting that the season of occupation may extend into the spring. The gastropods, small mammals, reptile and amphibians provided a good framework on which to base the sympatry analysis. These species, many from similar environments and others that are more adaptable, afforded a comprehensive look at the past environment

Generating Narratives from Personal Digital Data: Using Sentiment, Themes, and Named Entities to Construct Stories

As the quantity and variety of personal digital data shared on social media continues to grow, how can users make sense of it? There is growing interest among HCI researchers in using narrative techniques to support interpretation and understanding. This work describes our prototype application, ReelOut, which uses narrative techniques to allow users to understand their data as more than just a database. The online service extracts data from multiple social media sources and augments it with semantic information such as sentiment, themes, and named entities. The interactive editor automatically constructs a story by using unit selection to fit data units to a simple narrative structure. It allows the user to change the story interactively by rejecting certain units or selecting a new narrative target. Finally, images from the story can be exported as a video clip or a collage

Modelling the cognitive quality of student contributions to online discussion forums

Understanding how students can develop their critical thinking skills and engage in social knowledge construction through discussion with their peers is important for both educators and researchers. As asynchronous online discussion forums become increasingly common across educational settings of all kinds, there is a growing need to identify the characteristics of effective discussions that are associated with learning gains. Such findings can inform the way discussion-based assignments are framed and assessed and can provide evidence about the efficacy of instructional interventions. While many messages are purely social in nature, others demonstrate intellectual engagement with the subject matter of the course, to a greater or lesser extent -- the cognitive quality of the message. However, it is not straightforward to measure cognitive quality. Previous research has defined cognitive engagement based on the visible learning behaviours of students; and identified distinct phases of cognitive presence commonly seen in collaborative online discussions among groups of participants. Little prior work has brought together insights from both individual learning behaviours and group discussion dynamics, a gap this thesis aims to fill. This thesis introduces a two-dimensional measure of cognitive quality, making use of constructs from two well-supported educational frameworks: the Interactive-Constructive-Active-Passive framework and the Community of Inquiry framework. Using a pseudonymised set of messages that were labelled using both frameworks, the thesis explores how attributes of the dialogue were correlated with cognitive quality. Message quality was found to depend more on the nested discussion structure than on chronological order. As previously seen with other frameworks, the same messages tended to be identified as high-quality by both frameworks, while there was more variation among mid- and lower-quality messages. The thesis goes on to investigate the potential moderating effects of two instructional interventions: assigning roles to students within the asynchronous online discussions; and an external facilitation intervention, introducing guidelines that aimed to enhance the quality of students' self-regulation. Using a novel network analytic approach, the external facilitation was observed to moderate the associations between the frameworks, while no such change was seen with the role assignment. Finally, the thesis finds that the order in which students took on the assigned roles had minimal impact on the cognitive quality of their contributions to the discussion. This thesis contributes new, actionable findings about the factors that influence the cognitive quality of student contributions to asynchronous online discussions and concludes with a discussion of future research directions