E-portfolio thinking in teacher training: a small-scale study in K-12 in Turkey

The account given in this paper is related to the experiences of foreign language teachers involved in the pilot study undertaken in a high school in Turkey. After outlining the distinctive advantages of e-portfolios in the context of teacher development; this paper discusses the results of a qualitative study addressing the value of e-portfolios as versatile teaching and learning tools to showcase the professional skills of the teachers. Data collection was undertaken through both semi-structured interviews with the majority of these teachers and field observations. By providing teachers with the opportunity to enhance their technological skills and to reflect critically upon their work as educators, e-portfolios can serve as an invaluable resource for meeting educational standards and promoting effective teaching practice

Real-Time Digital Content Analysis for a Networking Platform: An Overview of Digital Content Strategies based on a Case Study in Turkey

The research study provides an in-depth analysis of content types for an Islamic social networking platform to offer digital content strategies for conveying their messages across the target audience As the starting point for engaging in social media usage is to monitor the social media presence of relevant people and organisations an analysis of 25 most connected Islamic leaders and groups in Turkey has been included in this research study A real-time social media analysis has been used via means of Social Mention Use of social media of these individuals and groups is not linear but involves multiple stages of monitoring and utilising opportunities to learn engage with others and use this influence to share their message This research study identified that the challenges of social media efforts of these groups related to the lack of production of video or multimedia products such as Flash animation videos or short video clips which attract most of the target audience challenges in delivering the message in multilanguage The analysis in this research study suggests that an Islamic social networking platform can contribute to reducing some of the key barriers to advocacy of these religious leaders These barriers include the lack of time resources access to media and ability to exert adequate influence to create chang

The Praxis of Learning Analytics for a Conceptual Open Textbooks System

Textbook costs have skyrocketed in recent years putting them beyond the reach of many students but there are options which can mitigate this problem Open textbooks an open educational resource have proven capable of making textbooks affordable to students There have been few educational development as promising as the development of open textbooks to lower costs for students While the last five years have witnessed unparalleled interest and significant advances in the development and dissemination of open textbooks one important aspect has until now remained unexplored the praxis of learning analytics for extracting information regarding how learners interact and learn with open textbooks which is crucial for their evaluation and iterative improvement process Learning analytics off ers a faster and more objective means of data collection and processing than traditional counterparts such as surveys and questionnaires and most importantly with their capability to provide direct evidence of learning they present the opportunity to enhance both learner performance and environmen

Towards the Practice of Volunteering 2.0: Volunteers’ Digital Choices with Social Affordances in the Web 2.0 Era

There is little evidence that helps to inform education, practice, policy, and research about issues surrounding the use of online collaboration tools for organisational initiatives (Brown & Duguid, 1991; Cook & Brown, 1999); let alone a single study conducted with regard to the volunteering practice of knowledge workers. The underlying objectives of the research study are to explore and describe how corporate volunteers experience and participate in learning in technology-rich environments; investigate the strategies, beliefs and intentions of corporate volunteers who are effective in learning in technology-rich environments and identity factors that enable or inhibit effective e-learning and make recommendations for those involved in corporate volunteering based on my understanding of their diverse needs, experiences and preferences

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

The use of online collaboration tools for employee volunteering: a case study of IBM’s CSC programme

This research study intends to find out about the use of online collaboration tools in supporting knowledge workers for the practice of employee volunteering. Online collaboration tools refer to the web-based technologies such as popular Web 2.0 tools like blogs or wikis and traditional online tools such as instant messenger, discussion forums, online chats and e-mail used by several individuals with the aim of achieving a common goal. The employee volunteering program- called Corporate Service Corps (CSC) - is an employee volunteering program in which the IBM employees tackle the economic and societal issues of the less developed countries they have been sent to while getting involved in project-based learning activities. This study provides an insight into how online engagement enabled the continuation of non-formal workplace learning practices such as volunteering and opened up possibilities for new ways to contribute to the learning process of employees. When it comes to online communities there is a mixture of entanglements, partnerships, negotiations and resistances between these tools and human actors. This research study explores how online communities are created by employee volunteers and also provides an understanding of non-formal learning practices within such fluid settings; important issues for organizations interested in non-formal learning practices of their employees are also raised. Today’s workplace settings are in constant need of recurrent learning processes interwoven with daily tasks on digital spaces. However, these digital spaces are not devoid of any issues and hence suggest the need for employees to be conscious of the emerging issues. The results from the case study are analysed by using participatory design methods in order to contribute to the understanding of the use of technology as both a single and collective experience. This research identified the specific benefits of online collaboration tools, and explored how their usage has been appropriated by employee volunteers for their practice of volunteering and how they influenced the process of their meaning-making. By doing so, it raised an awareness of the digital tools that provide collections of traits through which individuals can get involved in non-formal learning practices by having digital interactions with others.</p

How to Manage the Inclusion of E-Learning in Learning Strategy: Insights from a Turkish Banking Institution

The purpose of this research paper is to demonstrate how a banking institution in Turkey is managing the inclusion of e-learning in its learning strategy. The case study demonstrates that the adoption of e-learning is actually influencing bankâ??s learning strategy, and that the simple delivery through technology cannot be sustained as a separate form of training, an appendix to traditional instructor-led activities. To be successful, it has to be seen as a part of a complete learning architecture that includes a variety of tools, approaches, and a coherent learning culture. The analysis shows two emerging phenomena: â?¢ A different degree of success of the e-learning initiative depending upon its coherence with the organizational culture, and the bankâ??s strategy â?¢ A changing balance of classroom training and e-learning in relationship to the adoption of the LMS adoption in each departmen

The adoption of digital learning tools in academy-industry partnerships

The purpose of this study was to begin to build substantive theory about stakeholders’ perceptions of the use of digital learning tools for academy-industry partnerships. The study aims to focus on the following central objectives: • to gain a richer understanding of the adoption of digital learning tools within the context of academy-industry partnerships;• to build theory in explaining how e-learning becomes embedded (or not) within the cultivation process of organizational wisdo