Tracing peer feedback to revision process in a wiki supported collaborative writing

Conference Theme: Globalisation or Internalisation?Topic - Technology in Learning: no. 0291This study investigates how can peer comments lead to actual revision process in a wiki supported collaborative writing environment among primary five and six students from a Chinese primary school in Hong Kong where English is taught as a second language (L2). Students from three upper primary classes totaling 119 students from age ten to twelve and their three English subject teachers went through three months of English language writing using a wiki. Quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed from activities recorded in a wiki system, including posted edits and comments and students’ group writings. The wiki page history revealed information on types of revisions that occurred, allowing a trace of how different peer feedbacks lead to actual revisions, resulting in better group writing. Findings from the study may shed light on how wikis can help provide necessary support and how peer-feedback can affect students’ writing process with wikis.published_or_final_versio

Students and teacher’s attitudes and perceptions toward a wiki-based collaborative process writing pedagogy in a Primary Five Chinese classroom

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Students and teacher’s attitudes and perceptions toward collaborative writing with WIKI in a Primary Four Chinese classroom

This case study investigated the attitudes and perceptions of primary school students and their teacher toward collaborative writing using a wiki technology in a Chinese writing class in China. An online collaborative writing environment named “Joyous Writing Club”(JWC) was designed and developed using a wiki. Participants included 59 primary four students and their Chinese language teacher. The study adopted a mixed-methods design, using quantitative and qualitative data. A writing attitude test was administered to the students using a pretest-posttest design, and JWC was used by the participants for a period of two months. After that, a questionnaire using responses on a 5-point Likert scale was administered to examine the students’ perceptions on the use of the wiki-based collaborative writing environment. A questionnaire consisting of open-ended queries was also administered to the teacher to gain her insights on using JWC with her students. The results indicated that students showed improvement in writing attitudes after engaging in collaborative writing with wiki. Students’ responses to the questionnaire revealed that they perceived the collaborative writing using a wiki as beneficial in facilitating motivation to write, heightened group interactions, and widening the reading audience of their writings. Students’ positive perceptions on the use of JWC were also found to associate positively with students’ writing attitudes in the posttest. The strongest positive correlation was found between perceptions on motivation to write and writing attitudes. The teacher reported that students expressed higher interest in writing on JWC compared relative to writing on paper. She also indicated that factors such as the topic of the Chinese composition and students’ computer skills may affect the quality of collaborative writing with wiki. This study provides information that may help teachers and researchers to understand students’ responses towards collaborative writing with a wiki environment in a Chinese writing class, and the factors that may facilitate the effective use of such wiki environment.postprin

Using a wiki-based collaborative process writing pedagogy to facilitate collaborative writing among Chinese primary school students

This case study explored collaborative writing in Chinese among 59 primary four Chinese students using a Wiki-based Collaborative Process Writing Pedagogy (WCPWP) in Shenzhen, China. It aimed mainly to design and orchestrate a WCPWP in order to facilitate students' Chinese writing. It investigated students' collaborative writing process and their performance on a wiki, and explored the perceptions and attitudes of the teacher and her students towards WCPWP. A wiki-based writing environment named Joyous Writing Club (JWC) was designed and developed using MediaWiki software. Data was collected from questionnaires, online wiki documents, interviews, and observations. The results illustrated students' collaborative writing process and their products on the wiki. Besides, the results showed that students perceived WCPWP was beneficial in boosting writing motivation, increasing group interactions, and extending the audience for their writing. This study may help primary educators gain a deeper understanding of the relationships between technology, pedagogy and education. It may also provide practical recommendations for primary school Chinese language teachers in the integration of Web 2.0 tools (wikis, Google Docs) as well as the use of effective pedagogical strategies in the teaching of Chinese writing.published_or_final_versio

CELNet: Evidence Localization for Pathology Images using Weakly Supervised Learning

Despite deep convolutional neural networks boost the performance of image classification and segmentation in digital pathology analysis, they are usually weak in interpretability for clinical applications or require heavy annotations to achieve object localization. To overcome this problem, we propose a weakly supervised learning-based approach that can effectively learn to localize the discriminative evidence for a diagnostic label from weakly labeled training data. Experimental results show that our proposed method can reliably pinpoint the location of cancerous evidence supporting the decision of interest, while still achieving a competitive performance on glimpse-level and slide-level histopathologic cancer detection tasks.Comment: Accepted for MICCAI 201

Going for Gold(-Standard): Attaining Coupled Cluster Accuracy in Oxide-Supported Nanoclusters

Metal nanoclusters supported on oxide surfaces are widely-used catalysts that boasts sharply enhanced activity over their bulk, especially for the coinage metals: Au, Ag and Cu. These properties depend sensitively on the nanocluster structure, which are challenging to model with density functional theory (DFT) -- the workhorse modelling technique. Leveraging the recently developed SKZCAM protocol, we perform the first ever benchmark study of coinage metal structures on the MgO surface with coupled cluster theory [CCSD(T)] -- the gold-standard modelling technique. We investigate a comprehensive range of DFT models (exchange-correlation functional and dispersion correction) and our benchmarks reveal that none of the investigated models can accurately describe this system. We demonstrate that this arises from inadequate account of metal-metal interactions in the nanocluster and propose a high-level correction which provides reference accuracy at low cost. This forges a path towards studying larger systems, which we highlight by benchmarking Au$_{20}$ on MgO, a challenging system where DFT models have disagreed on its ground state structure.Comment: Working pape

Ageing and utilisation of hospital services in Hong Kong: a retrospective cohort study.

Key Messages 1. In the 3 years before death, older age-groups do not use inpatient hospital services more than younger age-groups. However, they do use more accident and emergency department services. 2. No compression in morbidity was demonstrated. 3. Data obtained from this retrospective study may be used to project future usage for each type of service as a result of the changing age structure of the population, so as to facilitate health care planning. 4. Health care costs as a result of the changing age structure of populations may also be estimated more accurately, instead of assuming a linear increase in all types of services with age.published_or_final_versio

Structural and electronic origin of the magnetic structures in hexagonal LuFeO3_3

Using combined theoretical and experimental approaches, we studied the structural and electronic origin of the magnetic structure in hexagonal LuFeO$_3$. Besides showing the strong exchange coupling that is consistent with the high magnetic ordering temperature, the previously observed spin reorientation transition is explained by the theoretically calculated magnetic phase diagram. The structural origin of this spin reorientation that is responsible for the appearance of spontaneous magnetization, is identified by theory and verified by x-ray diffraction and absorption experiments.Comment: 5 pages, 2 tables and 4 figures, Please contact us for the supplementary material. Accepted in Phys. Rev. B, in productio