HIGH TECH VS HIGH TOUCH: ARE LANGUAGE TEACHERS LEADING THE WAY WITH EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY?

Technologies have the capacity to transform teaching and students' learning and different technologies can change the ways students learn and mediate the learning differently. But for many of the language teachers, the productive use of Information and Communication Technologies presents a challenge in their teaching practice. Students are usually very engaged with technology and have developed expertise outside the classrom which the teacher may not have. This expertise can, however, be constructed as a resource upon which the teacher can draw, while scaffolding the linguistic and cultural dimensions of the students' engagement with language and culture through technology. Languages educators must encompass these. Teachers are faced with selecting and using appropriate technologies from an ever-increasing range. We seek to make teachers use, and students' use, of technologies integral to the whole language learning process and not an add-on to teaching or a replacement for teaching. When we do this, teaching and learning pedagogies engage students, enhance achievement, create new learning possibilites and extend interaction with local and global communities.Keywords: Audio-visual, Blogs, CALL, ESL, EFL, ICT, Internet, Language teacher, LMS, Podcasting, Pedagogy, Wik

Affecting affect: making sense of the challenges - Australian non-native English speaker students in Australian universities

Multiple streams of influence, including cultural policy and societal goals, and theories of the mind, have affected the global non-English speaking background (NESB) community over the last couple of decades. The evolution of culture perceptibly influences directly or indirectly the rapid change of higher educational system in Australia. To improve approaches to Australian non-native English speakers (ANNES) students substantially, solutions to current concerns address integrating ANNES into the mainstream of NES. If such solutions can be implemented, the landscape of educational novelty will be very different and much improved at the end of the Australian university education. Reviewing the past century of ANNES gives rise to some critical questions. Where did the community of ANNES stand at the close of the university admission? Is this a comfortable and useful place? What needs to change and why? Meaningful answers to these questions we tried to find thorough this study. Thus, ANNES students can become part of the solution rather than be part of the problem as many appear to believe at the current turbulent time. More than what one thinks, less than what we need

Affecting affect: making sense of the challenges - Australian non-native English speaker students in Australian universities

Multiple streams of influence, including cultural policy and societal goals, and theories of the mind, have affected the global non-English speaking background (NESB) community over the last couple of decades. The evolution of culture perceptibly influences directly or indirectly the rapid change of higher educational system in Australia. To improve approaches to Australian non-native English speakers (ANNES) students substantially, solutions to current concerns address integrating ANNES into the mainstream of NES. If such solutions can be implemented, the landscape of educational novelty will be very different and much improved at the end of the Australian university education. Reviewing the past century of ANNES gives rise to some critical questions. Where did the community of ANNES stand at the close of the university admission? Is this a comfortable and useful place? What needs to change and why? Meaningful answers to these questions we tried to find thorough this study. Thus ANNES students can become part of the solution rather than be part of the problem as many appear to believe at the current turbulent time. More than what one thinks, less than what we need.Keywords: Aboriginal, Australian non-native English speaker, Australianuniversity, Higher education, International student, NESB, NNES

Development of Robust Transparent Conformal Antennas Based on Conductive Mesh-Polymer Composite for Unobtrusive Wearable Applications

© 1963-2012 IEEE. In this paper, a detailed investigation of the realization of conformal wearable transparent antennas by integrating conductive mesh with polymer has been presented. The proposed realization method is much simpler and more cost-effective than the existing realization methods of transparent antennas, and the prototype fabricated from the selected composite materials is more flexible and robust in bending operations than other transparent antennas. In this paper, the mechanical, electrical, and optical characteristics of the proposed composite material have been investigated to analyze its suitability for transparent flexible antenna realization. For concept demonstration, a prototype of a dual-band antenna operating at 2.33-2.53 GHz and 4.7-5.6 GHz has been fabricated and tested. These frequencies cover both the instrument, scientific, and measurement (ISM) and the wireless local area network (WLAN) bands. Full ground plane is utilized in the antenna design for on-body operations. The suitability of the antenna for wearable applications has been investigated by measuring its performance under physical deformation and testing its performance on phantom. Next, the RF performance of the antenna has been improved by using two layers of conductor to form the radiating element. Although transparency is slightly compromised, the double-layer element improves the gain and efficiency of the antenna

Traditional Cotton Dyeing with Natural Dyes from Plants: Colourimetric Analysis and Antibacterial Efficacy

100% cotton single jersey fabric (weight 160 g/m2) was dyed with the natural coloutants extracted from the leaves of Neem (Azadirachta indica) and Holy Basil (Ocimum sanctum/ tenuliflorum) and heartwood of Catechu/Khoyer (Acacia catechu) following traditional exhaust method of dyeing. A high concentration of dye was maintained for dyeing all three colourants with differential mordanting techniques (no mordanting, pre-mordanting, simultaneous mordanting and post-mordanting). Potassium alum [K2SO4.Al2(SO4)3.24H2O] was used as mordant. Colourimetric analysis was done using an industry grade spectrophotometer “Datacolor 650” (USA). Colour-fastness to wash of all dyed samples were tested according to ISO 105:CO3 method at 60°c for 30 minutes. All dyed and one undyed samples were tested by The AATCC test method 147-2004 to investigate their efficacy against 4 microorganisms including Bacillus cereus (ATCC 11778), Escherichia coli (ATCC 25922), Pseudomonas aeruginosa ATCC (27853), Staphylococcus aureus (ATCC 25923). Finding shows that there is significant colour difference between the unmordanted-dyed samples and mordanted-dyed samples for all three colourants and shades vary depending on mordanding techniques also. Simultaneous-mordanted-and-dyed samples exhibit poorer colour-fastness to wash in comparison to pre- and post-mordanted and dyed samples. No dyed sample was found to be effective against any of the bacterium tested which can be explained by the low solubility of plant phenolic compounds in aqueous medium as reported in published literature

Thermoplastic Composites reinforced with Multi-layer Woven Jute Fabric: A Comparative Analysis

Three commonly available thermoplastic matrices - High-density polyethylene (HDPE), polypropylene (PP) and nylon 6 – are reinforced with hessian jute fabric in multi-layer sequence to prepare composite laminates by compression moulding technique. The composite had a nominal fibre content of 18% in terms of weight and a nominal thickness of 6.5 mm. The mechanical and fracture behaviours of the resultant laminates are tested and compared. It was found that the Nylon-Jute composite exhibited the highest values of tensile strength, Young’s modulus, flexural strength, flexural modulus and hardness. On the other hand, HDPE-Jute composite showed relatively poor performance. Interestingly, the HDPE-Jute composite exhibited the highest impact strength and the Nylon-Jute composite was the poorest in this regard. The amount of water absorption by the composites from highest to the lowest was found in the following order: Nylon-Jute > HDPE-Jute > PP-Jute

Speech analysis for alphabets in Bangla language: automatic speech recognition

This paper presents a technique for recognizing spoken letter in Bengali Language. We first derive feature from spoken letter. Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) has been used to characterize a feature. Dynamic time warping (DTW) employed to calculate the distance of an unknown letter with the stored ones. K-nearest neighbors (KNN) algorithm is used to improve accuracy in noisy environment

Unethical Motives and the Management of Knowledge

Abstract This paper argues for a situationist understanding of the role and context of IS (Information Systems) development. Social philosophers analysis of 'the machine' and its dynamics indicate a mechanism of entrapment of human activity, to which information systems developments are uncritically referenced. Debord's concept of the Spectacle is found helpful in analysing this and it is our contention that Information Systems development is one of the Spectacle's most powerful contemporary mechanisms for self-preservation. Established power structure guarantee the maintenance of this, and the questions arises as to whether truly emancipatory developments are possible without a radical philosophy. Keywords Human Knowledge, Information Systems Development, Minimum Knowledge Management, Spectacle Introduction This paper is concerned with laying open the implicit philosophical underpinning of mainstream information systems developments as an agent in the maintenance of social stability, where designing for the appropriation, and formal commodification, of human knowledge and action is unspoken yet often significant goal of many information systems. This goes beyond the naively representational, to the larger aim of including humans as specialized knowledge producers and consumers, as a designed part of a mechanized or systematizes information system. The larger human activity system in this view necessarily takes on the characteristics of the machine, which in extremis tends towards an indifferent, closed system of interacting functions based on an essential separation. Debord's concept of the Spectacle (Debord 1967) provides an analytical framework that clearly explicates the working of this process. In this paper we assert that this is the uncritical and tacit philosophical goal underpinning IS development and we indicate its crucial potential in the maintenance of stability and the status quo

Counting the number of nodes in ocean wireless communication network

It is often essential to estimate the number of operating nodes in a wireless communication network (WCN), in which the nodes are deployed in different forms to cover small or large areas for a wide range of personal, scientific and commercial applications. The number of nodes may vary due to ad-hoc nature, power failure of nodes, or environmental disaster. In any communication network, it is important to estimate the number of nodes at any point in time for proper network operation and maintenance. Counting the number is very important for data collection, network maintenance and node localization. Also network performance depends on the area node ratio i.e. the number of operating nodes per unit area. Many estimation techniques are used to count the number of nodes in wireless communication networks, but in underwater environment they are not efficient. In this paper a cross-correlation based statistical signal processing approach for node estimation in underwater wireless communication network is proposed. In this method nodes are considered as acoustic signal sources and their number is calculated through the crosscorrelation of the acoustic signals received at two sensors placed in the network. The mean of the cross-correlation function is used as the estimation parameter in this process. Theoretical and simulation results are provided which justify the effectiveness of the proposed approach