Debilitating colonialism through ethnographic user-oriented evaluation of a collaborative science ICL course

One of the most striking features of colonialism in the education system of South Africa (SA) is the sustained use of English as a language of teaching. If university tuition is offered to students in a non-native language such as English, these institutions inadvertently shoulder the responsibility of meeting the language needs of the students. As a response to the hegemony of English in Higher Education (HE), attempts made to meet the language needs of students in tertiary institutions are manifest in different approaches employed by universities, such as Integrating Content and Language (ICL) to support non-native speakers of English, in English media universities. It is thus vitally significant that courses offered in a number of countries be perennially evaluated to determine whether they are fit for purpose. The salience of evaluating input collected from a cohort of students who attend these courses cannot be overemphasised, hence a discussion of a student user-oriented evaluation of an integrated science content and language course taught collaboratively in one of the South African universities

Personalization via collaboration in web retrieval systems: a context based approach

World Wide Web is a source of information, and searches on the Web can be analyzed to detect patterns in Web users' search behaviors and information needs to effectively handle the users' subsequent needs. The rationale is that the information need of a user at a particular time point occurs in a particular context, and queries are derived from that need. In this paper, we discuss an extension of our personalization approach that was originally developed for a traditional bibliographic retrieval system but has been adapted and extended with a collaborative model for the Web retrieval environment. We start with a brief introduction of our personalization approach in a traditional information retrieval system. Then, based on the differences in the nature of documents, users and search tasks between traditional and Web retrieval environments, we describe our extensions of integrating collaboration in personalization in the Web retrieval environment. The architecture for the extension integrates machine learning techniques for the purpose of better modeling users' search tasks. Finally, a user-oriented evaluation of Web-based adaptive retrieval systems is presented as an important aspect of the overall strategy for personalization

An evalution of the use subject based information gateways: case Study ADAM

Nowadays, end-users have quick and direct access to a massive amount of information available on the net. However, this information is unorganised expecting users to be able to identify and evaluate it in accordance with their information needs. Subject Based Information Gateways (SBIGs), organised collections of networked information, provide users with a catalogue of authoritative Internet resources, which can be searched or/and browsed. This paper provides an evaluation of one such gateway - the Art, Design, Architecture & Media Gateway (ADAM). It provides information on who these digital users are, how often they use the service, what their reasons for use are, which search methods and services provided they prefer, and what are the advantages and/or disadvantages of an online information service

Development of Design-Oriented Evaluation Tool : A HCI Perspective

Design-oriented is an alternative method in evaluating multimedia applications based on general usability criteria (as opposed to user-oriented evaluation which is is commonly applied in usability testing). This paper identifies the criteria and dimensions for the design-oriented evaluation. Based on the identified criteria, two version and dimensions for the design-oriented evaluation. Based on the identified criteria two versions of tool (long and short) were created to assist multimedia lecturers to assess their students' projects. Reliability and validity test were conducted to ensure the tool is valid and accurate to use. Suggestion and comments from experts were taken into consideration during the validation test. Certainly, the results show that majority of the experts accept the created tool as a good help in evaluating student's projects without hesitation

Shedding light on a living lab: the CLEF NEWSREEL open recommendation platform

In the CLEF NEWSREEL lab, participants are invited to evaluate news recommendation techniques in real-time by providing news recommendations to actual users that visit commercial news portals to satisfy their information needs. A central role within this lab is the communication between participants and the users. This is enabled by The Open Recommendation Platform (ORP), a web-based platform which distributes users' impressions of news articles to the participants and returns their recommendations to the readers. In this demo, we illustrate the platform and show how requests are handled to provide relevant news articles in real-time

Capturing information need by learning user context

Learning techniques can be applied to help information retrieval systems adapt to users' specific needs. They can be used to learn from user searches to improve subsequent searches. This paper describes the approach taken to learn about particular users' contexts in order to improve document ranking produced by a probabilistic information retrieval system. The approach is based on the argument that there is a pattern in user queries in that they tend to remain within a particular context over online sessions. This context, if approximated, can improve system performance. While it is not uncommon to link the evidence from one query to the next within a particular online session, the approach here groups the evidence over different sessions. The paper concentrates on the user-oriented evaluation method used in order to determine whether or not the approach improved information retrieval system performance

The corpus, its users and their needs: a user-oriented evaluation of COMPARA

Abstract COMPARA is a bidirectional parallel corpus of English and Portuguese, currently with 3 million words. The corpus was launched in 2000 and at present it is possibly the largest edited parallel corpus publicly available on the Web, with roughly 6,000 corpus queries per month. This paper summarizes an analysis of six years of corpus use. We begin by looking at user studies for language resources, especially corpora, and then we provide a snapshot of COMPARA's users and their behaviour based on log analysis. Particular emphasis is given to the language interface preferred by users (Portuguese and English are possible), the choice between the Simple and Complex Search modes, the reasons underlying null-results and behaviour after truncated output. The data has pointed us to cases where COMPARA's Web interface can be improved, and provided insights about our users and the problems they face, although further studies that distinguish between different kinds of users remain necessary

Creative professional users musical relevance criteria

Although known item searching for music can be dealt with by searching metadata using existing text search techniques, human subjectivity and variability within the music itself make it very difficult to search for unknown items. This paper examines these problems within the context of text retrieval and music information retrieval. The focus is on ascertaining a relationship between music relevance criteria and those relating to relevance judgements in text retrieval. A data-rich collection of relevance judgements by creative professionals searching for unknown musical items to accompany moving images using real world queries is analysed. The participants in our observations are found to take a socio-cognitive approach and use a range of content and context based criteria. These criteria correlate strongly with those arising from previous text retrieval studies despite the many differences between music and text in their actual content

Digital library research : current developments and trends

This column gives an overview of current trends in digital library research under the following headings: digital library architecture, systems, tools and technologies; digital content and collections; metadata; interoperability; standards; knowledge organisation systems; users and usability; legal, organisational, economic, and social issues in digital libraries