Developing students’ technological literacy through robotics activities

One way to consider Technology as other than an add-on might be to consider the opportunities to learn literacies opened by participation in technology. In this commentary Vinesh Chandra considers this in light of robotics lessons with primary school students as part of his work in the UR Learning project.

Social media, audiences, and audience co-creativity in contemporary performance: Restoring balance?

Producers, technicians, performers, audiences and critics are all critical components of the performing arts ecology – critical components of an ecosystem that have to come together into some sort of productive relationship if the performing arts are to be vital, viable and successful. Different performance practices developed in different times, spaces and places do, of course, connect these players in different ways as part of their attempt to achieve their own definition of success, be it based on entertainment, educational, expression, empowerment, or something else. In some contemporary performance practices, social media platforms, applications and processes are seen to have significant potential to restore balance to the relationship between performer and audience, providing audiences with more power to participate in a performance event. In this paper, I investigate prevailing assumptions about social media’s power to democratise performance practice, or, at least, develop more co-creative performance practices in which producers, performers and audiences participate actively before, during and after the event. I focus, in particular, on the use of social media as a means of developing a participatory aesthetic in which an audience member is asked to contribute to the cast of characters, plot or progression of a performance. Although diverse – from performances streamed online, to performances that offer transmedia components the audience can use to learn more about character, context and plot online, to performances that incorporate online voting, liking or linking, to performances that unfold fully online on websites, blogs, microblogs or other social media platforms – what a lot of uses of social media in contemporary performance today share is a desire to encourage audiences to reflect on their role in making, and making meaning, of the event. In this paper I interrogate if, and if so how, this democratises or develops deeper levels of co-creativity in the relationship between producers, performers and audiences.

Medical semantic similarity with a neural language model

Advances in neural network language models have demonstrated that these models can effectively learn representations of words meaning. In this paper, we explore a variation of neural language models that can learn on concepts taken from structured ontologies and extracted from free-text, rather than directly from terms in free-text. This model is employed for the task of measuring semantic similarity between medical concepts, a task that is central to a number of techniques in medical informatics and information retrieval. The model is built with two medical corpora (journal abstracts and patient records) and empirically validated on two ground-truth datasets of human-judged concept pairs assessed by medical professionals. Empirically, our approach correlates closely with expert human assessors ($\approx$ 0.9) and outperforms a number of state-of-the-art benchmarks for medical semantic similarity. The demonstrated superiority of this model for providing an effective semantic similarity measure is promising in that this may translate into effectiveness gains for techniques in medical information retrieval and medical informatics (e.g., query expansion and literature-based discovery).

An application of fuzzy DL-Based semantic perception to soil container classification

Semantic perception and object labeling are key requirements for robots interacting with objects on a higher level. Symbolic annotation of objects allows the usage of planning algorithms for object interaction, for instance in a typical fetchand-carry scenario. In current research, perception is usually based on 3D scene reconstruction and geometric model matching, where trained features are matched with a 3D sample point cloud. In this work we propose a semantic perception method which is based on spatio-semantic features. These features are defined in a natural, symbolic way, such as geometry and spatial relation. In contrast to point-based model matching methods, a spatial ontology is used where objects are rather described how they "look like", similar to how a human would described unknown objects to another person. A fuzzy based reasoning approach matches perceivable features with a spatial ontology of the objects. The approach provides a method which is able to deal with senor noise and occlusions. Another advantage is that no training phase is needed in order to learn object features. The use-case of the proposed method is the detection of soil sample containers in an outdoor environment which have to be collected by a mobile robot. The approach is verified using real world experiments.

The Yonder project: Stories of impact, change, and capacity building through engagement in arts education

This thesis examined the long-term impact of the community arts education project Yonder, a collaboration between Education Queensland and Queensland Performing Arts Centre. The findings from the data reveal that the project was still having impact twelve months after its completion and that in some instances the project served as a 'circuit-breaker', especially for special needs students and struggling students. The intervention of a rich arts project proved to be an opportunity for these students to learn in a different way and to perceive themselves in a new and reinvented light. This confidence was found to transfer into other aspects of their learning.

Analysing student programs in the PHP intelligent tutoring system

Programming is a subject that many beginning students find difficult. The PHP Intelligent Tutoring System (PHP ITS) has been designed with the aim of making it easier for novices to learn the PHP language in order to develop dynamic web pages. Programming requires practice. This makes it necessary to include practical exercises in any ITS that supports students learning to program. The PHP ITS works by providing exercises for students to solve and then providing feedback based on their solutions. The major challenge here is to be able to identify many semantically equivalent solutions to a single exercise. The PHP ITS achieves this by using theories of Artificial Intelligence (AI) including first-order predicate logic and classical and hierarchical planning to model the subject matter taught by the system. This paper highlights the approach taken by the PHP ITS to analyse students’ programs that include a number of program constructs that are used by beginners of web development. The PHP ITS was built using this model and evaluated in a unit at the Queensland University of Technology. The results showed that it was capable of correctly analysing over 96 % of the solutions to exercises supplied by students.

Appendix 8: Quantifying the effects of environmental factors on catch rates in South-East fisheries: 1986-2006

The collection of basic environmental data by industry members was successful and offers a way of overcoming the problems associated with differences in scale between the environment and fisheries datasets. A simple method of collecting environmental data was developed that was only a small time burden on skippers, yet has the potential to provide very useful information on the same scale as the catch and effort data recorded in the logbooks. The success of this trial was aided by the natural interest of fishers to learn more about the environment in which they fish. The archival temperature-depth tags chosen proved robust, reliable and easy to use. While the use of large scale environmental data may not yield significant improvements in stock assessments for most SESSF species, fine-scale data collected from selected vessels using methods developed during this project may, in the longer term, be useful for incorporation into CPUE standardisations in the future...

The fluid nature of action research

Action research is a fluid, unfolding process of research. It involves cycles of questioning, gathering data, critical reflection and deciding on a course of action (Stringer, 2008). Through action research, educators research their own practice in their own setting. They learn from their experiences as the action research cycles progress, and apply new learning to practice.

Ants, apples and the ABCs: The use of commercial phonics programmes in prior-to-school children's services

Commercial phonics programmes (e.g. Jolly Phonics and Letterland) are becoming widely used in the early years of school. These programmes claim to use a systematic explicit approach, considered as the preferred method of phonics instruction for teaching alphabetic code-breaking skills in Australia and the UK in the first years of school (Department of Education, Science and Training, 2005; Rose, 2006). However, little is known about the extent to which they are being used in prior-to-school settings, and the reasons behind decisions to use them. This study surveyed 283 early childhood staff in Sydney, Australia and found that commercial phonics programmes were being used in 36% of the early childhood settings surveyed. Staff with early childhood univer- sity qualifications and staff working in not-for-profit service types were less likely to use a commercial phonics programme than staff without university qualifications and staff working in for-profit services. Staff with less than 10 years’ experience were also more likely to use a commercial phonics programme. The rationale behind decisions deter- mining whether or not staff used the programmes ranged from pragmatic reasons, such as parent pressure or higher management decisions, to pedagogical reasons, such as teacher beliefs about how children learn to read and write. The practices staff engage in to teach phonics are explored.

Submission to Communications Alliance Industry Code: Copyright Notice Scheme

In making this submission, we suggest that Australia learn from the experiences of other jurisdictions, and avoid some of the mistakes that have been made. In particular, this involves: * Ensuring that adequate information is available to evaluate the success of the scheme * Ensuring that notices sent to consumers provide full and accurate information that helps them understand their rights and options * Limiting the potential abuse of the system, and particularly attempts to intimidate consumers into paying unfair penalties through ‘speculative invoicing’ * Avoiding the potential for actual or perceived bias in the scheme’s oversight body

A humanistic approach to South African accounting education

Humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers made a distinction between traditional approaches and humanistic `learner-centred\' approaches to education. The traditional approach holds that educators impart their knowledge to willing and able recipients; whereas the humanistic approach holds that educators act as facilitators who assist learners in their learning processes. As a learning theory, humanism refers to the belief in the innate ability of humans to learn, and the creation of an environment in which students are given `Freedom to Learn\'. South African accounting education has, by and large, followed the traditional approach rather than the humanistic approach. This article attempts to expand on the existing references to a humanistic approach through a more detailed exposition and application of the educational theory of Carl Rogers in the context of South African accounting education. The prospects of a humanistic approach in accounting education are then discussed and some practical strategies provided in relation to a specific third-year undergraduate accounting unit offered in South Africa.

Wikis for women's health: Social constructivist analysis of the effectiveness of online collaborative spaces for reflective learning

Public Health undergraduate students studying the unit Women’s Health undertook a teaching and learning exercise which required them to learn to create and use a wiki website for reflective learning purposes. The Women’s Health wiki provided an online shared, collaborative, and creative space wherein the students’ perceptions of women's health issues could be discussed, reflected upon, and debated. We analysed the content developed on the Women’s Health wiki using a social constructivist theoretical framework and provided a theoretical model for how the wiki worked to aid reflective and critical thinking, as well as developing technological and communicative skills amongst students.

Striving for a better world: Lessons from Freire in Grenada, Jamaica and Australia

The author of this paper considers the influence of Paulo Freire’s pedagogical philosophy on educational practice in three different geographical/political settings. She begins with reflections on her experience as a facilitator at Freire’s seminar, held in Grenada in 1980 for teachers and community educators, on the integration of work and study. This case demonstrates how Freire’s method of dialogic education achieved outcomes for the group of thoughtful collaboration leading to conscientisation in terms of deep reflection on their lives as teachers in Grenada and strategies for decolonising education and society. The second case under consideration is the arts-based pedagogy shaping the work of the Area Youth Foundation (AYF) in Kingston, Jamaica. Young participants, many of them from tough socio-economic backgrounds, are empowered by learning how to articulate their own experiences and relate these to social change. They express this conscientisation by creating stage performances, murals, photo-novella booklets and other artistic products. The third case study describes and evaluates the Honey Ant Reader project in Alice Springs, Australia. Aboriginal children, as well as the adults in their community, learn to read in their local language as well as Australian Standard English, using booklets created from indigenous stories told by community Elders, featuring local customs and traditions. The author analyses how the “Freirean” pedagogy in all three cases exemplifies the process of encouraging the creation of knowledge for progressive social change, rather than teaching preconceived knowledge. This supports her discussion of the extent to which this is authentic to the spirit of the scholar/teacher Paulo Freire, who maintained that in our search for a better society, the world has to be made and remade. Her second, related aim is to raise questions about how education aligned with Freirean pedagogy can contribute to moving social change from the culture circle to the public sphere.

Role Ambiguity and conflicts: A study of company secretaries and two-tier boards in the Netherlands

Recent research suggests that company secretaries are increasingly involved in governance responsibilities in addition to traditional administrative tasks. Little is known in the literature, however, about company secretaries' changing governance role, and their daily challenges in liaising with boards and other stakeholders. In addition, few studies have been able to gain access to learn firsthand how company secretaries operate. This exploratory study fills this void by gaining access to the opinions of about one hundred company secretaries in the Netherlands who operate in the two-tier board system. Our findings indicate that company secretaries significantly influence an organisation's governance framework, while they face a number of practical challenges with directors, employees and management in fulfilling their diverse roles and responsibilities.

Hepatitis C and initiates into injecting drug use among young people: Part I: The first shot

Explores how young people in Australia first come to inject drugs and how they learn about hepatitis C and sterile injecting drug use. Background on hepatitis C; Reasons for injecting drugs; Selection criteria for young people's participation in the i2i Project.