Knowledge spirals, situational leadership and informal learning applied on b-learning methodology

The methodology “b-learning” is a new teaching scenario and it requires the creation, adaptation and application of new learning tools searching the assimilation of new collaborative competences. In this context, it is well known the knowledge spirals, the situational leadership and the informal learning. The knowledge spirals is a basic concept of the knowledge procedure and they are based on that the knowledge increases when a cycle of 4 phases is repeated successively.1) The knowledge is created (for instance, to have an idea); 2) The knowledge is decoded into a format to be easily transmitted; 3) The knowledge is modified to be easily comprehensive and it is used; 4) New knowledge is created. This new knowledge improves the previous one (step 1). Each cycle shows a step of a spiral staircase: by going up the staircase, more knowledge is created. On the other hand, the situational leadership is based on that each person has a maturity degree to develop a specific task and this maturity increases with the experience. Therefore, the teacher (leader) has to adapt the teaching style to the student (subordinate) requirements and in this way, the professional and personal development of the student will increase quickly by improving the results and satisfaction. This educational strategy, finally combined with the informal learning, and in particular the zone of proximal development, and using a learning content management system own in our University, gets a successful and well-evaluated learning activity in Master subjects focused on the collaborative activity of preparation and oral exhibition of short and specific topics affine to these subjects. Therefore, the teacher has a relevant and consultant role of the selected topic and his function is to guide and supervise the work, incorporating many times the previous works done in other courses, as a research tutor or more experienced student. Then, in this work, we show the academic results, grade of interactivity developed in these collaborative tasks, statistics and the satisfaction grade shown by our post-graduate students.

Some reflections on the impact of globalization in the teaching and learning of English in socalled “expanding circle” countries

This article deals with the ongoing debate on the complex role of English as an International Language, be it understood as a homogeneous entity (one language with an international role [EIL]) or a heterogeneous one (different varieties (WE or ELF) grouped under one label, «English») as well as on the implications of this «globalising» status for its teaching in non-native settings. Given the complexity of this phenomenon, whose study is still in its infancy, we attempt neither to provide definitive answers nor adopt a prescriptive attitude, but simply contribute to the discussion and clarification of this, to some extent, emergent, controversial situation.

On stable uniqueness in linear semi-infinite optimization

This paper is intended to provide conditions for the stability of the strong uniqueness of the optimal solution of a given linear semi-infinite optimization (LSIO) problem, in the sense of maintaining the strong uniqueness property under sufficiently small perturbations of all the data. We consider LSIO problems such that the family of gradients of all the constraints is unbounded, extending earlier results of Nürnberger for continuous LSIO problems, and of Helbig and Todorov for LSIO problems with bounded set of gradients. To do this we characterize the absolutely (affinely) stable problems, i.e., those LSIO problems whose feasible set (its affine hull, respectively) remains constant under sufficiently small perturbations.

PoS-tagging the Web in Portuguese. National varieties, text typologies and spelling systems

The great amount of text produced every day in the Web turned it as one of the main sources for obtaining linguistic corpora, that are further analyzed with Natural Language Processing techniques. On a global scale, languages such as Portuguese - official in 9 countries - appear on the Web in several varieties, with lexical, morphological and syntactic (among others) differences. Besides, a unified spelling system for Portuguese has been recently approved, and its implementation process has already started in some countries. However, it will last several years, so different varieties and spelling systems coexist. Since PoS-taggers for Portuguese are specifically built for a particular variety, this work analyzes different training corpora and lexica combinations aimed at building a model with high-precision annotation in several varieties and spelling systems of this language. Moreover, this paper presents different dictionaries of the new orthography (Spelling Agreement) as well as a new freely available testing corpus, containing different varieties and textual typologies.