Learner autonomy : a guide to developing learner responsibility.

Ofrece orientación práctica para ayudar a los estudiantes a darse cuenta de la importancia de su contribución al proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje y animarlos a tomar parte activa en su propio aprendizaje. Las actividades están diseñadas para desarrollar una amplia gama de habilidades y actitudes tales como motivación, estrategias de aprendizaje, autocontrol y cooperación.

Developing the gifted and talented young learner.

Este manual considera los niños superdotados y talentosos y anima a explorar las creencias relativas a esto jóvenes estudiantes y cómo pueden satisfacerse sus necesidades adicionales. Contiene ideas prácticas para: dar comentarios y elogios; estructurar las actividades para ayudar a formar y reconocer a las altas capacidades; cómo crear un entorno de aprendizaje estimulante; el desarrollo de los ciudadanos del futuro.

The adult learner : the definitive classic in adult education and human resource development.

Es una lectura esencial para los profesionales del aprendizaje de adultos, estudiantes y profesionales de los recursos humanos, pues proporciona un marco teórico para la comprensión de los problemas del aprendizaje de adultos, tanto en los entornos docentes como en los lugares de trabajo. Se divide en tres partes: la primera parte estudia 'Las raíces de la andragogía', se traza el desarrollo de esta teoría y las características de los estudiantes adultos; en la segunda parte 'Los avances en el aprendizaje de adultos', se explican sus perspectivas de futuro en la investigación y la práctica y, en la última parte, 'Practica en el aprendizaje de adultos', se presentan lecturas seleccionadas que desarrollan los aspectos específicos de la andragogía en la práctica y que incluye estrategias para implementar los supuestos básicos, para adaptar el aprendizaje a las diferencias individuales, y para implementar la educación de adultos en las organizaciones. De especial interés son dos instrumentos de autoevaluación, 'the Core Competency Diagnostic and Planning Guide' y 'the Personal Adult Learning Style Inventory' que permiten al lector ponerse en camino del desarrollo personal en el aprendizaje de adultos.

Learner identity : an educational and analytical tool. 'La identidad de aprendiz : una herramienta educativa y analítica'.

Monográfico con el título: 'Identidad y educación'. Resumen basado en el de la publicación

Awareness of thinking and feelings as a natural process for every learner : implications for guidance. 'Consideración de la cognición y de la emoción en el aprendizaje : implicaciones para la orientación'.

Resumen basado en el de la publicación

If I has a lot of money... : learner errors in foreign language writing

Resumen basado en el de la publicaci??n

Facebook & Blackboard: comparison of learner perspectives

Different systems, different purposes – but how do they compare as learning environments? We undertook a survey of students at the University, asking whether they learned from their use of the systems, whether they made contact with other students through them, and how often they used them. Although it was a small scale survey, the results are quite enlightening and quite surprising. Blackboard is populated with learning material, has all the students on a module signed up to it, a safe environment (in terms of Acceptable Use and some degree of staff monitoring) and provides privacy within the learning group (plus lecturer and relevant support staff). Facebook, on the other hand, has no learning material, only some of the students using the system, and on the face of it, it has the opportunity for slips in privacy and potential bullying because the Acceptable Use policy is more lax than an institutional one, and breaches must be dealt with on an exception basis, when reported. So why do more students find people on their courses through Facebook than Blackboard? And why are up to 50% of students reporting that they have learned from using Facebook? Interviews indicate that students in subjects which use seminars are using Facebook to facilitate working groups – they can set up private groups which give them privacy to discuss ideas in an environment which perceived as safer than Blackboard can provide. No staff interference, unless they choose to invite them in, and the opportunity to select who in the class can engage. The other striking finding is the difference in use between the genders. Males are using blackboard more frequently than females, whilst the reverse is true for Facebook. Interviews suggest that this may have something to do with needing to access lecture notes… Overall, though, it appears that there is little relationship between the time spent engaging with Blackboard and reports that students have learned from it. Because Blackboard is our central repository for notes, any contact is likely to result in some learning. Facebook, however, shows a clear relationship between frequency of use and perception of learning – and our students post frequently to Facebook. Whilst much of this is probably trivia and social chit chat, the educational elements of it are, de facto, contructivist in nature. Further questions need to be answered - Is the reason the students learn from Facebook because they are creating content which others will see and comment on? Is it because they can engage in a dialogue, without the risk of interruption by others?

Learner strategies and self-efficacy: making the connection

This article reports on part of a larger study of the impact of strategy training in listening on learners of French, aged 16 to 17. One aim of the project was to investigate whether such training might have a positive effect on the self-efficacy of learners, by helping them see the relationship between the strategies they employed and what they achieved. One group of learners, as well as receiving strategy training, also received detailed feedback on their listening strategy use and on the reflective diaries they were asked to keep, in order to draw their attention to the relationship between strategies and learning outcomes. Another group received strategy training without feedback or reflective diaries, while a comparison group received neither strategy training nor feedback. As a result of the training, there was some evidence that students who had received feedback had made the biggest gains in certain aspects of self-efficacy for listening; although their gains as compared to the non-feedback group were not as great as had been anticipated. Reasons for this are discussed. The article concludes by suggesting changes in how teachers approach listening comprehension that may improve learners' view of themselves as listeners.

Analysing lexical richness in French learner language: what frequency lists and teacher judgements can tell us about basic and advanced words

We show how teacher judgements can be used to assess the quality of vocabulary used by L2 learners of French.

Parallel random prism: a computationally efficient ensemble learner for classification

Generally classifiers tend to overfit if there is noise in the training data or there are missing values. Ensemble learning methods are often used to improve a classifier's classification accuracy. Most ensemble learning approaches aim to improve the classification accuracy of decision trees. However, alternative classifiers to decision trees exist. The recently developed Random Prism ensemble learner for classification aims to improve an alternative classification rule induction approach, the Prism family of algorithms, which addresses some of the limitations of decision trees. However, Random Prism suffers like any ensemble learner from a high computational overhead due to replication of the data and the induction of multiple base classifiers. Hence even modest sized datasets may impose a computational challenge to ensemble learners such as Random Prism. Parallelism is often used to scale up algorithms to deal with large datasets. This paper investigates parallelisation for Random Prism, implements a prototype and evaluates it empirically using a Hadoop computing cluster.