Pedagogical Methods in Web-Based Language Teaching

This paper presents a research project that is being conducted at Dalarna University in Sweden. The aim is to study the following: 1) The quality of online language education compared with that of campus education, and 2) Advantages and disadvantages of online language education and how the disadvantages might be overcome. The project consists of two parts: pedagogical methods in online language education from the teachers’ point of view and from the students’ point of view. The first part was conducted in 2012 and various characteristics (benefits and difficulties) of online language education were identified. Flexibility and wider opportunities were general benefits, while lack of physical co-presence, difficulty in having lively debates/discussions, and high dropout rates were among the problems. The second part of the project (being conducted in 2014) aims to investigate how students experience online language learning. The goal is to explore alignments and misalignments between teachers’ perspectives and students’ perspectives, and to develop methods to enhance the quality of online education.

Principles of High Quality Documentation for Provenance: A Philosophical Discussion

Computer technology enables the creation of detailed documentation about the processes that create or affect entities (data, objects, etc.). Such documentation of the past can be used to answer various kinds of questions regarding the processes that led to the creation or modification of a particular entity. The answer to such questions is known as an entity's provenance. In this paper, we derive a number of principles for documenting the past, grounded in work from philosophy and history, which allow for provenance questions to be answered within a computational context. These principles lead us to argue that an interaction-based model is particularly suited for representing high quality documentation of the past.

Projeto para criação do Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Oral e Ciências Sociais (Beira, Moçambique)

A presente dissertação tem como objetivo central propor a criação do Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Oral e Ciencias Sociais na cidade da Beira, em Moçambique. Pretende-se, com o Centro, promover projetos que possibilitem a constituição de acervos de caráter histórico e documental, contribuindo, assim, para o desenvolvimento da pesquisa acadêmica e para a valorização da história e da cultura Moçambicanas. O Centro terá como principal ferramenta metodológica de pesquisa a história oral. O acervo a ser constituído no contexto de distintos projetos resultará, portanto, de entrevistas gravadas com atores de diferentes extratos sociais, todos eles participantes diretos de eventos relevantes da história recente de Moçambique. Essas entrevistas deverão estar disponíveis, no Centro, juntamente com outros tipos de fontes, coletadas e organizadas com o objetivo de constituir um centro de referência sobre a história contemporanea do país. Toda a atividade do Centro será acompanhada de projetos de qualificação de equipes. Neste sentido, o Centro terá de lidar com dois importantes campos: a pesquisa, produção, preservação e difusão de fontes para a história contemporânea; e o apoio didático-pedagógico aos diversos níveis do processo de aprendizagem.

Using an animated pedagogical agent to interact affectively with the student

This work proposes an animated pedagogical agent that has the role of providing emotional support to the student: motivating and encouraging him, making him believe in his self-ability, and promoting a positive mood in him, which fosters learning. This careful support of the agent, its affective tactics, is expressed through emotional behaviour and encouragement messages of the lifelike character. Due to human social tendency of anthropomorphising software, we believe that a software agent can accomplish this affective role. In order to choose the adequate affective tactics, the agent should also know the student’s emotions. The proposed agent recognises the student’s emotions: joy/distress, satisfaction/disappointment, anger/gratitude, and shame, from the student’s observable behaviour, i. e. his actions in the interface of the educational system. The inference of emotions is psychologically grounded on the cognitive theory of emotions. More specifically, we use the OCC model which is based on the cognitive approach of emotion and can be computationally implemented. Due to the dynamic nature of the student’s affective information, we adopted a BDI approach to implement the affective user model and the affective diagnosis. Besides, in our work we profit from the reasoning capacity of the BDI approach in order for the agent to deduce the student’s appraisal, which allows it to infer the student’s emotions. As a case study, the proposed agent is implemented as the Mediating Agent of MACES: an educational collaborative environment modelled as a multi-agent system and pedagogically based on the sociocultural theory of Vygotsky.

O trabalho do gestor escolar: intensificação e implicações administrativas e pedagógicas na gestão da escola

Analyze the work of the school manager who now faces the changes experienced in school management for the last two decades. We propose that there have been changes in school management that have generated a larger number of activities to be developed by managers, causing both the intensification of work and a greater involvement of professionals in the financial-administrative dimension of their work in opposition to the political and pedagogical dimension. This study has a historic-critic approach. That is why we performed semi-structured interviews with school managers of the city schools in Natal RN, BR as a methodological procedure. We also analyzed the literature as well as the documentation relevant to this subject. From the study it was possible to conclude that changes in the field of school management and also teaching have led to an intensification of work of school managers and that such changes have not been followed by corresponding improvement in working conditions and teaching career of these professionals. They, as a rule, are considered by controlling agencies and by the school community as the primarily responsible for the school condition and for creating actions or projects that may improve the institutional objectives and results, including even the maintenance of the institution. Moreover, the growing number of administrative activities represents for obvious reasons extra work for these managers, who, when trying to cope with the growing bureaucratic situations, end up misplacing other political and educational aspects of school work, which may undermine the final purpose of school itself. We stress that we must broaden the discussions on the functions of the school manager, so that this worker can actualize a pedagogical project more committed to an emancipatory nature, despite all the challenge in keeping the school running in often-precarious conditions

The design of the Latin American Documentation System (DOCPAL); a report on the first four months

Includes bibliography

An outline of the Latin American Documentation System (DOCPAL)

Includes bibliography

Compatibility among population documentation systems to meet the needs of the Latin American region

Includes bibliography

Technical description of the DOCPAL System: aspects relevant to compatibility among population documentation systems

Includes bibliography

Pedagogical model and school failure

Includes bibliography

Antecedentes, organización y programas del Centro Latinoamericano de Documentación Económica y Social = Background, organization and programmes of the Latin American Centre for Economic and Social Documentation

Incluye Bibliografía