Facebook & BlackBoard: comparative view of learning environments

For several years, online educational tools such as Blackboard have been used by Universities to foster collaborative learning in an online setting. Such tools tend to be implemented in a top-down fashion, with the institution providing the tool to the students and instructing them to use it. Recently, however, a more informal, bottom up approach is increasingly being employed by the students themselves in the form of social networks such as Facebook. With over 9,000 registered Facebook users at the beginning of this study, rising to over 12,000 at the University of Reading alone, Facebook is becoming the de facto social network of choice for higher education students in the UK, and there was increasing anecdotal evidence that students were actively learning via Facebook rather than through BlackBoard. To test the validity of these anecdotes, a questionnaire was sent to students, asking them about their learning experiences via BlackBoard and Facebook. The results show that students are making use of the tools available to them even when there is no formal academic content, and that increased use of a social networking tool is correlated with a reported increase in learning as a result of that use.

View-based approaches to spatial representation in human vision

In an immersive virtual environment, observers fail to notice the expansion of a room around them and consequently make gross errors when comparing the size of objects. This result is difficult to explain if the visual system continuously generates a 3-D model of the scene based on known baseline information from interocular separation or proprioception as the observer walks. An alternative is that observers use view-based methods to guide their actions and to represent the spatial layout of the scene. In this case, they may have an expectation of the images they will receive but be insensitive to the rate at which images arrive as they walk. We describe the way in which the eye movement strategy of animals simplifies motion processing if their goal is to move towards a desired image and discuss dorsal and ventral stream processing of moving images in that context. Although many questions about view-based approaches to scene representation remain unanswered, the solutions are likely to be highly relevant to understanding biological 3-D vision.

Terrestrial implications for the maritime geoarchaeological resource: A view from the Lower Palaeolithic

Stone tools and faunal remains have been recovered from the English Channel and the North Sea through trawling, dredging for aggregates, channel clearance, and coring. These finds highlight the potential for a maritime Lower Palaeolithic archaeological resource. It is proposed here that any Lower Palaeolithic artefacts, faunal remains, and sediments deposited in the maritime zone during dry, low-stand phases were once (and may still be) contextually similar to their counterparts in the terrestrial Lower Palaeolithic records of north-western Europe. Given these similarities, can interpretive models and analytical frameworks developed for terrestrial archaeology be profitably applied to an assessment of the potential value of any maritime resource? The terrestrial geoarchaeological resource for the Lower Palaeolithic is dominated by artefacts and ecofacts that have been fluvially reworked. The spatio-temporal resolution of these data varies from entire river valleys and marine isotope stages to river channel gravel bar surfaces and decadal timescales, thus supporting a variety of questions and approaches. However, the structure of the terrestrial resource also highlights two fundamental limitations in current maritime knowledge that can restrict the application of terrestrial approaches to any potential maritime resource: (i) how have the repetitive transgressions and regressions of the Middle and Late Pleistocene modified the terrace landforms and sediments associated with the river systems of the English Channel and southern North Sea basins?; and (ii) do the surviving submerged terrace landforms and fluvial sedimentary deposits support robust geochronological models, as is the case with the classical terrestrial terrace sequences? This paper highlights potential approaches to these questions, and concludes that the fluvial palaeogeography, Pleistocene fossils, and potential Lower Palaeolithic artefacts of the maritime geoarchaeological resource can be profitably investigated in future as derived, low-resolution data sets, facilitating questions of colonisation, occupation, demography, and material culture.

Strengthening argumentation in medical explanations by text planning revision

Explanations are an important by-product of medical decisionsupport activities, as they have proved to favour compliance and correct treatment performance. To achieve this purpose, these texts should have a strong argumentation content and should adapt to emotional, as well as to rational attitudes of the Addressee. This paper describes how Rhetorical Sentence Planning can contribute to this aim: the rulebased plan discourse revision is introduced between Text Planning and Linguistic Realization, and exploits knowledge about the user personality and emotions and about the potential impact of domain items on user compliance and memory recall. The proposed approach originates from analytical and empirical evaluation studies of computer generated explanation texts in the domain of drug prescription. This work was partially supported by a British-Italian Collaboration in Research and Higher Education Project, which involved the Universities of Reading and of Bari, in 1996.