Promoting a participatory convergence in a Spanish context: an inter-university action research project using visual narrative

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the deconstruction of an inter-university action research project that has allowed us to rethink our teaching and research, questioning the social, political and ethical dimensions of the university. Following the pre-assembly proposal to promote participatory convergence, organized within the framework of the 1^st Global Assembly for Knowledge Democracy (2017), an action research process was implemented in order to generate systematic inquiry around the current situation of the university and the need to act and rethink our commitment to promoting changes in this context. We have reflected on the meaning of democratization, rethinking the pedagogical relationship with our students and how we critically commit them to promote activism. We generated an environment where we look for the meaning of our practices by means of a visual narrative which has enabled us to weave and identify our own biography and become aware of where we are and why we act in one way or another. We have also focused on the search for the meaning of our actions in relation to the community we belong to and how to deal with the challenges of social justice, encouraging collaboration with other networks in a wider inter-university framework.     

Making Plans for Michael: providing for a student with moderate learning difficulties in a secondary academy

The profile of a student with learning difficulties is described and also the learning context in 2017. Previous models of provision are then described in terms of their aetiology with discussion of strengths and shortcomings. Some influential features of curriculum planning and delivery are identified. A model of provision involving specific literacy teaching and differentiation is advocated.     

Revisiting the cluster-based paradigm for implicit search result diversification

To cope with ambiguous and/or underspecified queries, search result diversification (SRD) is a key technique that has attracted a lot of attention. This paper focuses on implicit SRD, where the subtopics underlying a query are unknown. Many existing methods appeal to the greedy strategy for generating diversified results. A common practice is using a heuristic criterion for making the locally optimal choice at each round. As a result, it is difficult to know whether the failures are caused by the optimization criterion or the setting of parameters. Different from previous studies, we formulate implicit SRD as a process of selecting and ranking k exemplar documents through integer linear programming (ILP). The key idea is that: for a specific query, we expect to maximize the overall relevance of the k exemplar documents. Meanwhile, we wish to maximize the representativeness of the selected exemplar documents with respect to the non-selected documents. Intuitively, if the selected exemplar documents concisely represent the entire set of documents, the novelty and diversity will naturally arise. Moreover, we propose two approaches ILP4ID (Integer Linear Programming for Implicit SRD) and AP4ID (Affinity Propagation for Implicit SRD) for solving the proposed formulation of implicit SRD. In particular, ILP4ID appeals to the strategy of bound-and-branch and is able to obtain the optimal solution. AP4ID being an approximate method transforms the target problem as a maximum-a-posteriori inference problem, and the message passing algorithm is adopted to find the solution. Furthermore, we investigate the differences and connections between the proposed models and prior models by casting them as different variants of the cluster-based paradigm for implicit SRD. To validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approaches, we conduct a series of experiments on four benchmark TREC diversity collections. The experimental results demonstrate that: (1) The proposed methods, especially ILP4ID, can achieve substantially improved performance over the state-of-the-art unsupervised methods for implicit SRD. (2) The initial runs, the number of input documents, query types, the ways of computing document similarity, the pre-defined cluster number and the optimization algorithm significantly affect the performance of diversification models. Careful examinations of these factors are highly recommended in the development of implicit SRD methods. Based on the in-depth study of different types of methods for implicit SRD, we provide additional insight into the cluster-based paradigm for implicit SRD. In particular, how the methods relying on greedy strategies impact the performance of implicit SRD, and how a particular diversification model should be fine-tuned.     

VizBib

A scan of recent popular, professional, and research publications, films, and other media of interest to visual communicators, artists, and scholars.     

在线反思性交互的评估

交互是在线学习的关键要素，同(异)步交互工具可拓展教学交互的深度与广度，而科学、有效的评估能促进交互。本在比较多种异步交互评估方法后，以建构主义学习理论为基础，引用Simmons的反思性思维评价量规，详尽地描述了反思性交互的激励式评估在案例中的实施过程。     

Sequences of reward magnitude and runway performance

Three groups of rats underwent 24 days of training and 12 days of extinction (three trials per day) in a runway under conditions of increasing (I), decreasing (D), and random (R) sequences of reward magnitudes (0, 45, and 500 mg). The I Ss ran faster over the daily trials, the D Ss slowed down, and the R Ss ran at approximately equal speeds on each trial. The patterned running observed in training persisted in extinction, with the R Ss running fastest and the I Ss next. The results were discussed in terms of Capaldi’s sequential theory and Amsel’s frustration theory.     

The Classroom Practice of a Prospective Secondary Biology Teacher and His Conceptions of the Nature of Science and of Teaching and Learning Science

We describe research carried out with a prospective secondary biology teacher, whom we shall call Miguel. The teacher’s conceptions of the nature of science and of learning and teaching science were analyzed and compared with his classroom practice when teaching science lessons. The data gathering procedures were interviews analyzed by means of cognitive maps and classroom observations. The results reflected Miguel’s relativist conceptions of the nature of science that were consistent with his constructivist orientation in learning and teaching. In the classroom, however, he followed a strategy of transmission of external knowledge based exclusively on teacher explanations, the students being regarded as mere passive receptors of that knowledge. Miguel’s classroom behavior was completely contrary to his conceptions, which were to reinforce the students’ alternative ideas through debate, and not by means of teacher explanation.