Participation and genres of communication in online settings of higher education

This paper focuses on written utterances in online settings of higher education. It concerns the constitution of the initiation, turn taking and the steering of exchanges of utterances; and it describes these patterns in terms of different genres. The study also concerns participation in higher education and, specifically, participation in educational settings where students and teachers rarely meet face-to-face. Their participation is thus dependant on written utterances in online settings. Overall, this paper discusses constitutive aspects of these written utterances. The educational communication between students and teachers embraced both student- and teacher-centered genres. The distinction between these two genres relates to the functionality of the utterances, the main metaphor for learning and the responsibilities for the communication taken by students and teachers. The emergence of these genres seems to be affected by interplay between the composition of the study-groups, the structure of the task and other aspects of participation through online settings.     

Comment

During the fifties and the sixties there had been a pronounced increase in the interest of pre-school children and their development. This interest has been encouraging as well as frightening.     

Combining integrated sampling with SVM ensembles for learning from imbalanced datasets

Learning from imbalanced datasets is difficult. The insufficient information that is associated with the minority class impedes making a clear understanding of the inherent structure of the dataset. Most existing classification methods tend not to perform well on minority class examples when the dataset is extremely imbalanced, because they aim to optimize the overall accuracy without considering the relative distribution of each class. In this paper, we study the performance of SVMs, which have gained great success in many real applications, in the imbalanced data context. Through empirical analysis, we show that SVMs may suffer from biased decision boundaries, and that their prediction performance drops dramatically when the data is highly skewed. We propose to combine an integrated sampling technique, which incorporates both over-sampling and under-sampling, with an ensemble of SVMs to improve the prediction performance. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms individual SVMs as well as several other state-of-the-art classifiers.     

面向过程的创新资源集成模式研究

企业作为创新的传统主体一直受到学界和业界的重视和实践,而作为创新动力重要源泉的消费者的作用同样不容忽视,其活跃的思维方式、独特的视角在一定使能技术支持下,在产品创新过程中同样大有作为.如何将传统的企业创新资源与消费者这两种创新资源有机地集成在一起是一个现实的问题.以创新的过程作为切入点,根据创新不同阶段的特征以及对创新能力的需求,探讨了企业、消费者这两种创新资源的能力特征以及参与创新活动的形式.为实现资源的动态整合,提出了一种立体集成模式,从创新活动形式、资源主体以及创新阶段三个维度探讨了面向创新过程的资源集成方式.     

An Immanent Critique of Critical Pedagogy

In this essay, Quentin Wheeler‐Bell aims to reframe recent attempts to rethink the core principles of critical pedagogy. He argues that these attempts have been unsuccessful because they reproduce a deeper problem — specifically, an identity crisis — within critical pedagogy. The source of this problem, he contends, is that those working in this tradition have, over time, become more distant from and forgetful of its roots in critical theory; as a result, critical pedagogy is now in a state of dilution and fragmentation in which critical pedagogues are unable to bring the plurality of critical education approaches together theoretically around a set of shared principles. In order to address this problem and begin to reframe the core principles of critical pedagogy, Wheeler‐Bell first briefly sketches the debates around Max Horkheimer's classic essay “Critical Theory and Traditional Theory,” focusing on why critical theory grew into an interdisciplinary tradition situated between philosophy and social science. Then he explains why the recent attempts to rethink critical pedagogy rely upon a problematic, albeit dominant, narrative of the critical education tradition — a narrative that only tacitly recognizes a connection between critical education and critical theory. This dominant narrative contributes to the identity crisis within critical education because it supports a collective memory loss regarding the importance of both philosophy and social science to critical theory. Finally, Wheeler‐Bell attempts to develop a thin definition of critical education: one that connects critical education back to its roots in critical theory, while respecting the plurality of critical education approaches.     

Photocatalytic Degradation of Persistent and Toxic Organic Pollutants and its Mechanism

Persistent and toxic organic pollutants are serious environmental concerns in many parts of the world. These pollutants are often difficult to deal with using conventional treatment processes. Photocatalysis is an emerging technology which uses environmentally-friendly oxidants (oxygen, hydrogen peroxide, ozone),photocatalysts (titanium dioxide, ferrous ions or its complexes) and ultraviolet (UV) radiation to degrade and mineralize the toxic organic pollutants. The major drawback is that photocatalytic processes need to be activated by ultraviolet light, which accounts for only about 4% of the incoming solar energy; the overall reaction efficiency is still very low.