“I want to speak like the other people”: Second language learning as a virtuous spiral for migrant women?

This article contributes to scholarship on migrant women’s second language (L2) education in North America and Europe. Questioning reductionist understandings of the relationship between female migrants, their receiving communities and L2 education, the authors consider existing literature as well as their own qualitative work to investigate the challenges, opportunities and agency of migrant women. Weaving together and thematically presenting previous scholarship and qualitative data from interviews, participant observations and classroom recordings from a mixed-gender L2 adult migrant classroom in Austria and an all-women L2 migrant classroom in the United States, they trouble conceptualisations which position women primarily as passive recipients of education and in need of emancipation, while simultaneously elevating communities as agentic providers of these. Specifically, the authors emphasise that (1) L2 proficiency is not a guarantee for migrant women’s social inclusion or socioeconomic advancement; (2) migrant women’s complex challenges and agency need to be recognised and addressed; and (3) all involved in L2 education of migrant women do well to become learners of their own experiences of oppression, including their complicity in it.     

The trust continuum in the information age: a Canadian perspective

This paper examines the role of trust in the information continuum. It argues that in the context of Canadian federal government records, an analogous ??trust continuum?? is a useful model for analysing the relationships that exist between creator, archives and user in the information-abundant environment. The paper borrows from sociological theory to posit that creator, archives and user are bound together in a complex expert system that facilitates trust and mitigates risk in a broad societal context and contends that these interactions are shaped at the macro level by a dominant public discourse of accountability. These points are illustrated through three recent examples at Library and Archives Canada. First, the relationship between Canadian society and the archives is explored by interrogating the concept of relevance and assessing the feasibility of managing a pan-Canadian collection via a national network of knowledge institutions. Then, the role of trust between the archives and the creator in the management of government digital information resources is examined in light of the recently issued Directive on Recordkeeping, and in the context of LAC??s Trusted Digital Repository. Finally, Commissions of Inquiry??and the Indian Specific Claims Commission in particular??demonstrate both the power of archival records in repairing trust between a society and its government and the iterative nature of the relationship between the user and the archives.     

Mathe mit der Matte – Verkörperlichtes Training basisnumerischer Kompetenzen

Basic numerical representations are seen as the building block for the successful development of more complex numerical and arithmetic competencies. Extending previous studies focusing on improving basic numerical representations by means of embodied training schemes, the current study focused on an embodied training of children’s place-value understanding. In this vein, 49 secondgraders were trained on solving a number line estimation task by stepping on different fields of a dance mat allowing for separate estimations of tens and units with more effort needed to step on the tens. In a partially randomized cross-over design, two control conditions were used to controll for training effects caused exclusively by the numerical content trained or the use of the dance mat. Interestingly, results revealed specific training effects after both the embodied and the control conditions. However, training effects were significantly more pronounced after the embodied training, thereby providing further evidence for the benefit of an embodied training of the place-value structure of the Arabic number system.     

Are Students Customers in Finnish Higher Education?

This study examines Finnish higher education students’ perceptions of whether students are customers, based on qualitative interview data. The article contributes to the discussion on students as customers by giving attention to students’ own voices from a country where tuition fees are not generally collected. The data are presented and analysed using a matrix of preference and perception of seeing students as customers. While the data contained student voices insisting that it is not appropriate to talk about customers because money is not involved, different orientations showing either a preference or perception of students as customers were also described. It is concluded that seeing a student as a customer might be a solution to various higher education challenges which are not all related to tuition fees.     

Tracing discursive processes of shared knowledge construction in a technology-enhanced higher education setting

This study focused on combining both the group- and individual-level analyses in studying a collaborative activity in technology-enhanced interactions in a higher education setting. The aim was to make visible, with empirical examples, the quality of the students' web-based discussions and trace the route for shared understanding. By quantifying various communicative functions, the analysis provided general knowledge on the quality and purpose of the discussion in the group and highlighted the different functional positions each student had within the group. However, only a detailed interpretative analysis of the relationships between specific thematic contents, communicative functions, and the collaborative features of the discussion, in the temporal frame, made it possible to trace and gain a deeper understanding of the true acts of collaboration. It also highlighted the individual participants' different participatory and discursive positions in the different phases of the task. Over the study, it became evident that any attempts to define a collaborative activity from either the group's or individual's perspective would only result in a partial interpretation of the collaborative enterprise.     

Social network data to alleviate cold-start in recommender system: A systematic review

Recommender Systems are currently highly relevant for helping users deal with the information overload they suffer from the large volume of data on the web, and automatically suggest the most appropriate items that meet users needs. However, in cases in which a user is new to Recommender System, the system cannot recommend items that are relevant to her/him because of lack of previous information about the user and/or the user-item rating history that helps to determine the users preferences. This problem is known as cold-start, which remains open because it does not have a final solution. Social networks have been employed as a good source of information to determine users preferences to mitigate the cold-start problem. This paper presents the results of a Systematic Literature Review on Collaborative Filtering-based Recommender System that uses social network data to mitigate the cold-start problem. This Systematic Literature Review compiled the papers published between 2011–2017, to select the most recent studies in the area. Each selected paper was evaluated and classified according to the depth which social networks used to mitigate the cold-start problem. The final results show that there are several publications that use the information of the social networks within the Recommender System; however, few research papers currently use this data to mitigate the cold-start problem.     

The Ultimate Survey: Asking One Question at a Time to Get Feedback from Library Users

ABSTRACT

Libraries use surveys and other instruments to gather feedback from their users. However, with competition from many other campus entities requesting input, how can survey fatigue be avoided? To gather this feedback, the Social Sciences Reference Desk utilized a short, fun and easy method. Each week for 10 weeks during the fall semester of 2017, the reference assistants wrote a survey question on a whiteboard and provided sticky notes for patrons to write their answers. The survey provided valuable information about patrons’ needs and expectations. It also fostered changes that were easily implemented to improve the delivery of library services.