Location extraction from tweets

Five hundred million tweets are posted daily, making Twitter a major social media platform from which topical information on events can be extracted. These events are represented by three main dimensions: time, location and entity-related information. The focus of this paper is location, which is an essential dimension for geo-spatial applications, either when helping rescue operations during a disaster or when used for contextual recommendations. While the first type of application needs high recall, the second is more precision-oriented. This paper studies the recall/precision trade-off, combining different methods to extract locations. In the context of short posts, applying tools that have been developed for natural language is not sufficient given the nature of tweets which are generally too short to be linguistically correct. Also bearing in mind the high number of posts that need to be handled, we hypothesize that predicting whether a post contains a location or not could make the location extractors more focused and thus more effective. We introduce a model to predict whether a tweet contains a location or not and show that location prediction is a useful pre-processing step for location extraction. We define a number of new tweet features and we conduct an intensive evaluation. Our findings are that (1) combining existing location extraction tools is effective for precision-oriented or recall-oriented results, (2) enriching tweet representation is effective for predicting whether a tweet contains a location or not, (3) words appearing in a geography gazetteer and the occurrence of a preposition just before a proper noun are the two most important features for predicting the occurrence of a location in tweets, and (4) the accuracy of location extraction improves when it is possible to predict that there is a location in a tweet.     

Renovating early childhood education pedagogy: a case study in Vietnam

Since 2003, the Vietnamese government has prioritised curriculum reform efforts and commitment to improving the quality of the national curriculum. The Vietnamese early childhood education renovation has encountered considerable changes and challenges, particularly in the area of pedagogical approaches. Many early childhood teachers continue to favour direct instruction over more appropriate teaching practices for early childhood. This paper reviews the implementation and renovation of the revised curriculum over the past 10 years in Vietnam, and examines the changing realities of early childhood teachers' work to explore ways to implement and sustain changes in pedagogy in Lam Dong Province, Vietnam. The paper explores how changing societal expectations and the changing educational philosophies and resultant pedagogy have impacted on the beliefs and practices of early childhood teachers. The teaching profession, as a whole, is facing ongoing change and challenge; not only are ongoing educational reforms redefining teachers' work, but increasing teacher attrition and turnover also creates problems for Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in Lam Dong province. The paper concludes with suggestions for areas for future research in Vietnam in the field of ECEC.     

Creating teacher capacity in Early Childhood Education and Care institutions implementing an authoritative adult style

The being together intervention intends to raise teacher capacity in Norwegian Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) institutions and promote social and emotional development in preschoolers by implementing an authoritative (warm and predictable) adult style in the institution. An authoritative adult balances between building up high quality interactions with children, while at the same time having a predictable structure with clear norms and social expectations in the learning environment. The purpose of this study was to investigate what helped the ECEC institutions to successfully implement the program principles and core components, and what were the challenges. The staff groups of seven Norwegian ECEC institutions in different municipalities who took part in the innovation were interviewed at the beginning and before the end of the first year of implementation. Data analysis identified five success criteria in the implementation process; strong commitment to the authoritative adult style, strong focus on the implementation process, advanced support systems, highly involved leaders, and a collective orientation. These elements resulted in a shared vision and an academically grounded practice in the ECEC institutions. Staff members without formal professional training and a lack of written documentation in the ECEC institutions should be given more consideration in further improvement of the capacity building.