Making the connection: Examining the relationship between undergraduate students’ digital literacy and academic success in an English medium instruction (EMI) university

The transition through the first year of university study is challenging for the majority of students. For students from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) backgrounds, commencing studies in an English-Medium Instruction (EMI) university program presents a number of specific challenges. These students are faced with meeting both language demands as well as learning expectations of the institution, which often differ markedly from their previous formal learning experiences. Developing CALD students’ digital literacy practices has been shown to lead to improved academic performance, success and retention in some higher education settings. This paper focuses on the digital literacy practices of undergraduates at a national public university in a Gulf State. Results from a survey and focus groups are analysed to identify the students’ access to and use of digital technologies, in order to better understand how their academic success can be enhanced through digital literacy development. The study identifies a disconnect between students’ perceptions of their digital capabilities and the institutional requirements for study. The research recommends that providing integrated, institution-wide digital literacy development focused on accessing, assessing and incorporating online resources in their work, will help improve transitioning CALD students’ preparedness for undergraduate study in this and other EMI universities.

     

Towards application of drone- based GeoSTEM education: Teacher educators readiness (attitudes,competencies, and obstacles)

Education and Information Technologies - Drone technology has great potentials for enhancing and improving teaching and learning experiences in GeoSTEM Education which involves the integration...     

Confirmatory studies on the antioxidant and antidiabetic effect of quercetin in rats

Quercetin (QE), one of natural flavanoid group, was widely distributed as a secondary metabolite in plant kingdom. It has been believed that oxidative stress plays a role in the pathogenesis of diabetes mellitus (DM). The aim of the present study was the evaluation of possible effects of QE on blood glucose and antioxidant enzymes in experimental streptozotocin (STZ)-induced diabetes in rats. STZ was injected intraperitoneally with single dose of 50 mg/kg for diabetes induction. QE (15 mg/kg bw day, intraperitoneal (i.p.) injection) was injected for 3 days prior to STZ administration; these injections were continued to the end of the study (for 25 days). Glucose tolerance test and random plasma glucose were done for all animals. Cellular antioxidant enzymes such as glutathione peroxidase (GSHPx), superoxide dismutase (SOD) and catalase (CAT) activities were measured in pancreatic homogenates. Quercetin had no effect on plasma glucose level of normal animals but its pre- treatment was able to prevent diabetes induced by single intraperitoneal injection of streptozocintreated rats. Antioxidant enzyme activity significantly decreased in STZ induced diabetic group. QE treatment significantly increased the antioxidant enzyme activities. It could be concluded that quercetin, a flavonoid with antioxidant properties, exerting its beneficial antidiabetic effects.     

Design of digital controllers for uncertain chaotic systems using fuzzy logic

A new and systematic method to design digital controllers for uncertain chaotic systems with structured uncertainties is presented in this paper. Takagi-Sugeno (TS) fuzzy model is used to model the chaotic dynamic system, while the uncertainties are decomposed such that the uncertain chaotic system can be rewritten as a set of local linear models with an additional disturbed input. Conventional control techniques are utilized to develop the continuous-time controllers first. Then, the digital controllers are obtained as the digital redesign of the continuous-time controllers using the state-matching approach. The performance of the proposed controller design is illustrated through numerical examples.     

Looking perfect: Instagram use in a Kuwaiti cultural context

This study surveys 539 Arab university students to examine gender motivational differences in Instagram use, exploring the Self-Perfectionist Personality concept and usage activities that best predict a Self-Presentation motive on Instagram. While both genders utilized Instagram mainly for Entertainment, they varied on the priority of other motives. Females were less likely to have public accounts, post personal pictures, and disclose personal information. Also, self-perfectionists of both genders excessively edited their personal pictures before posting them and were more likely to use Instagram for Self-Presentation. Outcomes are discussed in the light of the influences of culture and gender roles in Kuwait.     

360 degree feedback: an integrative framework for learning and assessment

Feedback is widely acknowledged as the crux of a learning process. Multiplicities of research studies have been advanced to address the common cri de coeur of teachers and students for a constructive and effective feedback mechanism in the current higher educational settings. Nevertheless, existing pedagogical approaches in feedback are fragmented and ad hoc in nature. Taken in isolation, each approach fails to capture the full role and complexity of assessment feedback in the learning process. The paper provides a synthesis of existing practices in the field of assessment feedback and identifies the core guiding elements to develop a holistic and integrated feedback system. The 360 degree (360°) feedback system is proposed and its systematic implementation is demonstrated via the interplay between self-, peer and teacher assessment. It is concluded that the elements of 360° system when combined and integrated help to maximise the functions of feedback to enhance learning.     

Governing public universities in Arab countries

Traditionally in Arab public universities, presidents are appointed by government authorities. Recently, in uprising Arab countries universities' presidents have been elected by universities' faculty members. Neither traditional nor self-governance pattern succeeded to modernise Arab universities. Reforming patterns of governance is critical for improved productivity and accountability in Arab universities. Applying the modern pattern of university governance depends on the country's political system and extent of democracy. Arab countries need to establish an improved process of searching for leadership candidates. Improving patterns of universities' governance in Arab countries can lead to improving higher education and research and enhancing competitiveness among faculty members.     

Arabic texts analysis for topic modeling evaluation

Significant progress has been made in information retrieval covering text semantic indexing and multilingual analysis. However, developments in Arabic information retrieval did not follow the extraordinary growth of Arabic usage in the Web during the ten last years. In the tasks relating to semantic analysis, it is preferable to directly deal with texts in their original language. Studies on topic models, which provide a good way to automatically deal with semantic embedded in texts, are not complete enough to assess the effectiveness of the approach on Arabic texts. This paper investigates several text stemming methods for Arabic topic modeling. A new lemma-based stemmer is described and applied to newspaper articles. The Latent Dirichlet Allocation model is used to extract latent topics from three Arabic real-world corpora. For supervised classification in the topics space, experiments show an improvement when comparing to classification in the full words space or with root-based stemming approach. In addition, topic modeling with lemma-based stemming allows us to discover interesting subjects in the press articles published during the 2007–2009 period.     

The politics of fear in the making of worlds

This paper revisits "the Menchú controversy" by examining the relationship between "truth", politics and fear in the "making of the worlds." The author argue that "Menchú controversy" can teach us a lot about how "truth" involves a politics of containment whereby "others" are contained by the judgment that they have failed the truth at the very moment that they challenge how some "truths" are given or become givens. Such judgments are not simply about reading the testimonios of others as "perjured", but also work to construct others as fearsome and threatening, such that the defence of truth becomes "a matter of life and death." To explore the role of fear in containing others, the author offers a reading of the Menchú controversy alongside the reception given to Sunera Thobani's speech in which she criticizes the United States' "war on terrorism." She shows how Thobani's speech is constructed as an act of terror because it calls into question the very "truths" that have justified the war, by showing that they rely on an ontological distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence. The paper relates both the Menchú and Thobani cases to broader discourses of fear and anxiety that have circulated since September 11 2001 and argues that fear works to secure "truths" precisely through the narration of crisis or insecurity. Rather than considering fear as coming from within a subject, or as a characteristic of an object, the author suggests that fear works to effect the very boundaries between subjects and others, partly through the feeling that such boundaries have already been threatened by the presence of others. She also shows how fear operates as an affective economy of truth: fear slides between signs and sticks to bodies by constituting them as its objects. In making this argument, she shows how fear sticks to some bodies and not others. For example, the judgment that somebody "could be" a terrorist draws on past and affective associations that stick various signs (such as Muslim, fundamentalist, terrorist) together. At the same time, fear is reproduced precisely by the threat that such bodies "may pass (us) by." Such bodies become constructed as fearsome and as a threat to the very truths that are reified as "life itself." This paper hence shows how truth becomes an affective technique of containment in which the failure to contain is the justification of containment. The author concludes that if truth is a matter of containers and containment - about who or what gets contained to allow certain worlds to become given - then the risk taken by subaltern women, such as Rigoberta Menchú and Sunera Thobani, in speaking out against such truths is the risk of making an-other kind of world.