Behavior,perceptions and learning experience of undergraduates using social technologies during internship

Social technologies such as social networking sites, Wikis and blogs have gained popularity not only in social communication but also in other areas, such as in enhancing learning experience among students in tertiary education. This study investigated how blogs and Facebook scaffolded students’ learning during their internships in tertiary education. A mix-method approach was employed to examine students’ perceptions of blogs and Facebook in improving their internship learning experience. The results showed that blogs and Facebook encouraged students and facilitated their engagement in problem solving, information sharing and knowledge construction during their internships. In particular, Facebook showed more promising results, assisting students in reflecting on their experiences. Moreover, students acknowledged that Facebook was a better platform for online interaction and collaborative learning than blogs. This study provides empirical evidence for the use of social media tools in pedagogical scaffolding and collaborative learning during internships.

     

Low-cost evaluation techniques for information retrieval systems: A review

For a system-based information retrieval evaluation, test collection model still remains as a costly task. Producing relevance judgments is an expensive, time consuming task which has to be performed by human assessors. It is not viable to assess the relevancy of every single document in a corpus against each topic for a large collection. In an experimental-based environment, partial judgment on the basis of a pooling method is created to substitute a complete assessment of documents for relevancy. Due to the increasing number of documents, topics, and retrieval systems, the need to perform low-cost evaluations while obtaining reliable results is essential. Researchers are seeking techniques to reduce the costs of experimental IR evaluation process by the means of reducing the number of relevance judgments to be performed or even eliminating them while still obtaining reliable results. In this paper, various state-of-the-art approaches in performing low-cost retrieval evaluation are discussed under each of the following categories; selecting the best sets of documents to be judged; calculating evaluation measures, both, robust to incomplete judgments; statistical inference of evaluation metrics; inference of judgments on relevance, query selection; techniques to test the reliability of the evaluation and reusability of the constructed collections; and other alternative methods to pooling. This paper is intended to link the reader to the corpus of ‘must read’ papers in the area of low-cost evaluation of IR systems.