Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

"I 'Feel' Like I Am At University Even Though I Am Online." Exploring How Students Narrate Their Engagement With Higher Education Institutions In An Online Learning Environment, Sarah Elizabeth O'Shea, Cathy Stone, Janine Delahunty

Professor Sarah O' Shea

This article outlines a collaborative study between higher education institutions in Australia, which qualitatively explored the online learning experience for undergraduate and postgraduate students. The project adopted a narrative inquiry approach and encouraged students to story their experiences of this virtual environment, providing a snapshot of how learning is experienced by those undertaking online studies. The study explores what impacted upon students' engagement in this environment and how different facets of their learning experience made a qualitative difference to how individuals enacted engagement. Drawing upon Sharon Pittaway's engagement framework, the article seeks to foreground student voice as the learners define …

Personality Affects Learning And Trade-Offs Between Private And Social Information In Guppies, Poecilia Reticulate, Larissa Trompf, Culum Brown

Culum Brown, PhD

The acquisition of information such as the location and quality of food, mates or shelter is a key survival requirement for animals. Individuals can acquire information through personal experience (private information) or through observing and interacting with others (social information). Environmental spatial and temporal heterogeneity can mean that sometimes social information conflicts with private knowledge. We tested how personality affected the importance placed on public versus private information in wild female guppies when these two information sources came into conflict. We found that boldness and sociality affected decisions to use conflicting social and private information. Bolder females used social information …

The Influence Of Emotions, Attitudes And Perceptions On Learning With Technology, Meg O'Reilly

Dr Meg O'Reilly

No abstract provided.

Encyclopedia Of The Sciences Of Learning [Review], Anne Jumonville Graf

Anne Jumonville Graf

The Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning is the first major reference work in the growing and highly visible field of learning sciences. It brings together definitional entries from scholars who represent the breath of this interdisciplinary area of study, teaching, and practice: biology, neuroscience, psychology, computer and information science, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, education, and a range of narrower technical and applied fields. Given the increasing amount of scholarly and popular attention to the dimensions and questions of human learning, it’s important to note that this encyclopedia devotes equal time to animal and machine learning as well; this is a …

Bayesian Learning And Predictability In A Stochastic Nonlinear Dynamical Model, John Parslow, Noel Cressie, Edward P. Campbell, Emlyn Jones, Lawrence Murray

Professor Noel Cressie

Bayesian inference methods are applied within a Bayesian hierarchical modelling framework to the problems of joint state and parameter estimation, and of state forecasting. We explore and demonstrate the ideas in the context of a simple nonlinear marine biogeochemical model. A novel approach is proposed to the formulation of the stochastic process model, in which ecophysiological properties of plankton communities are represented by autoregressive stochastic processes. This approach captures the effects of changes in plankton communities over time, and it allows the incorporation of literature metadata on individual species into prior distributions for process model parameters. The approach is applied …

Playing With Knives: The Socialization Of Self-Initiated Learners, David F. Lancy

David Lancy

Since Margaret Mead’s field studies in the South Pacific a century ago, there has been the tacit understanding that as culture varies, so too must the socialization of children to become competent culture users and bearers. More recently, the work of anthropologists has been mined to find broader patterns that may be common to childhood across a range of societies. One improbable commonality has been the tolerance, even encouragement, of toddler behavior that is patently risky, such as playing with or attempting to use a sharp-edged tool. This laissez faire approach to socialization follows from a reliance on children as …

Teaching: Natural Or Cultural?, David F. Lancy

David Lancy

This chapter will argue that teaching, as we now understand the term, is historically and cross-culturally very rare. It appears to be unnecessary to transmit culture or to socialize children. Children are, on the other hand, primed by evolution to be avid observers, imitators, players and helpers—roles that reveal the profoundly autonomous and self-directed nature of culture acquisition (Lancy in press a). And yet, teaching is ubiquitous throughout the modern world—at least among the middle to upper class segment of the population. This ubiquity has led numerous scholars to argue for the universality and uniqueness of teaching as a characteristically …

Robots In The Classroom: Differences In Students’ Perceptions Of Credibility And Learning Between “Teacher As Robot” And “Robot As Teacher”, Autumn Edwards, Chad Edwards, Patric R. Spence, Christina Harris, Andrew Gambino

Chad Edwards

Differences In Perceptions Of Communication Quality Between A Twitterbot And Human Agent For Information Seeking And Learning, Chad Edwards, Austin Beattie, Autumn Edwards, Patric R. Spence

Chad Edwards

Differences In Perceptions Of Communication Quality Between A Twitterbot And Human Agent For Information Seeking And Learning, Chad Edwards, Austin Beattie, Autumn Edwards, Patric R. Spence

Patric R. Spence