Set Of Considerations Research Articles

Appropriation of literacy technologies in the classroom: reflections from creative learning design workshops with primary school teachers

Background:Approaches to teacher professional development, such as learning designs (LDs), can facilitate primary school teachers' appropriation of literacy technology in the classroom. LDs are detailed learning activities and interventions designed by teachers to plan their use of technology.Methods:Using a creative design methodology to carry out a series of LD workshops with teachers, we aimed to understand how primary school teachers envision learning and teaching with two distinct technologies designed to support children's reading skills: a game and an e‐reader. Employing systematic qualitative content analysis, we compared LDs developed by teachers for each technology.Results:Our study shows that while principles of teacher instruction are consistently incorporated across the LDs, the design of each technology plays an important role in how teachers plan their students' learning and focal reading skills. Further, teachers' perception of the technology is as important as the features of the design. Compared with the e‐reader, the game is perceived as an individual practice activity with less opportunities to learn with peers. Finally, across both technologies, teachers envision supporting additional literacy skills, beyond those designed in the technology, highlighting the importance of explicitly facilitating LDs intended to foster within‐subject learning.Conclusions:These findings raise a new set of considerations on how to support teachers to design literacy learning and teaching activities with technology, and also offer a new methodological approach to facilitate LDs in future research and teacher training.HighlightsWhat is already known about this topic Professional development supports teachers to appropriate literacy technologies in the classroom. The learning design approach has been shown to facilitate professional development by placing teachers in the role of the designer. The learning design approach can support and complement existing pedagogical approaches in the classroom, as well as to foster socio‐constructivist learning. What this paper adds In the context of literacy, teachers rely on the learning aims of the technology and its pedagogical approach to determine how and what their students will learn. Teachers embed learning with peers when the technology aligns with existing social practice in the classroom. Teachers reappropriate literacy technology designed to support reading skills to extend into other literacy skills, such as writing and oral language. Implications for theory, policy or practice The paper offers a learning design methodology to support teachers in creating activities that integrate literacy technologies in the classroom. The methodology includes strategies that support teachers to embed learning with peers alongside reflecting a broad coverage of literacy learning objectives.

A variational autoencoder approach for choice set generation and implicit perception of alternatives in choice modeling

Choice set generation is a challenging task, since the consideration set is generally unknown to the modelers, and the full choice set could be too large to be enumerated. The proposed variational autoencoder approach (VAE) is motivated by the idea that the chosen alternatives must belong to the consideration set. The proposed VAE method explicitly considers maximizing the likelihood of including the chosen alternatives in the choice set and inferring the underlying generation process. This paper derives the generalized extreme value (GEV) model with implicit availability/perception (IAP) of alternatives, for bridging the VAE with choice modeling. Specifically, the cross-nested logit (CNL) model with IAP is derived as an example of IAP-GEV models. The IAP approach assumes each alternative is associated with an implicit degree of availability/perception (likelihood in the context of VAE) to be included in the choice set. The VAE approach for route choice set generation is illustrated in a toy network. Simulation experiments show that the proposed method could reproduce the pre-defined true values. We further exemplify the VAE approach using a real dataset. The IAP-CNL model estimated has the best performance in terms of goodness-of-fit and prediction performance, compared to multinomial logit models and conventional choice set generation methods.

MI Diaries: ethical and practical challenges

Abstract The Michigan Diaries (MI Diaries) project was developed from late March to early April of 2020, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. MI Diaries is a longitudinal sociolinguistic project, collecting “audio diaries” from participants throughout the pandemic and beyond. As a research project designed to obtain personal narratives from a time of deep anxiety and pain, and during a time where face-to-face data collection was not feasible, MI Diaries was confronted from the outset with a substantial set of both ethical and practical considerations. In this paper, we describe some of these challenges, and our false starts and eventual solutions in response. Throughout, we highlight decisions and methods that may be applicable for future researchers conducting remote fieldwork, navigating a speech community during a disaster, or both.

Introduction

Introduction

The great office evolution: Reimagining the workplace

The COVID-19 pandemic has redefined how and where many of us work. Our new normal requires agility and adaptation from employers and workers. Now both sides have the chance to capitalise on the positive and mitigate the negative. While hybrid and remote work are not new concepts or practices, the scale at which the pandemic has required their use has never before been experienced and is only possible now due to the plenitude of advanced communication and collaboration technologies available. Navigating this forced work experiment through the lens of site selection enables a company to form a comprehensive set of considerations for data collection and objective analysis. This will allow organisations to understand current trends based on historic benchmarking from similar occurrences to maximise potential and minimise risk. No one knows exactly what to do next, but what we do know is the best process to figure it out. This paper discusses how, despire some large corporations introducing hybrid work schedules, allowing employees to work anywhere they like, and some companies even considering cutting workers’ pay if they no longer commute to the office, smarter companies are figuring out how to work within the new normal of mass remote and hybrid workforces. It concludes that businesses need to right-size their real estate portfolio while enabling their remote workforce to produce in the most effective and accommodating way possible.

Data-Aware Device Scheduling for Federated Edge Learning

Federated Edge Learning (FEEL) involves the collaborative training of machine learning models among edge devices, with the orchestration of a server in a wireless edge network. Due to frequent model updates, FEEL needs to be adapted to the limited communication bandwidth, scarce energy of edge devices, and the statistical heterogeneity of edge devices’ data distributions. Therefore, a careful scheduling of a subset of devices for training and uploading models is necessary. In contrast to previous work in FEEL where the data aspects are under-explored, we consider data properties at the heart of the proposed scheduling algorithm. To this end, we propose a new scheduling scheme for non-independent and-identically-distributed (non-IID) and unbalanced datasets in FEEL. As the data is the key component of the learning, we propose a new set of considerations for data characteristics in wireless scheduling algorithms in FEEL. In fact, the data collected by the devices depends on the local environment and usage pattern. Thus, the datasets vary in size and distributions among the devices. In the proposed algorithm, we consider both data and resource perspectives. In addition to minimizing the completion time of FEEL as well as the transmission energy of the participating devices, the algorithm prioritizes devices with rich and diverse datasets. We first define a general framework for the data-aware scheduling and the main axes and requirements for diversity evaluation. Then, we discuss diversity aspects and some exploitable techniques and metrics. Next, we formulate the problem and present our data-aware scheduling (DAS) algorithm for FEEL. Evaluations in different scenarios show that DAS algorithm can help achieve high accuracy in few rounds with a reduced cost.

Considerations on the Curation of Educational Apps for Digital Play and Learning

Mobile devices have become increasingly ubiquitous in the contemporary communication landscape. Riding this trend, educational apps have proliferated the market, with many which claim to support and improve children’s learning and literacy development. Caregivers are often faced with the challenge of discerning the value of these educational apps and in choosing the appropriate apps for their children. In this paper, we discuss the development of a set of considerations to support caregivers in their curation of educational apps. This is done by performing a review of 28 past studies done on educational apps and synthesizing their findings to draw out common themes from the literature. These themes are then categorized into nine considerations in the form of guiding questions that caregivers can use to curate educational apps for their children’s digital play and learning. In the final part of our paper, we apply the set of considerations to three educational apps to demonstrate its utility.

Designing Rehearsals for Secondary Mathematics Teachers to Refine Practice

ABSTRACT In this article, we describe rehearsals designed for use in professional development (PD) with secondary mathematics teachers to support them in reimagining and refining their practice. We detail a theoretical framework for learning in PD that informs our rehearsal design. We then share evidence of secondary mathematics teachers’ improvements in classroom practice from a broader study examining their participation in a PD that featured the use of rehearsals and provide examples of the ways two teachers’ rehearsals of the practice of monitoring students’ engagement with mathematics corresponded to changes in their practice. We conclude with a set of considerations and revisions to our design and a discussion of the role of mathematics teacher educators in supporting teachers in expanding their practice toward more ambitious purposes for students’ mathematical learning.

Towards Consistency in Geometry Restraints for Carbohydrates in the Pyranose form: Modern Dictionary Generators Reviewed.

Macromolecular restrained refinement is nowadays the most used method for improving the agreement between an atomic structural model and experimental data. Restraint dictionaries, a key tool behind the success of the method, allow fine-tuning geometric properties such as distances and angles between atoms beyond simplistic expectations. Dictionary generators can provide restraint target estimates derived from different sources, from fully theoretical to experimental and any combination in between. Carbohydrates are stereochemically complex biomolecules and, in their pyranose form, have clear conformational preferences. As such, they pose unique problems to dictionary generators and in the course of this study, require special attention from software developers. Functional differences between restraint generators will be discussed, as well as the process of achieving consistent results with different software designs. The study will conclude a set of practical considerations, as well as recommendations for the generation of new restraint dictionaries, using the improved software alternatives discussed.

Strategies for Parametric Design in Architecture

A new specialist design role is emerging in the construction industry. The primary task related to this role is focused on the control, development and sharing of geometric information with members of the design team in order to develop a design solution. Individuals engaged in this role can be described as a parametric designers. Parametric design involves the exploration of multiple solutions to architectural design problems using parametric models. In the past these models have been defined by computer programs, now commercially available parametric software provides a simpler means of creating these models. It is anticipated that the emergence of parametric designers will spread and a deeper understanding of the role is required. This thesis is aimed at establishing a detailed understanding of the tasks related to this new specialism and to develop a set of considerations that should be made when undertaking these tasks. The position of the parametric designer in architectural practice presents new opportunities in the design process this thesis also aims to capture these. Developments in this field of design are driven by practice. It is proposed that a generalised understanding of applied parametric design is primarily developed through the study of practical experience. Two bodies of work inform this study. First, a detailed analytical review of published work that focuses on the application of parametric technology and originates from practice. This material concentrates on the documentation of case studies from a limited number of practices. Second, a series of case studies involving the author as participant and observer in the context of contemporary practice. This primary research of applied use of parametric tools is documented in detail and generalised findings are extracted. Analysis of the literature from practice and generalisations based on case studies is contrasted with a review of relevant design theory. Based on this, a series of strategies for the parametric designer are identified and discussed.

Social Contexts, Agency, and Conflicts: Exploring Critical Aspects of Design for Future Smart Home Technologies

Smart devices are increasingly being designed for, and adopted in, the home environment. Prior scholarship has investigated the challenges that users face as they take up these devices in their homes. However, little is known about when and how users or potential users would prefer future domestic Internet of Things (IoT) to support their activities in home settings. To fill this gap, we conducted two co-design workshops, an in-home activity between the two sessions, and pre- and post-study interviews with 18 adult participants, who had diverse levels of prior experience of IoT use. Our findings contribute new insights into how smart home devices could adapt their behavior based on social contexts; how to re-imagine agency and support useful intelligibility; and how to resolve user-driven conflict by providing appropriate information about those with whom devices are shared. Finally, based on these findings, we discuss the implications of our work and provide a set of design considerations from which designers of future smart home technologies can benefit.

Product Ranking on Online Platforms

On online platforms, consumers face an abundance of options that are displayed in the form of a position ranking. Only products placed in the first few positions are readily accessible to the consumer, and she needs to exert effort to access more options. For such platforms, we develop a two-stage sequential search model where, in the first stage, the consumer sequentially screens positions to observe the preference weight of the products placed in them and forms a consideration set. In the second stage, she observes the additional idiosyncratic utility that she can derive from each product and chooses the highest-utility product within her consideration set. For this model, we first characterize the optimal sequential search policy of a welfare-maximizing consumer. We then study how platforms with different objectives should rank products. We focus on two objectives: (i) maximizing the platform’s market share and (ii) maximizing the consumer’s welfare. Somewhat surprisingly, we show that ranking products in decreasing order of their preference weights does not necessarily maximize market share or consumer welfare. Such a ranking may shorten the consumer’s consideration set due to the externality effect of high-positioned products on low-positioned ones, leading to insufficient screening. We then show that both problems—maximizing market share and maximizing consumer welfare—are NP-complete. We develop novel near-optimal polynomial-time ranking algorithms for each objective. Further, we show that, even though ranking products in decreasing order of their preference weights is suboptimal, such a ranking enjoys strong performance guarantees for both objectives. We complement our theoretical developments with numerical studies using synthetic data, in which we show (1) that heuristic versions of our algorithms that do not rely on model primitives perform well and (2) that our model can be effectively estimated using a maximum likelihood estimator. This paper was accepted by Gabriel Weintraub, revenue management and market analytics.

Consideration sets as resources for business model generation

Consideration sets as resources for business model generation

Consideration sets as resources for business model generation

Business models as outcomes for entrepreneurship are increasing in prevalence in pedagogy and practice. Instructors and entrepreneurs are focusing efforts on iterating potential ideas through a process of trial and error in hopes to produce working business models. However, such practices need to be better underpinned by theory so we can develop an understanding of how to identify more valuable opportunity ideas and how to progress them towards working business models with fewer trials and errors. This conceptual paper focuses on integrating extant conceptualisations of business models as interdependent activities with research on identifying opportunities as problem-solution pairings. While integrating those literatures, the present framework also details how reliance on constrained, systematic search - with its resource-based view underpinnings - can help individuals with entrepreneurial aspirations identify more valuable opportunities and progress them faster and with fewer trials and errors into working business models.

Assortment Optimization under Multinomial Logit Choice Model with Tree Structured Consideration Sets

Assortment Optimization under Multinomial Logit Choice Model with Tree Structured Consideration Sets

Designing Fuel-Economy Standards in Light of Electric Vehicles

Electric vehicles are declining in cost so rapidly that they may claim a large share of the vehicle market by 2030. This paper examines a set of practical regulatory design considerations for fuel-economy standards or greenhouse gas standards in the context of highly uncertain electric vehicle costs in the next decade. The analysis takes a cost-effectiveness approach and uses analytical modeling and simulation to develop insight. I show that counting electric vehicles under a standard with a multiplier or assuming zero upstream emissions can reduce electric vehicle market share by weakening the standards. Furthermore, there are trade-offs from implementing a backstop conventional vehicle standard along with a second standard that also includes electric vehicles, but such a backstop offers the possibility of ensuring that low-cost conventional vehicle technologies are exploited.

Interpreting Irremediability When a Mental Health Disorder is the Sole-qualifying Medical Condition for MAiD

In this critical commentary, a set of ethical considerations of relevance to the (currently contested) interpretation of irremediability for medical assistance in dying (MAiD) in circumstances where the sole-underlying medical condition is a mental health disorder is explored and analyzed. Based on the application of an ethics lens, a practical description of irremediability is proposed for intended use as guidance by Canadian mental health care clinicians, MAiD assessors and providers, and provincial/territorial professional regulatory authorities.

Formulation of a protocol to evaluate the aerobic granulation potential (AGP) of an inoculum

This paper proposes and develops a protocol for measuring the aerobic granulation potential of sludge, aiming to provide an affordable and simple alternative that can facilitate the development of aerobic granulation technology. In this sense, the protocol comprises a set of parameters and considerations that interact to create a controlled environment and stimulate cell population clustering. All of this is done in the context of procedural simplicity, low cost, and the speed at which results are obtained. The protocol is essentially a three-stage method: preparation of the substrate, adaptation of the inoculum, and implementation of the protocol. Simple parameters were measured to evaluate the granulation process: SVI, settling velocity, and morphological parameters. The protocol was validated according to optimal ranges and criteria previously established in the literature. For this purpose, an activated sludge inoculum from a domestic wastewater treatment plant was submitted to the protocol, obtaining an optimal response of the biomass (SVI5 =13.90 mL g−1, settling velocity= 25,79 m h−1, Diameter > 0.2 mm) in a relatively short time (7 d). The results show that this protocol can constitute a tool for evaluation and decision-making using traditional laboratory equipment and is applicable at different scales.

Crane Cloud: A resilient multi-cloud service abstraction layer for resource-constrained settings

Developers and users situated in low-resource settings are faced with unique contextual and infrastructure challenges when accessing and consuming cloud-based services. In low-resource settings, access to cloud services and platforms is usually characterized by low-end computing devices and often unreliable and slow mobile broadband Internet connections. In this paper, we discuss key challenges for developing for and accessing cloud services in resource constrained settings, namely, (1) Frequent Internet partitions and bandwidth constraints, (2) Data jurisdiction restrictions, (3) Vendor lock-in, and (4) Poor quality of service. Inspired by these challenges, we propose a set of important design considerations and properties for a resilient multi-cloud service layer, that includes: (1) Containerization and orchestration of applications, (2) Application placement and replication, (3) Portability and multi-cloud migration, (4) Resilience to network partitions and bandwidth constraints, (5) Automated service discovery and load balancing, (6) Localized image registry, and (7) Support for platform monitoring and management. We present an implementation and validation case study, Crane Cloud, an open source multi-cloud service abstraction layer built on-top of Kubernetes that is designed with inherent support for resilience to network partitions, microservice orchestration (deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications), a localized image registry, support for migration of services between private and public clouds to avoid vendor lock-in issues and platform monitoring. We evaluate the performance and user experience of Crane Cloud by implementing and deploying a computational and bandwidth intensive machine learning system. The results show lower response times of the system on Crane Cloud compared with hosting on other public clouds. The Crane Cloud platform is serving as a cloud-service for students and developers in low-resource settings and also as an education platform for cloud computing.

The Anthropology of Cultural Heritage in Europe

This article offers an overview of the origins and development of the anthropology of cultural heritage in Europe, tracing its main genealogical lineages stemming from kindred disciplines and methods in a comparative fashion. This brief genealogy is then complemented by a set of considerations and observations about the author’s personal ethnographic explorations of various European countries and regions, again with the aim of fruitful comparison. The article discusses how the anthropology of cultural heritage in Europe emerged, where it stands now, and where it might be going.