Teaching Technologies

The afternoon session at ECREA 2016 starts with a paper by Gunilla Hultén. She presents Storylab, a collaborative project with Svenska Dagbladet, one of the major daily newspapers in Sweden. This brought together journalism and computer science students and their educators with journalists and editors at the newspaper.

The media industry in Sweden is experiencing rapid changes, much as such industries are doing around the world. In addition to many challenges, new technologies are also creating new opportunities for journalistic storytelling; to realise these, it is necessary to bring together journalists and developers even while they are still in …

The next speaker at Web Science 2016 is Jenna Mittelmeier, whose focus is on cross-cultural collaboration. Group work has always been difficult, and the majority of online contributions are from a small subset of all users; this free riding by non-participants is especially problematic in educational settings that require all users to participate equally.

How do users offline networks translate into their online collaboration practices? Jenna's study examined a group of 118 students in the UK, including 92% international students; these students varied from having highly homophilous to very country-diverse networks. These networks did not have any direct influence in …

We start the first paper session at WebSci 2016 with a paper by Guanliang Chen that examines learner engagement with Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs). These generate a great deal of data about learner engagement during the MOOC itself, but there's very little information about learners before and after this experience. Can we use external social Web data to identify and profile these learners, in order to better customise the learning experience for them?

The biggest challenge in this is to identify the learners across diverse social media platforms. There are some possible approaches: explicit matching based on public email …