Robert B. Allen

The Impact of Different Teaching Approaches and Languages on Student Learning of Introductory Programming Concepts

Learning to program, especially in the object-oriented paradigm, is a difficult undertaking for many students. As a result, computing educators have tried a variety of instructional methods to assist beginning programmers. These include developing approaches geared specifically toward novices and experimenting with different introductory programming languages. However, determining the effectiveness of these interventions poses a problem. The research presented here developed an instrument to assess student learning of fundamental and object-oriented programming concepts, then used that instrument to investigate the impact of different teaching approaches and languages on university students’ ability to learn those concepts. Extensive data analysis showed that the instrument performed well overall. Reliability of the assessment tool was statistically satisfactory and content validity was supported by intrinsic characteristics, question response analysis, and expert review. Preliminary support for construct validity was provided through exploratory factor analysis. Three components that at least partly represented the construct “understanding of fundamental programming concepts” were identified: methods and functions, mathematical and logical expressions, and control structures. Analysis revealed significant differences in student performance based on instructional language and approach. The analyses showed differences on the overall score and questions involving assignment, mathematical and logical expressions, and code completion. Instructional language and approach did not appear to affect student performance on questions addressing object-oriented concepts.

Towards a Full-Text Historical Digital Library

A new generation of digital libraries is now possible based on the large amount of open-access full-text and other rich-media materials available. Such content can be more richly modeled and cross-linked than is possible for traditional document-level digital libraries. For collections which include details of events such as collections of newspapers, structured descriptions could be developed to focus on events. For higher-level historical analysis a combination of content and discourse descriptions is needed. Prior work on composite hypertexts has focused almost exclusively on the relationship of the discourse terms without considering the semantics of the content. Here, we describe a framework and interface widgets that support interaction with a historical text which incorporates both discourse and content descriptions. Further, we consider broader issues of interaction based on rich description of content.

Formal Representation of Socio-Legal Roles and Functions for the Description of History

We propose a modeling approach for formal descriptions of historical material. In our previous work, we defined the formal structures of social entities such as roles, rights and obligations, activities, and processes which appear in the Roman Constitution, as an application of Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). In this paper, we extend that approach by incorporating aspects of the Information Artifact Ontology (IAO) and the emerging Document Acts Ontology (DAO). We use these to describe relationships among realizable entities (role and function), rights and obligations that are aligned to Socio-Legal Generically Dependent Continuants (SGDCs) of DAO, and activities as subtypes of directive information entity of IAO. Two examples are discussed: a passage from a digitized historical newspaper and a description of citizenship in ancient Rome.

Architectures for complex semantic models

We have been exploring applications for complex semantic models such as rich media science and history digital libraries. In this paper, we consider in more detail a range of services which could be implemented as well as technical details for those implementations. Many semantic tools are now available but these have rarely, if ever, been applied across broad and dynamic sets of complex instances. Modeling detailed histories involves complex entities interacting in complex ways. We consider architectures such as the Basic Formal Ontology and object-oriented models and we apply them in hybrid implementations using Jena/Java and Slate.

Issues for the Direct Representation of History

We propose that representations for structured models of human and social history need to go beyond traditional ontologies to the combination of rich semantic ontologies with programming languages. We base our approach on the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and then consider how to extend it beyond traditional approaches to ontology with higher-level structures. For instance, we propose the need for composite entities that allow transitions in the configuration of component entities. We then explore the relationship of these composite entities to notion of systems and consider how they may provide a definition of “causal unity” and be related to models of social systems. We identify some challenges in defining the nature of social entities. Finally, we introduce structured applied epistemology as a framework for managing historical evidence, analysis, and argumentation.

Describing Scholarly Information Resources with a Unified Temporal Map

We consider the use of procedures for providing structured descriptions of information resources such as scholarly works and of their contents. This goes beyond the usual view of metadata as discrete elements. For instance, we consider mapping the structured and interdependent activities in the publication of Ulysses. We discuss some specific representations and discuss the development of structured scholarly guides. Finally, we consider how the activities associated with publication, along with other historical activities, can be positioned on a unified temporal map. Ultimately, there should be a unified framework for the description of individual information resources and collections of information resources across periods and technologies.

Active learning for text classification: Using the LSI Subspace Signature Model

Supervised learning methods rely on large sets of labeled training examples. However, large training sets are rare and making them is expensive. In this research, Latent Semantic Indexing Subspace Signature Model (LSISSM) is applied to labeling for active learning of unstructured text. Based on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), LSISSM represents terms and documents as semantic signatures by the distribution of their local statistical contribution across the top-ranking LSI latent dimensions after dimension reduction. When utilized to an unlabeled text corpus, LSISSM finds the most important samples and terms according to their global statistical contribution ranking in the corresponding LSI subspaces without prior knowledge of labels or dependency to model-loss functions of the classifiers. These sample subsets also effectively maintain the sampling distribution of the whole corpus. Furthermore, tests demonstrate that the sample subsets with the optimized term subsets substantially improve the learning accuracy across three standard classifiers.

Digital Libraries: Providing Quality Information

Digital game-based learning has grown rapidly in recent years, including in information literacy (IL) education. However, many efforts have failed because users are not involved in the design process. The present study adopts a user-centered design approach to evaluate an educational IL game prototype, with data analyzed based on Pedagogical Playability Heuristics.The proposed study is in the area of data curation and knowledge representation. It focuses on the issues and methods of curating quantitative social science data, to advance the methodology of data curation, and data reuse and integration in the social sciences. Socio-economic data will be the object of the study. They are defined as data that is related to people, organization and society which can be stored in a tabular format.Museums are highly specialized cultural institutions. Obstacles exist between the knowledge and terminology of the museum professionals and that of the general public. Topical analysis of museum collections can reveal topical similarities and differences among museums and facilitate museum tours with recommended professional guides. In this study, 7177 French artworks collected by 90 art museums worldwide were investigated. The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) technique, an unsupervised artificial neural network method, was applied to visually analyze similarities and differences among the museums. The Treemap technique was also employed on a large dataset to reveal the distribution of the specific themes among the investigated museums. Finally, a comprehensive museum tour recommendation mechanism is established for tourists.For enhancing skills related to information literacy instruction in the digital age, we developed an education program for academic librarians, based on knowledge of learning science and educational technology. We evaluated the program in practice and discovered that: 1) academic librarians want to acquire basic knowledge of learning science and instructional design, 2) lectures about theory alone are insufficient, but the combination of theory with practical workshops is effective for promoting the integration of participants’ knowledge, and 3) some practical examples support understanding of the theory.Web 2.0 technologies have paved the way for self-directed online learning. YouTube, in particular, is a viable Web 2.0 platform that can be used to disseminate educational content and in the process empower users to take charge of their own learning. Through the lens of self-directed learning theory, we perform qualitative content analyses on comments contributed by learners after watching educational videos on YouTube. Results indicate that YouTube can play important roles in facilitating a self-directed learning platform.

A Foundry of Human Activities and Infrastructures

Direct representation knowledgebases can enhance and even provide an alternative to document-centered digital libraries. Here we consider realist semantic modeling of everyday activities and infrastructures in such knowledgebases. Because we want to integrate a wide variety of topics, a collection of ontologies (a foundry) and a range of other knowledge resources are needed. We first consider modeling the routine procedures that support human activities and technologies. Next, we examine the interactions of technologies with aspects of social organization. Then, we consider approaches and issues for developing and validating explanations of the relationships among various entities.

Structured Descriptions of Roles, Activities, and Procedures in the Roman Constitution

A highly structured description of entities and events in histories can support flexible exploration of those histories by users and, ultimately, support richly-linked full-text digital libraries. Here, we apply the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) to structure a passage about the Roman Constitution from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Specifically, we consider the specification of Roles such as Consul, Activities associated with those Roles, and Procedures for accomplishing those Activities.