Three Application Scenarios for Use in the myCourse Educational Environment

ABSTRACT: This paper analyzed elementary TED (Teacher Education) programs in the top performing TIMSS ( Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study ) Asian, i.e. Japan, South Korea, and Singapore countries to explore how much emphasis should be placed on general content knowledge, versus general pedagogical knowledge, and versus methodological pedagogical knowledge. Three theoretical frames of reference were analyzed during this process: whether the programs were consecutive or concurrent; the model of partnership followed between universities and field experience institutions; and the overall status of teachers in the society as categorized by position-based or career-based. Methodologically, only peer-reviewed literature published between 2000 and 2018 was used. It was found that the top performing Asian TIMSS countries usually: have consecutive and concurrent options; provide very intensive TED experiences to their students focusing on diverse and practical field experiences; place more emphasis on academic subject expertise than pedagogy; require students to major in at least one academic subject; have national accreditation institutes for unifying standards; their sponsor countries enforce various types of induction and professional development once in the field; offer salaries competitive with other professions that require the same amount of years and training; and, most importantly, only accept the top academic achievers into their programs. One of the recommendations is that since Saudi Arabia has just initiated “Vision 2030”, a sort of privatization schema for the entire economy, it seems higher selection criteria will be critical to TED in line with this national vision. KEY WORDS: Teacher Education; Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study ; Asian Countries; Comparative Study. About the Author: Dr. Mohammed Sabrin is an Assistant Professor at the College of Education, Taibah University, Office SB-29, College of Education Building B-13, Al-Madinah al-Munawwarah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. E-mail: msabrin@taibahu.edu.sa Suggested Citation: Sabrin, Mohammed. (2018). “A Comparative Policy Analysis of Elementary Teacher Education in the Top Performing Asian TIMSS Countries” in EDUCARE: International Journal for Educational Studies , Volume 11(1), August, pp.1-16. Bandung, Indonesia: Minda Masagi Press owned by ASPENSI with ISSN 1979-7877 (print) and ISSN 2621-587X (online). A rticle Timeline : Accepted (February 17, 2018); Revised (May 2, 2018); and Published (August 30, 2018).

Annika Goldenbaum's revised dissertation, a study of this enigmatic, nearly 10,000-line satirical poem from the turn of the fourteenth-fifteenth century, is an apt contribution to a series titled Literatur–Theorie–Geschichte. Constructing a theoretical framework through which the literary-historical dimensions of the text provide coherence to an intentionally unclear narrative and form, the book effectively applies sociological/sociolinguistic lenses to previous narratological investigations of the text and suggests a functional interpretation bridging incompatible generic assignations and a history of scholarly dispute about which conflicting conventions and expectations undermined the other. In this sense, the analysis offers a way of thinking through one dilemma, even if it raises other questions in the process.In five chapters (three body chapters plus an introduction and summary), the study in the broadest sense discusses knowledge transfer and modes of didactic communication in the “literary explosion” of the Late Middle Ages (Hugo Kuhn) from epistemological, linguistic, literary, and historical perspectives. A dual heuristic model with a micro- and macro-level focus centers on the concept of a Krisenexperiment—a breaching experiment in English ethnomethodological terms, which investigates reactions to violations of norms or expectations. The first stage consists of demonstrating in the text a continual drafting and destruction of the constitutive structural elements of didactic communication; a second stage posits that the hermeneutic labors of the text recipient in encountering violations of expectations itself constitutes a process of knowledge generation about knowledge, a reflexive, (re)generative space between scholastic and synodal discourse in the Late Middle Ages.Already before further investigation is possible, it is necessary to grapple with the choice (here viewed as false) previous studies have presented between a personal or small-scale model of scholastic, practical philosophy, or a narrative—a bawdy, grotesque Schwank—inverting the courtly marriage tale for a cast of peasant characters which happens to include a variably integrated series of catalogues and didactic passages. That the work resists coherent interpretation, if not also risks oversignification, in its complexity of correspondences and expectations in form, poetics, function, and genre, is clear. Goldenbaum's position that the Ring is a didactic text construed in the form of a peasant Schwank is less clear on the basis of previous research but convincingly argued within the framework of intentional norm violation developed here. Notably, the two-color encoding of serious endeavors (red) and satirical or entertaining content about rustic life (green) in the text without direct parallel in the wider tradition of premodern didactic literature appears intentionally inconsistent or incoherent and provokes mistrust in potential audiences: “Der Ring ist ein gelehrter Text, der nicht belehrt. Er enttäuscht nicht nur viele der zunächst aufgerufenen Erwartungen, er spielt sie auch gegen den Rezipienten aus” (The Ring is a learned text that does not teach. It not only disappoints many of the expectations initially raised, it also plays them off against the recipient) (p. 11). The present study proceeds from reconstruction, on new-philological grounds, of the textual recipient, rather than positing confusion or incoherence first from the perspective of a hypothetical reader.Surviving in a lone manuscript, Cgm 9300, BSB Munich, the Ring as it has been transmitted is probably close to the original composition on the basis of codicological evidence and dates to the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth century in the Bodensee area, which provides a chronological and sociopolitical frame of reference for analysis (e.g., rivalry between rural and urban social groups). Displaying a mixture of linguistic (Alemannic/Swabian alongside Bavarian forms) and structural elements (prosimetrum), the work perhaps also implicates the political conflicts between local farmers (Alemannic/Swabian speakers) and Austrian nobles (speakers of Middle Bavarian dialects), as noted in scholarship. Throughout the rest of the study, however, the allusive and genealogical structural and linguistic connections to other works and generic traditions provide grist for the analytical mill, rather than the potential for a localized interpretation.Chapter two suggests that the sociology of knowledge is a possible key to deciphering complexity in communication-based epistemological discourse. The author is careful to spare medieval literature a narrow ascription of fictionality opposite functional, scientific (wissenschaftlich) texts and recites a litany of recent literary-theoretical justifications for complicating taxonomic assessment of the text. For example, Joseph Vogl, among other theorists, supplies the call to uncouple or dealign knowledge and literature from the same phenomenological plane, because they are not comprehensible as opposites. Individual episodes checked for sources, analogies, and coherence have in the past led to a dichotomy (Dichtung/Didaxe) in which the work as a whole is hierarchized in either direction between didactic and Schwank narrative genres, granting the Ring one of two central purposes interrupted or undermined by the other. Goldenbaum addresses the “aporetic whole” (p. 30, the reviewer's formulation) in an attempt to extend analysis to how the text provokes contradictions and unexpected situations or processes in the recipient. Part of this questioning requires resisting a universalizing understanding of medieval literature as wissensvermittelnde Literatur, an always pragmatic Schriftlichkeit with instructive interpretations, which risks losing metadiscursive potential on the difference between genres and text types. Such a conceptual expansion leads to the point of analytical frivolity if carried too far. In order to evade this snare, it is vital to ascertain precisely what is literary in the didactic and what is didactic in the literary, as well as to examine the literary treatment of didactic communication, i.e., the metadiscourse. Turning to Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology, this study asks these questions via a sociolinguistic process of the construction of knowledge in a communicative, interaction-based framework.Arguing that didactic communication creates via asymmetries the horizon of expectations that—narratively and cognitively—constitutes types/situations of communication, chapter 3 comprises the bulk of the study (pp. 51–207). Violations proceeding from the asymmetries of the socially differentiated distribution of knowledge in the text are demonstrated by examples where codicological organization (the mise en page) of genre conventions fails to adhere to expectations. A long discussion with color figures illustrating the trajectory and realization of didactic textual organization on the basis of other manuscripts, texts, and genres follows, charting the various correspondences and echoes in the Ring. Readers have transferred conventional structural markers of moral-didactic, scholastic texts to the Ring manuscript, which defies conventions from rubrication to internal coherence regularly. Traces of this diagrammatic practice of textual marking known from manuscripts on the virtues appear in Cgm 9300, where orientation from a community of readers provides the missing framework. The Ring also seems to provoke in modern scholars a diagrammatic impulse to order knowledge according to graphic conventions (see the figures on pp. 74–77). In the author's reading, intentional obscuring of orienting markers elides the “known” and “to be known,” producing in the text a lack of accountability “repaired” by readers’ interpretations and engagements with it.The difficulties of genre assignment provide another angle for discussing the structural and thematic boundaries transgressed by the Krisenexperiment of the Ring: encyclopedia, Hausbuch, speculum regale, florilegia of various types, and Wissensliteratur generally may supply points of entry but do not exhaust or even explain the dimensions of anthologization. Goldenbaum suggests that the fundamental Unordnung in the text functions as an intentional strategy to disrupt conventions, forms, and expectations, among other methods by setting up expectations of a moral-didactic form at the outset and offering instead a smaller-focused, narrative form from another genre. More specific generic interventions demonstrate deliberate inversions and uses of the Minnelehre, the oeconomica tradition on marriage versus a clerical discourse (describable as a meta-Schwank on the incompatibility of the systems), and the Ritterspiegel, from which a discourse on war is borrowed and which, alongside the use of other juridical sources, establishes grounds for well-known figures from heroic epic elements to appear.More significantly, a comprehensive investigation of sources lays bare the Ring's early translation (and fictionalization) of various areas of knowledge and attendant discursive structures into the vernacular, which otherwise primarily circulated in learned Latin texts until the end of the fifteenth century. This is, however, not clear in the text itself: the untrustworthiness of narrators and bearers of knowledge, and thus the narrative itself, surfaces throughout. One solution, championed here, is that didactic communication fails because of class-based incompatibilities between interlocutors. Communicative situations are discussed above all in terms of proverbial, sentential frames (e.g., modelled on virtue paradigms) that express temporal fluidity. This is an application of, among other researchers of paroemiological discourse, Wernfried Hofmeister's Sprichwortartige Mikrotexte, which illustrates how the micro-level of phraseology can shape the macro-level structure of the text and genre. This section contains more textual passages and analyses than any other part of the study and profitably applies theoretical advances in linguistic surface phenomena to broader questions of literary form.Chapter 4 returns to the purpose of the text within the framework developed in the previous chapters, arguing that irritation and knowledge exemplify the metadiscursive function of the Ring. If there is “system-theoretical and linguistic-hermeneutic” value in disruption (p. 209), communicative processes and structures can be revealed in the operational space of the text, in which readers are free to interpret processes of knowledge generation and sharing. The composer pushes modes of didactic writing, knowledge creation, and transmission to their limits in order to unveil the mechanisms according to which the system of knowledge and its distribution functions. However, the text cannot escape tradition, and appears firmly traceable to a late medieval Aristotelian theory of knowledge.Returning to the text's classification, Goldenbaum concludes that the Ring is a Schwank in the wider sense of a text that represents second-order discourse to the reader, in this case an example of didactic texts’ potential to signify, produce, and disseminate knowledge. If this study does not overinterpret or oversystematize inconsistencies with perceived expectations on the evidence of a single manuscript, the implications are significant, perhaps moving the boundary of a—however problematically designated—more modern form of literary metadiscourse on knowledge to the early fifteenth century. Ultimately, the discourse-analytical, sociological conceptual framework and application of a wide range of literary-theoretical approaches offers a suggestive model for didactic literature and interprets Wittenwiler's Ring beyond dead-end dichotomies and impenetrability.

We adopt the direction towards new educational and pedagogic paradigms, where learning is a process of emergence and co-evolution of the individual, the social group and the wider society. In this direction, Service-Oriented Architectures are becoming a popular system paradigm for e-learning. In this article, we present our research and development efforts to provide a social networking learning platform for developing services which address the personal learning needs of the users and enable them to create value. We also present the specific characteristics of our community driven service framework and discuss our approach in comparison to other similar approaches and frameworks.

The purpose of this study is to understand the nature of pre-instructional knowledge transferred by students into problem situations and the change process on students’ knowledge system during classroom discussions. This study was framed by two interrelated theoretical frameworks on knowledge structures, phenomenological primitives and coordination classes. The data were collected through problem solving sessions on turning effect of forces (torques or moment) from ten participants who were seeking a degree to become physics teachers. The analysis of data showed that, in this particular context, students’ pre-instructional ideas can be characterized according to phenomenological primitives. The theoretical constructs of the coordination classes generated meaningful results to understand students’ particular difficulties in transferring the moment concept across different contexts and the change process on students’ knowledge system. The major stimulator of the change process emerged as the students’ becoming aware of the epistemological nature of their knowledge structures and searching the causal mechanisms behind physical phenomena.

It has long been acknowledged that knowledge is key for economic growth and innovation. Over the last decades, the perception of what knowledge is and how it can be characterized, however, has changed drastically. Today, in particular the neo-Schumpeterian perspective highlights that knowledge cannot longer be considered as a pure public good but stresses it as something individual, local, tacit, firm specific and complex (Hanusch and Pyka, 2010). So for example, we know from literature that the process of knowledge discovery and creation (and thus the process of innovation) is a recombinatorial one (see e.g. Fleming, 2001). In fact, already Schumpeter (1942) addressed innovations as new combinations and also Weitzman (1998, p. 209) states: "when research is applied, new ideas arise out of existing ideas in some kind of cumulative interactive process that intuitively has a different feel from prospecting for petroleum". Against this backdrop, it is striking that that knowledge in agent-based simulation models is still often oversimplified. Consequently, the discovery or generation of new knowledge in many cases is modelled as a random process similar to the discovery of new oil fields (Antonelli, Krafft and Quatraro, 2010). At the same time, some models feature more sophisticated concepts and ideas, each with a particular focus and objective. Approaches from the literature range from simple binary representations that consider knowledge as an (or more) isolated piece(s) of information. In this setting, knowledge diffusion, for example, boils down to the process similar to the contagious transmission of a disease. Other contributions consider knowledge to be linked knowledge pieces that form a network of knowledge (see for example Morone and Taylor, 2010; Schlaile, Zeman and Mueller, 2018; Müller, Kudic and Vermeulen, 2020) which allows for the analysis of more nuanced analyses of knowledge discovery, creation and diffusion. The overarching goal of this chapter is to show how knowledge and hence knowledge creation and knowledge diffusion processes are modelled in agent-based models in the literature. This is done to analyse how we can capture the complex nature of knowledge especially against the backdrop of radical transition processes such as the bioeconomy and the energy transition.

A concept map is a schematic device for representing a set of concept meanings embedded in a framework of propositions. It can be used to evaluate students’ knowledge structure. This article introduces the comparative study of Chinese and American secondary school students’ knowledge structure. They are compared quantitatively and qualitatively in terms of mean score, individual proposition scores, proposition choice and map structure. The results indicate that students’ knowledge structures in the two countries are remarkably different. Compared with American students, Chinese students’ ability to take an exam is stronger and their mean score is higher. However, Chinese students need to improve their general knowledge and creativity although their basic knowledge is solid and they are better in mastering discipline knowledge and knowledge application.

Decision-making and Cognitive Structuring of Students at University

The abstract explores the relationship between knowledge creation and its impact on the awareness attribute within the context of sustainability campus management. It delves into how knowledge creation shapes and influences the level of awareness associated with sustainable practices in campus management. The concept of sustainability campus management has become increasingly important in today's organizations and institutions. Effective knowledge management is crucial for the success and sustainability of campus management. The creation of knowledge is essential for developing a culture of knowledge awareness. When individuals within an organization or institution know the importance of knowledge, they are more likely to seek out and share information actively. It can lead to a continuous knowledge creation and sharing cycle, which can benefit the entire organization. The study aims to uncover how the generation and dissemination of knowledge contribute to fostering a heightened consciousness of sustainability objectives among stakeholders. Furthermore, knowledge creation is significant for promoting sustainability in campus management. By creating and sharing knowledge about sustainable practices, institutions can reduce their environmental impact and promote a more sustainable future. The analytical study and article content analysis are used to evaluate. Content analysis is used to analyze the findings and reveal the significance of the knowledge creation influences on the knowledge awareness attribute. By examining the interconnectedness of knowledge creation andawareness within the campus management framework, this research seeks to provide insights that can inform strategies for enhancing sustainable practices and promoting a culture of environmental responsibility within academic institutions.

Public open spaces have historically been places of political action. Contemporary life, on the other hand, raises challenges to the city and its places of urbanity: they need to meet multiple demands, which indirectly include political action, but also involve leisure, entertainment, sport and social interaction, for example. Understanding the city as a place of encounter, and public open spaces as essential facilities for social interaction, leads to an approach to public open spaces from the perspective of urbanity. This article analyses the case study of Parque Germânia in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The case study considers a confrontation between the built environment as a physical dimension and appropriation as a social dimension. The study analyzes public use of the park through non-participant observation focusing on the following concepts: diversity and tolerance; visibility and flexibility. Diversity and tolerance is considered as a way of understanding the dynamic of appropriation by different social groups and their relationships; visibility is considered as a concept related to urban security, and flexibility is analyzed from the seasonal nature of different scenarios of use in the same space. The study analyzes the physical dimension by presenting a layered map that focuses on urban insertion, environmental aspects and design. Urban insertion is considered from the perspective of urban planning, such as use of the surrounding areas, access points and mobility; the environmental aspects consider areas of environmental preservation and hydrography; design considers the design of the park and its facilities as support for community activities and its multifunctional ability to serve different uses. The article presents a possible approach to public open spaces from the perspective of urbanity by considering both physical and social dimensions, and specifically builds a structured analysis of Parque Germânia.

This article explores the relationship between knowledge creation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth in the United States over the last 150 years. Distinguishing between general knowledge and economically useful knowledge, we examine the changes over time in the locus and content of new knowledge creation: the role of universities, particularly engineering schools and land-grant universities, industrial laboratories, and corporate research and development (R&D) laboratories prior to World War II. The practical orientation of US academic R&D and the close research interaction between academia and industry are noted. We study the unprecedented increase in R&D spending in the United States during and after World War II and how it was converted into economic activity via incumbent firms in the early postwar period and increasingly via new ventures in the last few decades.

The chapter focuses on knowledge processes in joint industry-academia research projects. Our experience of knowledge creation in joint industry-academia research projects in the domain of logistics and supply chain management (SCM) has led us to deepen the study of industry-academia interactions more specially the knowledge processes at work in such projects. With this perspective, we adopted an action research approach to launch and conduct two research projects in collaboration with a global manufacturing company. The chapter reviews the knowledge management (KM) literature on knowledge processes, presents the action research approach, and reports the results from the two action-research joint industry-academia research projects with knowledge creation objectives in logistics and SCM. The analysis of the projects reveals that the knowledge creation dynamic results from three intertwined, interactive, and iterative processes: knowledge transfer, knowledge sharing and knowledge generation. This outlines a framework of industry-academia knowledge processes dynamic. The analysis also underlines factors influencing the dynamic, among them action-research methodological choices and tactics. The chapter concludes on the value of action research to boost knowledge creation in joint industry-academia research projects and questions adopting a KM approach in this type of projects that could be part of the KM strategies of partners.

Knowledge space theory is a theory that provides a guidelines for human learners` possible education decisions and has been used in various educational environment. However, traditional methodologies using the knowledge space theory have always depended on handwork system and it is necessary to learn programming language such as Visual Basic and R, causing time consuming situations. In order to overcome those issues on the environment of education we propose a new Knowledge Structure Analysis System that not just analyzes learners` knowledge structures automatically but to provide critical learning path for the learners based on knowledge space theory. Proposed system is implemented by using rApache generating critical learning path computing Chi-square value. This provides an automatic way of analyzing knowledge structure in learners` knowledge space and shows systematic reviews for the knowledge space.

The subject of adult education has been chosen for this paper in order to provide a point of orientation for the discussion of certain related social problems of the western farming community. The conclusions are based upon field studies of several contrasting rural communities in Manitoba carried out under the direction of the Manitoba Royal Commission on Adult Education. Some characteristics of governmental institutions, farm movements, and farming conditions are peculiar to that province but basic similarities in the social structure of farming communities throughout the Prairie region mean that most of the findings have a wider application. It is necessary for reasons of space to treat ethnic communities only briefly, but this brevity may be partially justified on the grounds that the British-origin farming community represents the ideal type to which the ethnic communities are assimilating at various rates.The difficulty of defining adult education may be avoided by noting briefly its place in the educational process. In complex societies the term “education” has commonly been used to apply to the explicit function of the formal institutions through which social groups prepare young candidates for adult participation. It is apparent that, in terms of this social function, education is part of the more inclusive processes of socialization and acculturation necessary to all social groups and carried out in many societies without benefit of formal institutions. To prepare the young for integration in social groups as adults it is necessary that they acquire and incorporate in their personalities at least a minimum of the normative behaviour patterns necessary to various social roles as well as learn such elements of the cultural tradition (systems of knowledge, techniques, value-patterns, language, art, and the other expressional forms) as the adults controlling the training deem desirable. Although an unprecedented amount of training is acquired within formal institutions in our society, these institutions provide only part of the training necessary for social participation as an adult.

Knowledge systems technologies, as derived from AI methods and used in the modern Semantic Web movement, are dominated by graphical knowledge structures such as ontologies and semantic graph databases A critical but typically overlooked aspect of all of these structures is their admission to analyses in terms of formal hierarchical relations The partial order representations of whatever hierarchy is present within a knowledge structure afford opportunities to exploit these hierarchical constraints to facilitate a variety of tasks, including ontology analysis and alignment, visual layout, and anomaly detection We introduce the basic concepts of order metrics and address the impact of a hierarchical (order-theoretical) analysis on knowledge systems tasks.

This chapter takes the complex knowledge systems of metaphors and shows that their structured knowledge can be represented and predicted by ontology. The complex knowledge system of metaphors contains two knowledge systems, source domain and target domain, as well as the knowledge mapping between the two domains. Hence metaphors offer a test case of how structured knowledge can be manipulated in an information system. In terms of the theory of metaphor, we integrate the Conceptual Mapping Model with an ontology-based knowledge representation. We demonstrate that conceptual metaphor analysis can be restricted and eventually, automated. In terms of knowledge processing, we argue that the knowledge structure encoded in ontology, such as the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO), is the necessary foundation for manipulating information from multi-domain and multilingual sources. We first extract source domain knowledge structure based on ontology. Next we show that the ontological account allows correct explanation of the parallel yet different use of the same source domain in two different languages. Thirdly, we showed that the restricted set of upper ontology can be combined with the open lexical knowledgebase of wordnets to provide a principled, yet robust, general coverage of language-based knowledge systems.