Students' Perceptions

I teach a variety of undergraduate and postgraduate modules at the university in this semester. The modules include 'Basics of Databases Design and Evaluation in Social Sciences', 'Practical Computing', 'General References', and 'Statistics & Probability' for undergraduate students and 'Information Storage & Retrieval' and 'Basics of Computer Programming' for postgraduate students. At the first session of each module I asked my students to draw a simple mind map of their perceptions about what they already knew about the subject and what they expect to learn during this semester in the module. Most of them were somehow uncertain about what they might learn during the module. I'll ask them to draw another mind map at the end of the semester to compare these two which I hope would be considerably different.

Popular posts from this blog

Web Search Efficacy

The following paper was published recently: Mansourian, Y. (2008). Web search efficacy: definition and implementation, Aslib Proceedings , Vol. 60, No. 4, pp. 349-363. Abstract: Purpose – This paper aims to report a number of factors that are perceived by web users as influential elements in their search procedure. The paper introduces a new conceptual measure called “web search efficacy” (hereafter WSE) to evaluate the performance of searches mainly based on users' perceptions. Design/methodology/approach – A rich dataset of a wider study was inductively re-explored to identify different categories that are perceived influential by web users on the final outcome of their searches. A selective review of the literature was carried out to discover to what extent previous research supports the findings of the current study. Findings – The analysis of the dataset led to the identification of five categories of influential factors. Within each group different factors have been recognize
Read more

Doctoral Forum in Aberystwyth

I attended a wonderful workshop at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth from 6th to 7th April. I delivered a presentation about my research. It was the third doctoral forum that I have attended during my PhD study. I like this kind of doctoral forums because it provides us with an opportunity to simply talk to other fellow researchers from different universities and learn new things from them. I’ll write more about the workshop in the next entries. I have uploaded some photos that I took in Aberystwyth on my homepage here and here .
Read more

Clusty

I think Clusty works more efficiently than other general-purpose search engines at present time. I like it because of the clustering method that it employs to present the search result. It seems very useful to me.
Read more