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

Off the Web

Image
I used to have access to the web at home and always considered it as a bonus. I could not imagine a day without it. It was an indispensable part of my stuff at home. However, recently I do not have access to it at home and interestingly I found it very useful! I just noticed how much time I used to spend on the web. Now I spend that time on reading books which is much more enjoyable.
Read more

ISSI 2011 in Durban

13th ISSI (International Society for Scientometrics and Infometrics) Conference will take place in Durban, South Africa from 4th to 8th July 2011. The conference topics include: theory, methods and techniques in Scientometrics and Infometrics, citation and co-citation analysis, indicators, Webometrics, mapping & visualization, research policy, productivity & publications, journals, databases and electronic publications, scholar collaborations, country level studies and patent analysis. For more details, please have a look at the conference’s website .
Read more