The question captured in the title of this paper was asked by an audience member in a panel session at the 2014 Learning Analytics Summer Institute, hosted by the Society for Learning Analytics Research. More accurately, the question was: “What does a data scientist working in a learning context need to know?” One respondent quipped in response: “learn Python and learn R!”. Subsequent debate ab...

Purpose – This paper seeks to understand how users determine credibility in the internet environment from a conceptual level and the implications of these new methods of credibility determination on internet tools (primarily software) and services. Design/methodology/approach – The author first examines the underlying reasons for increased dependence on the internet for information, using elect...

Nectar enables users of the MoinMoin collaborative wiki editing environment to conveniently create and view in-text annotations to wiki documents without disturbing the underlying document. It is designed to facilitate online collaboration for traditional classroom learning by allowing authors to lock documents for editing, but still solicit comments online. Nectar has an obvious and easy to le...

This work concerns automatic topic segmentation of email conversations. We present a corpus of email threads manually annotated with topics, and evaluate annotator reliability. To our knowledge, this is the first such email corpus. We show how the existing topic segmentation models (i.e., Lexical Chain Segmenter (LCSeg) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)) which are solely based on lexical in...

As services become more loosely coupled and increasingly autonomous, heterogeneous distributed services should be able to discover and converse with each other dynamically, with or without human intervention. Current paradigms of service interaction require service developers to hardcode their logic to adhere strictly to pre-defined conversation policies. We propose here a mechanism for a Conve...

Conversation analysts have sometimes been taken to task for apparently choosing not to deal with the "context" of the conversational activities they examine (Cicourel, 1981). In Talking Culture Moerman (1988) describes a blend of ethnography and conversation analysis, and suggests that ethnography describes contextual data extrinsic to interaction while conversation analysis provides non-contex...

BACKGROUND Those attempting to implement changes in health care settings often find that intervention efforts do not progress as expected. Unexpected outcomes are often attributed to variation and/or error in implementation processes. We argue that some unanticipated variation in intervention outcomes arises because unexpected conversations emerge during intervention attempts. The purpose of th...

BACKGROUND & AIMS A recent systematic review of conversation training for communication partners of people with aphasia has shown that it is effective, and improves participation in conversation for people with chronic aphasia. Other research suggests that people with aphasia are better able to learn communication strategies in an environment which closely mirrors that of expected use, and that...

aim: considering the fundamental role of parents' function and family dynamics including the importance role of family communication pattern on preventing early-onset substance use in children, the present study aimed to determine the correlation between family communication pattern and mothers' preventive behavioral intention regarding preventing early-onset substance use in children...