La expansión de propuestas educativas mediadas por tecnologías ha dado origen a estrategias y recursos innovadores como es el caso de los objetos de aprendizaje y la posterior diseminación mundial de repositorios de OAs. Este trabajo fue motivado por la necesidad de localizar OAs que permitan complementar la enseñanza presencial de las metodologías de diseño de bases de datos, contenidos clásicos de toda carrera de informática y/o computación. El punto de partida fue la conceptualización de los OA, para continuar con el relevamiento de los Repositorios de Objetos de Aprendizaje (ROAs) existentes. Una vez localizados los OAs comenzó la etapa de evaluación de los mismos, previo estudio de las propuestas de medición de calidad de objetos de aprendizaje, de modo de obtener información que constituya una referencia a los posibles reutilizadores. Para la selección de los instrumentos de evaluación a ser utilizados, se tuvo en cuenta aquellos que brindan la posibilidad de un resultado cuantificable, donde las dimensiones observables se encuentran claramente definidas.

2011 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC). June 5-8, 2011, Ritz-Carlton, New Orleans, LA, USA

The cognitive models that research on conceptual change has generated have been the subject of criticism, suggesting that these reflect an unrealistic view of learning as an overly “cold” and isolated process. Accordingly, representatives of this criticism suggest that research on conceptual change should investigate to what extent the cold cognition relates to “warm” affective constructs. In the present thesis, the warmth is not considered as prior to conceptual change, but is inferred from the very process of conceptual change itself. The aim is to investigate and describe how this warmth – in terms of normativity – is expressed in conceptual change and how individuals, in these processes, emerge as subjects in their interchange with the environment. This is done by exploring what students do when they make meaning of gender and nation in interviews and exam papers. The results show that the students mainly relate to two different norm-systems, including six normative aspects of conceptual change. The first system includes the goal to challenge or emancipate, the means to problematize, and engagement in the interviews or exams. Furthermore, it includes critical theory as an ideal, social structures and power as values, and me as a social being and actions as part of a tradition as what to make meaning of. The second system includes the goal to preserve, the means to claim how it “is”, and engagement in the interviews or exams. Furthermore, it includes psychological/biological reductionism as an ideal, essences and a natural order as values, and me as an individual and actions as an outcome of intentions as what to make meaning of. By understanding what the students do as interfering with these normative aspects, it becomes possible to understand them as negotiating norms that are brought to the fore. With this, “coldness” appears to be a misleading epithet of conceptual change. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 1: Submitted. Paper 2: Accepted. Paper 3: Submitted.</p>

The present study aims at analysing metaphor in the inaugural addresses of American Presidents. It is hypothesised that metaphor is a legitimization strategy which is employed to affect the audience. The research questions were formulated as follows: What conceptual metaphors and their linguistic realizations are used for legitimization in American Presidents’ inaugural addresses and what are their rhetorical implications? The study was carried out within the framework of the Critical Metaphor Theory suggested by Charteris-Black (2005), which is a blend of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis. The corpus of the study was compiled of 14 and 16 inaugural addresses delivered by American Presidents affiliated to the Democratic and Republican parties respectively. To achieve the aim the following objectives were set. Firstly, metaphorical expressions were identified and ascribed to the conceptual metaphors they manifest. Secondly, the quantitative analysis was carried out to reveal the frequency of the metaphorical expressions underlying the prevailing conceptual metaphors in the inaugural addresses delivered by the members of both political parties. Finally, the realizations of the conceptual metaphors were contrasted and interpreted across the two political parties. The analysis revealed the following prevailing conceptual metaphors: AMERICA IS A FAMILY, AMERICA IS A PERSON, POLITICS IS A JOURNEY, SIGNIFICANT IS BIG, POLITICS IS A BUILDING, DIFFICULTIES ARE... [to full text] / Šis darbas nagrinėja metaforą kaip legitimizacijos strategiją, dominuojančią Amerikos prezidentų inauguracinių kalbų diskurse. Atlikti tyrimai rodo. kad metafora kaip legitimizacijos strategija yra vartojama siekiant daryti įtaką visuomenei. Tyrimui vykdyti buvo suformuoti tokie klausimai: kokios konceptualios metaforos yra vartojamos Amerikos prezidentų inauguracinėse kalbose legitimizacijos tikslais, kokia yra jų lingvistinė raiška ir kokia yra jų retorinė potekstė? Metafora politikoje, būdama šio tyrimo dėmesio centre, atsiduria tarp kognityvinės lingvistikos ir diskurso analizės. Panašu, kad abi šios mokslo sritys prisideda prie metaforų nagrinėjimo politiniame diskurse, sukurdamos aiškesnį jų pobūdžio ir veikimo ypatumų vaizdą. Taigi, šis tyrimas buvo atliktas remiantis Kritinės metaforos teorija, kuri yra Konceptualios metaforos teorijos ir Kritinės diskurso analizės derinys. Konceptualios metaforos teorijos pirmtakai Lakoff ir Johnson (1980: 4) parodė, jog mūsų konceptuali sistema savo prigimtimi yra iš esmės metaforinė. Metaforos esmė yra vieno dalyko supratimas ir patyrimas kito dalyko atžvilgiu. Mokslininkai teigia, jog konceptualios metaforos, kurios yra vartojamos politiniame diskurse, sėkmingai gali įtikinti, įteisinti bei įtakoti publiką. Susidomėjimas politikų kalba sustiprėjo diskurso tyrinėtojų dėka, kurie nagrinėja metaforų vartojimą politikų pasisakymuose, politinių partijų ir judėjimų dokumentuose, žiniasklaidoje, pokalbiuose prie apvalaus stalo, debatuose... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]

Magistro darbe „Darbo konceptas lietuvių ir rusų patarlėse ir priežodžiuose“ bandoma plačiau panagrinėti koncepto darbas specifiką ir raišką lietuvių ir rusų kalbų pasaulėvaizdžiuose, atrasti panašumų ir skirtumų, rekonstruoti kalbai būdingą pasaulėvaizdį, tautų mąstymo strategijas. Atlikus lyginamąją ir konceptualiąją analizę, išanalizavus surinktą medžiagą, nustatyta, kad darbo konceptas lyginamose kalbose yra suvokiamas panašiai (darbas (darbštumas) – kaip gerovės šaltinis, darbas – kaip tinginystės priešprieša, tinginystė –kaip darbo parodija, darbas – jungtis tarp žmogaus ir gamtos, darbas – kaip vargas, darbas –kaip žmogaus savybių matmuo, darbas – kaip mokymo įrankis, darbas – šeimyninės sanklodos rodiklis, darbas – gyvenimiškos tiesos saugykla). Dažniausi darbo denotatai lietuvių ir analogiškai rusų kalboje yra darbas (darbštumas) – kaip gerovės šaltinis, darbas – kaip tinginystės priešprieša, tinginystė – kaip darbo parodija, darbas – kaip vargas, darbas – kaip žmogaus savybių matmuo. Darbas (darbštumas) – kaip gerovės šaltinis dažniausiai realizuojamas lietuvių kalboje. Rusų kalboje dažniausiai realizuojamas darbas – kaip tinginystės priešprieša, tinginystė – kaip darbo parodija. Lietuvių ir rusų kalbų patarlės ir priežodžiai pasižymi raiškos įvairove: aktyviai vartojami posakiai su neigiamu modalumu, elipsė, dauguma atvejų yra metaforiški, vaizdingi, lakoniški, neretai hiperbolizuoti, vyrauja ironija, komiškumas, garsinis aspektas, kategoriškumas, pamokymai ir... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The aim of this master work, „The concept of work in Lithuanian and Russian proverbs and bywords“, is to take a wider glance at the concept of work in Lithuanians and Russians world-view, to find similarities and differences, to recreate the type of world-view which would be common to the language and also to recreate the strategies of thinking. After a comparative and conceptual analysis and after the analysis of collected examples, we made a conclusion that the concept of work is perceived similarly: work (diligence) as the source of wellness, work as the confrontation with laziness, laziness as the parody of diligence, work as the connection between human and nature, work as misery, work as the measurement of humanity, work as the proper way to educate, work as the measurement of family values and work as the storage of all the values. The most frequent and common for both Lithuanian and Russian languages meanings of the concept work are these: work as the source of wellness, work as the confrontation with laziness, laziness as the parody of diligence, work as misery and work as the measurement of humanity. The most common meaning to Lithuania language is work as the source of wellness and the most common meaning of work to Russian language is work as the confrontation with laziness and laziness as the parody of diligence. Lithuanian and Russian proverbs and bywords can be expressed in various ways: there are a lot of examples which have negative meaning. People use many... [to full text]

Most of the work investigating the representation of concrete nouns in the brain has focused on the locations that code the information. We present a model to study the contributions of perceptual and semantic features to the neural code representing concepts over time and space. The model is evaluated using magnetoencephalography data from different paradigms and not only corroborates previous findings regarding a distributed code, but provides further details about how the encoding of different subcomponents varies in the space-time spectrum. The model also successfully generalizes to novel concepts that it has never seen during training, which argues for the combination of specific properties in forming the meaning of concrete nouns in the brain. The results across paradigms are in agreement when the main differences among the experiments (namely, the number of repetitions of the stimulus, the task the subjects performed, and the type of stimulus provided) were taken into consideration. More specifically, these results suggest that features specific to the physical properties of the stimuli, such as word length and right-diagonalness, are encoded in posterior regions of the brain in the first hundreds of milliseconds after stimulus onset. Then, properties inherent to the nouns, such as is it alive? and can you pick it up?, are represented in the signal starting at about 250 ms, focusing on more anterior parts of the cortex. The code for these different features was found to be distributed over time and space, and it was common for several regions to simultaneously code for a particular property. Moreover, most anterior regions were found to code for multiple features, and a complex temporal profile could be observed for the majority of properties. For example, some features inherent to the nouns were encoded earlier than others, and the extent of time in which these properties could be decoded varied greatly among them. These findings complement much of the work previously described in the literature, and offer new insights about the temporal aspects of the neural encoding of concrete nouns. This model provides a spatiotemporal signature of the representation of objects in the brain. Paired with data from carefully-designed paradigms, the model is an important tool with which to analyze the commonalities of the neural code across stimulus modalities and tasks performed by the subjects.

Magistro darbo objektas yra vienas žodis lietuvių ir anglų kalbose: viltis ir hope, kuris panašus, ar tapatus, tiek turiniu, tiek forma. Šio žodžio reikšmės tyrimas atliekas vis labiau populiarėjančiu tekstynų lingvistikos metodu. Darbe didelis dėmesys kreipiamas į vilties kolokacijas, rastas lyginamuose tekstynuose, nes būtent tekstynuose yra randama įprastinė abstrakto raiška. Kognityvinės metaforos, rinktos iš kolokacijų, pagrindžiamos ne bet kokiais, o įprastiniais kasdienės kalbos posakiais. Dėl šios priežasties darbo šaltiniais pasirinkti British National Corpus ir Dabartinės lietuvių kalbos tekstynas. Interneto vartotojams šiuose tekstynuose prieinama po 100 mln. žodžių, ir tai pakankamai didelis pavyzdžių skaičius tokio pobūdžio tyrimams. Darbo tikslas – išanalizuoti abstraktaus daiktavardžio viltis konceptualizavimą lietuvių ir anglų kalbose. Kadangi konceptualiosios metaforos yra sietinos ne tik su žmogaus jutimine, bet ir su visos tautos kultūrine patirtimi, manoma, kad žodžio viltis konceptualizavimas gretinamose kalbose turėtų skirtis. Pasirinktoji magistro darbo tema aktuali, nes žodžio viltis konceptualizavimas lietuvių kalboje ligi šiol nėra nagrinėtas ar lygintas su anglų kalbos atitikmeniu hope. / The master paper deals with one lexeme in Lithuanian, viltis, and its equivalent in English hope. The author provides the analysis of the selected words from the corpus using a corpus-based approach which becomes more and more popular. The paper demonstrates that metaphors, if they are to reflect the most popular understanding of a concept, should be obtained from collocations. On that score their concordances were compiled from the Corpus of Contemporary Lithuanian and the British National Corpus. They are both of the size of 100 million running words in their Internet versions and they offer a reliable source of data for this kind of analysis. The main goal of this paper is to describe the concept represented in Lithuanian and English by the word hope. As conceptual metaphors are linked not only with man‘s sensual, but also with the whole nation‘s cultural experience, the conceptualization of hope in languages should differ. The theme is relevant because conceptualization of hope had not been explores in Lithuanian and compared with its equivalent in English.

It is no unknown fact that South African learners underachieve in mathematics. Due to the fact that the quality of mathematics teaching is one possible factor that has an influence on learners' mathematics achievement, there are valid reasons questioning the conceptual mathematical knowledge of mathematics teachers. In order to facilitate conceptual understanding teachers themselves must possess profound mathematical knowledge. Apart from the influence of a teacher's knowledge for teaching, teachers' attitudes and beliefs play a meaningful role in the way they teach mathematics. The deficient nature of prospective and practising teachers' knowledge of school mathematics, as well as their attitudes and beliefs towards mathematics has serious implications for the training of prospective mathematics teachers. Literature reveals that a technologically enhanced environment can improve the conceptual learning of prospective mathematics teachers. The purpose of this study was to determine the influence of a dynamic technologically enhanced environment on the attitudes and beliefs, as well as the conceptualisation of prospective mathematics teachers regarding the function concept. In this study, prospective teachers were exposed to Geometer's Sketchpad®, a dynamic software programme providing a powerful learning context that promotes the investigation of algebraic relationships. In order to answer the research question, an explanatory mixed method design was used. In the quantitative part of the study, the Study Orientation Questionnaire in Mathematics and a function test were administered to prospective teachers. In the latter, conceptualisation of the function concept was measured in terms of four competence components, namely interpretation, modelling, translation and reification. In the qualitative part of the investigation semi-structured and task-based interviews were held with a group of prospective teachers. Analysis of the results revealed that the dynamic technologically enhanced environment did not contribute to an improvement of the prospective teachers' attitudes and beliefs. In fact, these decreased visibly. Regarding their conceptualisation, only the reification component showed a practically significant improvement. It therefore appears as if prospective teachers are not being prepared to benefit from the dynamic technologically enhanced environment. A model is proposed for the effective use of such a learning environment. The model involves that diagnostic assessment be made of prospective teachers' basic knowledge of the function concept, their study habits, their attitudes and beliefs with respect to mathematics, as well as their mathematics anxiety. The second component comprises recommendations made to prospective teachers as a result of the diagnostic assessment, as well as continuous support being offered as an integrated part of the mathematics module. Support is offered with respect to cognitive and meta-cognitive skills, affective factors and the creation of an advantageous technologically enhanced learning environment. Despite the restricted value of generalisation of the findings from this study, I still recommend the expansion, refining and implementation of the model so that prospective mathematics teachers can effectively benefit from a technologically enhanced environment. Key words for indexing: mathematics education, mathematics teacher education, teacher knowledge, prospective mathematics teachers, function concept, conceptual learning, tertiary education. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Education))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2009.

This study focuses on the way in which the conceptual artists Berni Searle and Jan van der Merwe portray their respective memories of the influence of hegemony on their identity formation. Two conceptual installations of each artist, namely Looking back (1999) and Not quite white (2000) of Searle and Wag (2000) and Ontwortel (2009) of Van der Merwe, are interpreted comparatively according to the portrayal of hegemony, identity (including the artists‟ different sexual and race identities) and their memories of the historic and cultural effects of domination. The reading and interpretation of the installations are guided by the key concepts hegemony, identity and memory and are grounded theoretically from a critical post colonial perspective. Searle and Van der Merwe‟s memories of the influence of power relations and ideology on their conception of art and identity formation are addressed by contextualizing the artists within the South African context. Van der Merwe, as a white Afrikaans speaking man, initially formed collectively part of the Western patriarchate identity norm because of his historic background. His identity is in contrast with Searle‟s brown and female identity which is traditionally viewed and portrayed as different and inferior. Van der Merwe‟s memorial art is therefore mainly that of the unjustified benefiting of the white and male agents of power in contrast with Searle‟s memorial art of colonial and patriarchate domination. / Thesis (MA (History of Art))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013

It is no unknown fact that South African learners underachieve in mathematics. Due to the fact that the quality of mathematics teaching is one possible factor that has an influence on learners' mathematics achievement, there are valid reasons questioning the conceptual mathematical knowledge of mathematics teachers. In order to facilitate conceptual understanding teachers themselves must possess profound mathematical knowledge. Apart from the influence of a teacher's knowledge for teaching, teachers' attitudes and beliefs play a meaningful role in the way they teach mathematics. The deficient nature of prospective and practising teachers' knowledge of school mathematics, as well as their attitudes and beliefs towards mathematics has serious implications for the training of prospective mathematics teachers. Literature reveals that a technologically enhanced environment can improve the conceptual learning of prospective mathematics teachers. The purpose of this study was to determine the influence of a dynamic technologically enhanced environment on the attitudes and beliefs, as well as the conceptualisation of prospective mathematics teachers regarding the function concept. In this study, prospective teachers were exposed to Geometer's Sketchpad®, a dynamic software programme providing a powerful learning context that promotes the investigation of algebraic relationships. In order to answer the research question, an explanatory mixed method design was used. In the quantitative part of the study, the Study Orientation Questionnaire in Mathematics and a function test were administered to prospective teachers. In the latter, conceptualisation of the function concept was measured in terms of four competence components, namely interpretation, modelling, translation and reification. In the qualitative part of the investigation semi-structured and task-based interviews were held with a group of prospective teachers. Analysis of the results revealed that the dynamic technologically enhanced environment did not contribute to an improvement of the prospective teachers' attitudes and beliefs. In fact, these decreased visibly. Regarding their conceptualisation, only the reification component showed a practically significant improvement. It therefore appears as if prospective teachers are not being prepared to benefit from the dynamic technologically enhanced environment. A model is proposed for the effective use of such a learning environment. The model involves that diagnostic assessment be made of prospective teachers' basic knowledge of the function concept, their study habits, their attitudes and beliefs with respect to mathematics, as well as their mathematics anxiety. The second component comprises recommendations made to prospective teachers as a result of the diagnostic assessment, as well as continuous support being offered as an integrated part of the mathematics module. Support is offered with respect to cognitive and meta-cognitive skills, affective factors and the creation of an advantageous technologically enhanced learning environment. Despite the restricted value of generalisation of the findings from this study, I still recommend the expansion, refining and implementation of the model so that prospective mathematics teachers can effectively benefit from a technologically enhanced environment. Key words for indexing: mathematics education, mathematics teacher education, teacher knowledge, prospective mathematics teachers, function concept, conceptual learning, tertiary education. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Education))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2009.