O presente estudo constitui-se na Dissertação de Mestrado apresentada ao Programa de Pós-Graduação da Universidade de Caxias do Sul, pertencente à linha de pesquisa Educação, Epistemologia e Linguagem, e ancora-se nos pressupostos teóricos e conceituais da Epistemologia Genética. Essa teoria, criada pelo pensador suíço Jean Piaget, com o fim investigativo de entender os processos cognitivos, mais especificamente, no que se direciona a revelar a gênese do conhecimento. O intuito principal do estudo a ser apresentado está na possibilidade de desvelar os vieses apriorísticos da teoria piagetiana por meio de um estudo teórico analítico, realizado, basicamente, a partir em três obras piagetianas, a saber: Nascimento da Inteligência na Criança (1975 [1936]), Biologia e Conhecimento (2003 [1967]) e Epistemologia Genética (2007 [1970]). Como forma de elucidar o pensamento piagetiano, se fazem presentes os preceitos epistemológicos platônicos, mais especificamente a teoria da reminiscência, assim como as ideias racionalistas de Descartes, o empirismo clássico de Locke, a teoria da harmonia preestabelecida de Leibniz, o apriorismo de Kant e o evolucionismo de Lamarck e de Darwin. A partir dos entendimentos revelados pela análise e interpretação das obras piagetianas, pela reflexão acerca de seus comentadores, e pelas proposições epistêmicas contidas nos pensadores da antiguidade a modernidade nomeados acima, entende-se que Piaget foi, veementemente, um epistemólogo, por suas pesquisas teóricas e empíricas - estarem envoltas pelo propósito de esclarecimento de como se desenvolve o conhecimento. Contudo, a constituição epistêmica piagetiana se adentra, mais especificamente, pela Biologia, Filosofia e Psicologia, passando a revelar que o processo cognitivo do sujeito epistêmico ocorre na relação entre ele e o objeto a ser conhecido. Nesse sentido, Piaget elaborou uma teoria que se contrapôs aos pressupostos epistemológicos do empirismo clássico, assim como aos pressupostos racionalistas que sustentam a existência das ideias inatas , por entender que o conhecimento não está unicamente no sujeito ou no objeto cognoscível e, mas sim na relação entre ambos. Piaget não nega o papel fundamental da experiência no processo cognitivo; contudo, sua proposta se diferencia da Epistemologia Empírica por essa afirmar que a experiência é a única fonte do conhecimento. No mesmo sentido, afirma que há um sujeito cognoscente, porém esse não apresenta estruturas cognitivas inatas imutáveis, como afirmam as epistemologias de cunho inatistas, mas dirá que esse é dotado de uma funcionalidade cognitiva a priori. No campo educativo as proposições teóricas suscitadas, neste estudo, se fazem relevantes na medida em que promovem no docente uma problemática epistêmica, de cunho reflexivo, do seu agir pedagógico. O estudo divide-se em três capítulos: o primeiro deles trata dos fundamentos da Epistemologia tradicional, empirista e racionalista, enquanto disciplina filosófica, e da Epistemologia Genética; o segundo, dos processos de conhecer elencados, descritos e explicados por Piaget a partir de suas preocupações de biólogo e filósofo; e o terceiro aborda a posição e os aspectos aprioristas da Epistemologia Genética.

Knowledge is often tacit and under researched in educational fields. In order for student access to knowledge and its related academic discourses to be facilitated, a deep understanding needs to be gained of the form that this knowledge takes. This study interrogates the ways in which knowledge is constituted in the first year of a Public Management Diploma and a Public Administration Degree at a comprehensive university in South Africa. The study takes a social realist approach that understands reality as fact but sees our knowledge thereof as a social phenomenon. The study was concerned with knowledge structures and knower structures as it argues that these have not been adequately accounted for in the sociology of education research. But this study comes to this concern from a strongly ideological view of student reading and writing. This study calls on a social practices approach that sees literacy as embedded within specific academic discourses, which vary from context to context. It uses this ideological understanding of literacy as the orienting framework for the study of knowledge. The study takes place in a Higher Education mileu that has begun to transform from its divisive past. The transformation brought about new institutional formations such as the comprehensive university, with its mix of vocational, professional and formative programmes and varied emphasis on contextual and conceptual curriculum coherence. Increasingly, the transformation agenda also shifts concern from simply providing physical access to a previously disenfranchised majority to ensuring full participation in the context of high attrition rates in first year and low retention rates. The data was analysed using the Specialisation Codes of Legitimation Code Theory to see what was being specialised in the Diploma and Degree curricula of the Public Management and Administration fields. These fields are characterised in the literature by ongoing tensions about focus, and perceptions of there being a theoretical vacuum and an inability to deal adequately with challenges in the South African public sector. Analysis of lecturer interviews and first-year curriculum documentation showed that both the Public Management Diploma and Public Administration Degree have stronger epistemic relations (ER), with an emphasis on claims to knowledge of the world. The data showed relatively weak social relations (SR), in that there was not the valuing of a particular lens on the world or a specific disposition required for legitimation within this field. The combination of ER+ and SR- indicates that these curricula are Knowledge Codes, where legitimation is through the acquisition of a set of skills and procedures. The programmes were characterised by fairly low-level procedural knowledge, which may point to a workplace-oriented direction that is dominant in the comprehensive university. In keeping with concerns raised in the literature about this field, there was little evidence of theoretical or propositional knowledge in the Public Management Diploma and while the Public Administration Degree had some evidence of this, it was arguably not to the extent expected of a degree as described in the National Qualifications Framework. This study was limited to the first-year of the Diploma and Degree and subsequent years could present different findings. Lecturers showed awareness of student challenges with literacy practices and made concerned attempts through various interventions to address this but they were found to value the surface features of writing practices over personal engagement with the knowledge. Though the expectations of student literacy practices in tests and assignments were aligned to the ways in which knowledge was constructed in the curriculum, there was little evidence of student induction into disciplinary discourses of the field as knowledge was presented as being neutral and student writing primarily took the form of retelling objective facts. The implications of these findings could include student exclusion from higher-level academic discourse, more powerful knowledge in the workplace and, finally, constrain them from becoming producers of knowledge.

This thesis begins with the assumption that the theory of academic dependency provides an adequate framework within which the relationship between social science communities in the North and South can be understood. Present problems of social scientists in the South have very often been attributed to this dependence and it has been concluded that academic dependence has resulted in an uncritical and imitative approach to ideas and concepts from the West (Alatas, 2000). This dependence has also resulted in the general regression among social scientists based in the South and in a marginalisation of their works within the social science community no matter how significant and original they may be. The problematic invisibility of the works of prominent South African scholars is a dimension of a wider crisis of academic dependence, if unchecked this current trend will also reinforce academic dependence. From the nature of the problems generated by academic dependence, it is obvious that there is a need for an intellectual emancipation movement. This movement may take different forms that may range from but are not limited to a commitment to endogeneity which involves among other things, knowledge production that takes South African local conditions seriously enough to be the basis for the development of distinct conceptual ideas and theories. This requires transcending the tendency to use ‘the local’ primarily as a tool for data collection and theoretical framing done from the global north. Secondly, there is a need to take the local, indigenous, ontological narratives seriously enough to serve as source codes for works of distinct epistemological value and exemplary ideas within the global project of knowledge production. Endogeneity in the context of African knowledge production should also involve an intellectual standpoint derived from a rootedness in the African conditions; a centring of African ontological discourses and experiences as the basis of intellectual work (Adesina, 2008: 135). In this study, it is suggested that the recommendations highlighted above can only succeed if scholars make an effort to actually engage with locally produced knowledge. There is therefore a need to make greater efforts to know each other’s work on Africa. This demand is not to appease individual egos but it is essential for progress in scientific work. African communities will benefit from drawing with greater catholicity from the well–spring of knowledge about Africa generated by Africans. In the South African context, transcending academic dependence in the new generation of young academics requires engagement with the work of our local scholars who have devoted their lives to knowledge production. This thesis explores the scholarship of Professor Bernard Magubane by engaging with his works on race, class and inequality by locating his works within the wider debates on race, class and inequality in South Africa. The specific contributions of Professor Magubane to the enterprise of knowledge production are identified and discussed in relation to his critique of Western social science in its application to Africa. The making of Professor Magubane’s life, his career, scholarship and biography details are analysed with the intention of showing their influence on Magubane as a Scholar. The examination of Professor Magubane’s intellectual and biographical accounts help to explain the details, contexts and implications of his theoretical paradigm shifts. This helps prove that Professor Magubane’s experiences and theoretical positions were socially and historically constituted. The research from which this thesis derives is part of an NRF-funded project, on Endogeneity and Modern Sociology in South Africa, under the direction of Professor Jimi Adesina.

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the Master of Information and Communications Technology Degree, Faculty of Accounting and Informatics, Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa, 2016 / The need to utilize English in daily International communications within broad settings, such as business and academia, is accelerated by Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) and internationalisation. Internationalisation introduces the increased need (through ICT) to communicate through a common language (global language) and English has evolved into such a ‘global language’. There is evidence in the literature indicating that teachers assume that students have the educated ‘guessing skill’ in the ability to read and write efficiently in English. Literature further proves that limited ESL proficiency is still a major drawback for the efficient and effective use of English as a medium of instruction both in academe and in other industries. Therefore, the current study postulates that interventions such as perceived educational themed computer game playing could facilitate English vocabulary improvement; an approach believed to be more appealing to the students of this ICT-dominated world than traditional rote learning. As a result, students of the Internet age more receptive towards vocabulary conveyed through ICT tools, as opposed to traditional printed texts. The focus of this study was on the utilization of an ICT tool in the form of a computer game in supplementing teaching and learning of English vocabularies. This quasi-experimental mixed methods’ research used seven research instruments that incorporated both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods. This research attempted to investigate the effectiveness of a selected computer game on English vocabulary improvement using engineering students (participants) that served as either the control or experimental groups. Data analysis tests, such as Wilcoxon Signed Ranks, Chi-Square and Paired Samples T-Test assisted in analysing the data collected for this study. The significant findings of this study indicate that the study’s selected computer game was easy to use and useful, because there were improvements in English vocabulary amongst participants resulting from the game. Further lessons learned from this study confirm that ICT relevant tools (such as this study’s computer game), do complement teaching and learning. These findings also align with the study’s theoretical framework by indicating that perceived ease of use and usefulness of the study’s selected computer game have an influence towards English vocabulary improvement. / M

Orientador: Inês Signorini / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-27T17:50:00Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Biondo_FabianaPocas_D.pdf: 3129361 bytes, checksum: 2f10f8e058551dcb0bc2a228fa8cb17a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015 / Resumo: A partir do campo aplicado dos estudos da língua(gem), esta tese de doutorado tem como objetivo analisar o processo colaborativo de construção de conhecimentos entre professora/aluno(s) e entre aluno(s)/aluno(s) nos fóruns online de um curso semipresencial de Morfologia da Língua Portuguesa, na Licenciatura em Letras de uma universidade pública situada na região centro-oeste. O corpus foi gerado por meio de uma "pesquisa-ação" (BURNS, 2010) e constitui-se especialmente por 538 postagens feitas pela professora e pelos alunos em quatro fóruns desse curso, nos anos de 2011 e de 2012. Por meio de uma perspectiva sociocultural de investigação baseada na "lógica da prática" (SANDBERG e TSOUKAS, 2011), a proposição desse objetivo visa à apreensão do fórum de discussões online, neste trabalho, para além de sua funcionalidade como ferramenta de ensino-aprendizagem, bem como para além das características textuais/estilísticas de escrita nele manifestas, defendendo-o como uma prática colaborativa de construção de conhecimentos; no caso, conhecimentos sobre Morfologia da língua. Para isso, e no âmbito de uma abordagem inter/transdisciplinar, são articuladas contribuições teóricas sobre aprendizagem colaborativa (online) (VIGOTSKI, 2007[1984]; 2008[1987]; BRUNER et al.,1976; INGRAM e HATHORN, 2004; HARASIM, 2005; 2012, entre outros), sobre fórum de discussões online (OLIVEIRA, 2007; LALUEZA et al., 2010; MANTOVANI et al., 2010; CASSANY, 2012, entre outros) e sobre o campo teórico-epistemológico da prática (WENGER, 2001; RECKWITZ, 2002; NICOLINI, 2009; SANDBERG e TSOUKAS, 2011, entre outros). As análises evidenciam, sobretudo, dois modos diferentes de produzir escrita e gerar conhecimentos nos fóruns online: 1) a partir de práticas de escrita e ensino-aprendizagem individualizadas e tradicionalmente escolarizadas/acadêmicas; 2) a partir de práticas de interação e escrita em ambientes colaborativos da Internet. No cruzamento entre as práticas tradicionais à escola/academia e as práticas de interação na Internet ligadas à ideia de inovação, evidencia-se uma perspectiva fronteiriça entre novos/velhos letramentos (SIGNORINI, 2007; SIGNORINI, 2012) na situação de comunicação e de geração/negociação de significados focalizada, aventando a possibilidade de movimento, de mudança de práticas e de papéis sociointeracionais, de fortalecimento da construção colaborativa de conhecimentos em ambientes de formação de professores como a Licenciatura em Letras aqui focalizada / Abstract: In the field of applied language studies, this doctoral thesis aims to analyze the collaborative process of knowledge construction between teacher/student(s) and between student(s)/student(s) in online forums of a blended learning course called Morphology of the Portuguese Language in an undergraduate course of Languages in a public government-run university in the central-western region of Brazil. The corpus was generated through an "action research" (BURNS, 2010) and is constituted, especially, by 538 posts made by the teacher and students in four forums of this course, between the years 2011 and 2012. Based on a sociocultural perspective of research investigation on the "logic of practice" (SANDBERG and TSOUKAS, 2011), the proposition of that goal focuses on the apprehension of the online discussion forum, going beyond its functionality as a teaching and learning tool as well as beyond the textual/stylistic characteristics of writing it manifests, defending this forum as a collaborative practice of knowledge construction; in this case, knowledge of the Portuguese language morphology. For this purpose, and as part of an inter/transdisciplinary approach, the following theoretical contributions are articulated on collaborative learning (online) (VIGOTSKI, 2007[1984]; 2008[1987]; BRUNER et al.,1976; INGRAM e HATHORN, 2004; HARASIM, 2005; 2012, among others) on online discussion forum (OLIVEIRA, 2007; LALUEZA et al, 2010; MANTOVANI et al, 2010; CASSANY, 2012 etc.) and on the theoretical and epistemological field of practice (WENGER, 2001; RECKWITZ, 2002; NICOLINI, 2009; SANDBERG and TSOUKAS, 2011, among others). Analyses reveal, above all, two different ways of producing writing and generating knowledge on online forums: 1) through teaching and learning individualized and traditionally schooled/academic writing practices; 2) through interaction and writing practices in collaborative online environments. A bordering perspective between the old/new literacies may be observed in the intersection between traditional schooled/academic practices and Internet practices related to the idea of innovation (SIGNORINI, 2007; SIGNORINI, 2012) in situations of communication and generation/negotiation focused on meanings, revealing the possibility of movement, changing practices and socio-interactional roles, and strengthening the collaborative construction of knowledge in teachers¿ training environments such as the Languages Undergraduate Course focused upon in this analysis / Doutorado / Lingua Materna / Doutora em Linguística

This study was conducted in an effort to explore the attitudes and knowledge held by law enforcement officers regarding child maltreatment. This study was completely exploratory in nature, with no hypothesis about the outcome.

Mit der Digitalisierung im Bildungsbereich sind Hochschulen aufgefordert, neue und mit digitalen Technologien angereicherte Lehr- und Lernformate bereitzustellen. Die sächsischen Hochschulen können dafür auf eine flächendeckende, technologische Infrastruktur [u. a. das Lernmanagementsystem (LMS) OPAL] zurückgreifen. Im Lehralltag zeigen sich jedoch fach- und hochschulübergreifend ähnliche Phänomene: Die digitalen Infrastrukturen werden vorwiegend für administrative Zwecke (bspw. für Kurseinschreibung oder Materialbereitstellung) und nur in geringem Maße zur innovativen Gestaltung von Lehr-Lern-Arrangements genutzt. Dabei bietet die vorhandene Infrastruktur reichlich Potenzial für motivational anspruchsvolle, digitale Lehr-Lern-Arrangements in allen Fachgebieten. Mit der Steigerung der Learning Experience, also der Lernerfahrung, sollen positive Emotionen geweckt und für den Lernprozess genutzt werden. Lernen soll Freude machen. Mit dem Projekt LOS (Learning Experience in OPAL mit Spielelementen) wird ein frei zugängliches Transfer- und Weiterbildungsangebot aufgebaut, mit dem Lehrende für die Steigerung der Learning Experience ihrer Lernangebote durch den Einsatz von Spielelementen sensibilisiert und qualifiziert werden. Damit soll langfristig die Attraktivität und der Nutzungsgrad der sächsischen Lernplattform aus Sicht aller akademischen Stakeholder gesteigert werden. Der Beitrag stellt Zielstellungen und Maßnahmen des Projektes LOS vor und skizziert zunächst allgemein das Konzept der Gamification sowie dessen pädagogischen Potenziale für die Hochschullehre. [... aus Punkt 1]

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Studies on the internationalization of entrepreneurial firms have ignored women's entrepreneurship as a distinct research area before the 1970s. However, women's entrepreneurship started to get the attention of researchers a few decades ago and it is still in the adolescence stage. In addition, there is very little research on the internationalization of women entrepreneurial firms from emerging markets particularly those from Bangladesh. Researches that have been conducted on the challenges of Bengali women entrepreneurial firms often focused on the challenges of developing a business within the domestic context. The study seeks to fill this knowledge gap by exploring the challenges the women entrepreneurs in emerging markets are facing while growing a business within the international context, with a focus on Bangladeshi women entrepreneurial firms. This study was conducted using qualitative case studies using semi-structured interviews of three women entrepreneurial firms. The empirical findings show that two Bengali women entrepreneurs are involved with both inward and outward internationalization and one is involved with outward internationalization. The research identified networking as the greatest challenge faced by women entrepreneurs when it comes to internationalizing the business from an emerging market where insufficient funding is also another greatest obstacle. The findings also revealed that entrepreneurs should concentrate on expanding their knowledge and learning further in order to improve their skills and dynamic capacities, which is still insufficient and requires extensive effort to ensure the successful internationalization of the businesses. The findings also showed that Bangladesh is still lagging behind other developed economies in terms of digitalization and innovation. The smallness of the business also significantly affects the business activities when it comes to competing globally.

Description logic knowledge bases can be used to represent knowledge about a particular domain in a formal and unambiguous manner. Their practical relevance has been shown in many research areas, especially in biology and the semantic web. However, the tasks of constructing knowledge bases itself, often performed by human experts, is difficult, time-consuming and expensive. In particular the synthesis of terminological knowledge is a challenge every expert has to face. Because human experts cannot be omitted completely from the construction of knowledge bases, it would therefore be desirable to at least get some support from machines during this process. To this end, we shall investigate in this work an approach which shall allow us to extract terminological knowledge in the form of general concept inclusions from factual data, where the data is given in the form of vertex and edge labeled graphs. As such graphs appear naturally within the scope of the Semantic Web in the form of sets of RDF triples, the presented approach opens up the possibility to extract terminological knowledge from the Linked Open Data Cloud. We shall also present first experimental results showing that our approach has the potential to be useful for practical applications.