In the technological world of the Twenty-first Century, students must be information literate. They must have the skills to access, evaluate, and utilize information needed in their undergraduate experience and in their future endeavors. It is important for Geography majors to acquire these skills as part of their undergraduate education. At one institution of higher learning, information literacy learning is embedded in the Geography curriculum. An online instrument to assess information literacy skills is used to evaluate seniors. In this article, goals for information literacy, the creation of the information literacy assessment instrument and the results of assessment testing are discussed.
AQUA - Automatic Quality Assessment and Feedback in eLearning 2.0
The current development of Web 2.0 makes the distinction between author and reader fading away. Users now produce huge amounts of data which sometimes is of questionable quality. This leads to the problem of information overload: how to make the most of this information without overwhelming the users? One key challenge to solve this issue is to assess the quality of the user generated content.
In AQUA, we seek to develop algorithms to assess the quality of content automatically. We focus on two sources for this assessment: (1) user generated content; (2) feedback by users of the content. To do so, we investigate techniques from the fields of natural language processing (NLP), information retrieval, and machine learning.
So, in a nutshell, AQUA will answer the following questions:
What is quality of information? How does it matter in information search?
How to model the quality of user generated content?
How far can you go with automatic methods in assessing quality?
How to give feedback to users regarding quality?
The AQUA project is associated with the project "Mining Lexical-Semantic Knowledge from Dynamic and Linguistic Sources and Integration into Question Answering for Discourse-Based Knowledge Acquisition in e-learning (QA-EL)".