Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
The Role of Higher Education Curriculum Quality in Fostering Digital Skills of University Students

This study aims to investigate the relationship between program curriculum quality and students’ digital skills, as well as the impact of six dimensions of digital skills on social studies students individually. A total of 148 students comprised the research sample. Technological or instrumental skills, communication skills, information skills, critical skills, personal safety skills, and device safety skills were the six dimensions of digital skills evaluated in the study. SmartPLS 4 was used to analyze data using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The results demonstrated that the quality of the curriculum had a significant impact on the technological or instrumental skills, communication skills, information skills, and critical skills of the students. It was determined, however, that the quality of the curriculum has no significant effect on students’ personal safety skills. In addition, our findings demonstrated that the curriculum’s quality had a positive impact on device security skills. The results suggest that the quality of the curriculum plays an important role in shaping students’ digital competences, and that educational programs aimed at enhancing the development of digital skills should consider the multidimensional nature of digital skills and the role of the curriculum in promoting digital competences.
Active Learning with Data Augmentation Under Small vs Large Dataset Regimes for Semantic-KITTI Dataset

Active Learning (AL) has remained relatively unexplored for LiDAR perception tasks in autonomous driving datasets. In this study we evaluate Bayesian active learning methods applied to the task of dataset distillation or core subset selection (subset with near equivalent performance as full dataset). We also study the effect of application of data augmentation (DA) within Bayesian AL based dataset distillation. We perform these experiments on the full Semantic-KITTI dataset. We extend our study over our existing work [14] only on 1/4th of the same dataset. Addition of DA and BALD have a negative impact over the labeling efficiency and thus the capacity to distill datasets. We demonstrate key issues in designing a functional AL framework and finally conclude with a review of challenges in real world active learning.
Literacy and Professional Training - A Factor for Overcoming the Digital Divide: Experts’ Opinion from Bulgaria

The publication aims to present a current picture of the competence gaps in Bulgaria regarding literacy and the integration of innovations in business, education, and culture. We identify measures enshrined in several national documents related to reducing the consequences of inequality in access and skills in information society conditions. The material also includes data from a sociological study using the in-depth interview method, which presents the vision of experts from the educational and cultural sectors about the spectrum of necessary competencies and the impact that technological innovations have on educational and cultural institutions (schools, universities, libraries).
Digital Literacy in Teacher Education: Transforming Pedagogy for the Modern Era

This chapter describes research developed in the Spanish educational framework in 2020, during the period of home confinement, which was carried out with the purpose of reducing the spread of the COVID-19 disease. The aim of this research is to find out about the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and two groups of digital technologies and the effects of this use. The tools analyzed were: i) six digital tools for communication and ii) nine digital tools for instructional design, in a group of 108 practicing teachers, aged between 23 and 65 years. They participated in this study by answering an online questionnaire called EDU-COVID [1]. Most of the teachers worked in public schools (69.4%), in several autonomous communities in Spain. The largest representation was from Castile and Leon (39.8%). These analyses revealed statistically significant differences in perceptions of the use of digital tools according to variables such as gender and type of school. Based on these findings, the study discusses and evaluates the educational suggestions of the new educational reforms aimed at digitizing teaching. The research provides information on the impact of digital technologies on teaching, assessing ongoing efforts to improve the quality of teachers’ ICT instruction.
Teacher’s Skills for Application of Modern Technology in Educational Work

This topic is dealt with by numerous relevant researches, so we tried to contribute empirical research to the ICT aspect in teaching. The aim of this research is to determine and analyze teachers’ views on their own skills for the application of modern technology in educational work. A descriptive method with surveying and scaling techniques was used, and a questionnaire instrument with an assessment scale was created based on numerous papers dealing with this topic.157 respondents participated in this empirical research. The analyzed data show the following: teachers know the specifics and pedagogical importance of applying modern technology in educational work; teachers have acquired skills for using modern technology during education, professional development, private courses and through independent studies and research; teachers believe that institutions that prepare teachers and teaching staff should continue to pay attention to teaching subjects that concern modern technology in teaching; a significant number of teachers believe that they have developed ICT skills and have a desire for more frequent training in this area, where they stated what they would like to learn and apply in practice. This research opens up questions for practical answers in which all ways could be adequately answered to the teachers’ proposals, whereby an interesting idea could be directed towards cooperation with the local community and the realization of these proposals.
DIAR: Deep Image Alignment and Reconstruction Using Swin Transformers

When taking images of some occluded content, one is often faced with the problem that every individual image frame contains unwanted artifacts, but a collection of images contains all relevant information if properly aligned and aggregated. In this paper, we attempt to build a deep learning pipeline that simultaneously aligns a sequence of distorted images and reconstructs them. We create a dataset that contains images with image distortions, such as lighting, specularities, shadows, and occlusion. We create perspective distortions with corresponding ground-truth homographies as labels. We use our dataset to train Swin transformer models to analyze sequential image data. The attention maps enable the model to detect relevant image content and differentiate it from outliers and artifacts. We further explore using neural feature maps as alternatives to classical key point detectors. The feature maps of trained convolutional layers provide dense image descriptors that can be used to find point correspondences between images. We utilize this to compute coarse image alignments and explore its limitations.
MinMax-CAM: Increasing Precision of Explaining Maps by Contrasting Gradient Signals and Regularizing Kernel Usage

While various AI explaining methods has been developed in the last decade, the Class Activation Map (CAM) technique (and derivations thereof) has remains a popular alternative today. Highly versatile, and sufficiently simple, CAM-based techniques have been consistently used to explain the predictions of Convolutional Neural Networks over classification problems. However, many studies conducted to assert the precision of the produced explaining maps have done so on single-label multi-class classification problems, where the task is simplified by focusing and framing the objects of interest in the foreground. In this work, we test and evaluate the efficacy of CAM-based techniques over distinct multi-label sets. We find that techniques that were created with single-label classification in mind (such as Grad-CAM, Grad-CAM++ and Score-CAM) will often produce diffuse visualization maps in multi-label scenarios, overstepping the boundaries of their explaining objects of interest onto objects of different classes. We propose a generalization of the Grad-CAM technique for the multi-label scenario that produces more focused explaining maps by maximizing the activation of a class of interest while minimizing the activation of the remaining classes present in the sample. Our results indicate that MinMax-CAM produces more focused explaining maps over different network architectures and datasets. Finally, we present a regularization strategy that encourages sparse positive weights in the last classifying, while penalizing the association between the classification of a class and the occurrence of correlated patterns, resulting in cleaner activation maps.
Hydrogeoochemical Evaluation Of Middle Eocene Limestone Aquifer Using Multivariate Statistics And Visual Models, East El Minia Governorate, Egypt

East Minia is considered as one of the most promising areas for the establishment of numerous sustainable development projects. The Middle Eocene Limestone aquifer is the main water source needed for the establishment of these projects. Therefore, 32 collected samples from different wells and chemically analyzed to determine the suitability of that water for drinking and irrigation, as well as mentioned to the various factors controlling the water quality through the application of hydrochemical diagrams and statistical analysis. TDS value of the studied water samples was ranged from 271 to 2328 ppm which indicates that nearby is 93.8% of the investigated water samples are acceptable for drinking uses, while total hardness value ranged from 32.19 to 1035.44 which indicates that there is 93.8% of the studied groundwater samples are suitable for domestic uses. Statistical analyses, Gibbs and End-member diagrams indicate that the water-rock interactions, geochemical process (Redox), besides anthropogenic activities are the essential contributor to the investigated groundwater chemical composition. Thus, the studied water is suitable for irrigation purposes based on the calculated sodium hazards and salinity.
MNEMOSCOPE – A Model for Digital Co-creation and Visualization of Collective Memories

In the domain of cultural events, heritage and memory institutions, crowdsourcing and user-generated content have a growing impact on the emergence of social archives, the enrichment of digital collections and sharing of collective memories and experiences. In this context, a technology-mediated model through a participatory digital platform is proposed based on a research process comprising a multiple case study, prototype testing with users and exploratory interviews with experts. The model combines online and offline strategies, namely visualization, gamification, and locative practices, to potentiate the aggregation, correlation, and co-creation of collaborative digital resources. The participatory nature of this proposal intends to empower individuals, municipalities and cultural entities like museums, libraries, and local organizations to create and expand their community archives around past and current events, by presenting them in a multidimensional way. The model is presented through a set of operative components and principles regarding participation, visualization, and mediation, to guide the development of prototypes for specific contexts and territories. The receptivity and recommendations from potential users and experts allowed us to design the MNEMOSCOPE model in a flexible way to be adaptable and scalable. Following, the development and testing of a functional platform will be held within an R&D project, focused on cultural events and experiences in Portugal.
Tipping the Canoe: What Can Be Learned from a Postdigital Analysis of Augmented and Virtual Reality in Networked Learning?

In this paper, the authors use a postdigital lens to examine augmented (AR) and virtual reality (VR) as tools for networked learning. The postdigital perspective suggests that the ‘digital’ is so pervasive that it is no longer considered novel or noteworthy; rather, it is so embedded in our day-to-day lives that it now evades notice. This examination draws upon the concepts of analogue and digital to explore ontological and epistemological characteristics of AR and VR as well as how media and materials may shift on a continuum or manifest both characteristics concurrently. Two vignettes are used to create a shared context and atmosphere from which to consider the pedagogical use of these technologies. One vignette describes a VR app that invites the learners into a canoe where they are immersed into a lesson about Indigenous constellations; the second describes an AR app in which the learners direct their smartphones up at the sky also to learn about constellations. The authors discuss the analogue and digital characteristics as well as the freedoms and constraints relative to sites of learning, activities, learner configurations, and representations of learning. In making the human-technology relationship more perceptible, it is possible to design for learning.
The Mode 3 Network University and Design: A New Materialist Perspective

Universities have grown to be complex institutions, networked both inwardly and outwardly within societySocieties. This has produced a complex networkNetworks of humans, technologies, discourses, policy, and diverse and contested path dependent ideas on what a university is and does. DigitalDigital technologies have changed many social practices but promises of innovation and revolution in higher educationHigher education have not in the mainstream materialised. New materialisms provide theoretical perspectives for research and practice within the contemporary Mode 3 NetworkNetworks University. The networkNetworks from a new materialist perspective brings together human relationships, technologies and collaborative enquiry and action. These perspectives question exclusive human agency to shape and use technologies in simple and instrumental ways to achieve desired ends. Many actors, both human and non-human come together and are entangled, in constant flux to enact the becoming of the networkNetworks university. This raises the question of how technologies are adopted and designed in the networkNetworks where agency does not reside exclusively with the individual human, such as policy maker, designer or technologist. New materialisms provide the perspective that the human designer affects and is affected by the networkNetworks assemblage and rather than being a fixer or solutionist, designs with the human and non-human networked university.
Conclusion: Emerging Themes in Sustainable Networked Learning

In this concluding chapter we point to themes that emerge from the chapters in this book on sustainable networked learning. The themes cut across different sections of the book, indicating their wider significance. These themes are Lasting effects of lockdown online teaching; Digital sustainability for the future; Future roles of networked learning in society; Balancing utopia and dystopia in visions of AI and open data; Speculative methods in research, education and design; and Balancing qualitative and quantitative data in the research of networked educational settings: Studies at the community and project levels.
Introduction

The present book has emerged from the 13th International Conference on Networked Learning (NLC, 2022), held 16–18 May, 2022 at Mid-Sweden University, Sundsvall, Sweden. The conference had a high number of interesting, high-quality research papers, which made it a difficult task to select papers to be further developed into chapters for this book. To aid our editorial decisions, in the final plenary session of the conference, we encouraged the delegates to discuss what themes and ideas they had found most interesting and/or thought-provoking during the many presentations. Comments were collated on an online board (a padlet), creating a rich plethora of potential focal points for this volume. With this as the outset, we found a set of overarching themes that each encompassed a sufficient number of papers corresponding to delegates’ articulated interests. From there, the process leading to the present collection included several rounds of reviews and revisions through which authors of the chosen papers have further developed their contributions.
Emerging Rhizomatic Networks and New Ways of Connectivity

This chapter introduces a framework for analyzing learning networks. It builds on findings from an investigation of students’ experiences from and participation in online teaching during the Covid19-lockdown. The investigation is based on 32 interviews with students from a variety of University College Programmes As part of the interviews, the students were asked to share their experiences regarding learning through online participation. From the body of the empirical data, three cases were singled out for this chapter aiming to maintain a high degree of complexity and maximum variation. Through the contemporary theories within the field of Networked Learning, we aim to show examples of how the students were networked during the Covid-19 shutdown and the implications that emerging networks had on their participation in online educational activities. Furthermore, we suggest the utilization of the applied framework for analyzing how students are experiencing and expressing their perspectives on being networked. The main findings suggest that online teaching during the lockdown required students to establish new patterns of participation, thus, establishing new structures and ways to collaborate. This led to emerging networks supporting various aspects of their life setting as students and creating opportunities for engaging in new social configurations and learning.
Transformative Networked Learning: An Expanded Design Framework for Individual, Group, and Social Perspective Transformations

There has been the growing effort within a research community of networked learning (NL) to re-define the notion of NL. Contributing to such a collective effort, the authors argue that there is a significant distance between the community’s political aspirations and everyday practices—subsequently, the community has exclusively focused on the “network” part of NL while neglecting the “learning” part. The chapter demonstrates how the NL theory and associated design principles have failed to translate the criticality of macro-level critiques into micro-level design practices. To address this issue, the authors propose an expanded design framework for transformative NL, consisting of three levels of interconnected NL communities: (i) internal NL communities in online courses that aim to transform individual students’ perspectives, (ii) external NL communities in students’ real-life contexts that aim to transform group practice, and (iii) social NL communities in broader contexts that aim to transform social perspectives. Thus, the emphasis of transformative NL design should not be restricted to facilitating learner interactions and knowledge acquisition inside an online course but expanded to helping learners’ holistic development and leading to meaningful changes in their lives outside the course. The authors conclude the chapter by drafting new transformative NL design principles.
Networked Learning in a Postdigital-Biodigital Age

Networked Learning (NL) has developed predominantly in university settings, yet much of the research across decades has implicit links with broader global concepts, such as bioinformation, biodigitalism, postdigitalism, critical posthumanism and viral modernity. In this chapter, we explore these implicit connections as an important, less recognized part of NL. We surface some postdigital-biodigital challenges in NL by revisiting relevant histories, concepts, and definitions and noticing where there are connections, particularly when NL and Postdigital Science and Education have developed in the same Zeitgeist. Despite diverse histories, these areas of research have resulted in different, yet often overlapping theories, approaches, and ethos. After examining a number of cross-cutting areas of interest, we ask why a focus towards postdigital-biodigital challenges in NL is worthwhile, and indeed, why now? We perceive NL to implicitly hold a long history of deep and successful engagement with postdigital-biodigital challenges in theory and through the concept of convergence. Convergence is an important and sustained concept in NL that can break down perceived barriers to developing cross-cutting research in the areas discussed throughout this chapter. It is therefore timely to bring to light explicit bioinformational connections, to help focus our research efforts on NL in a postdigital-biodigital age.
How to Design for the Materialisation of Networked Learning Spaces: A Cross-Case Analysis

The potential of a networked learning (NL) space comes into being when participants establish communication, build connections with one another and create a dialogic space. Moving from this premise, this chapter poses a complex question: How to design for the materialisation of a networked learning space for professionals in education? It bases its theoretical framework on Bakhtin’s idea of centrifugal and centripetal forces, the concepts of network core and periphery as well as the idea of the strength of weak ties. Through these lenses, this chapter presents a cross-case analysis of two projects aimed at teacher/leader professional development in technology education in Denmark: Master of ICT and Learning (MIL) and Teknosofikum. The two cases are analysed qualitatively through the concepts of forces, connections and movements. Findings show that the materialisation of NL spaces occurs through the constant movement between centrifugal and centripetal forces; the core and the periphery meet in between, and new connections are created in this encounter. The newly materialised NL spaces will not survive the ending of the courses. They do, however, allow for experimenting with NL principles and for bringing new practices and ideas into the participants’ own organisations.
The Future of Presence in Online Education, a Speculative Design Approach

This paper adds to the movement towards rethinking the university of the future following the upheaval of emergency remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. It investigates new and emerging alternatives for creating innovative teaching and learning spaces and experiences. The paper focuses on the question of creating presence at a distance within a networked learning framework. The purpose of the research is three-fold: imagine, with teachers and educational designers, what presence could look like in the online university of the future; critically engage with these futures; and evaluate the speculative approach as a means to initiate a conversation and engage teachers in thinking differently about presence in online education. In six speculative design workshops, teachers and staff developed prototypes of what presence and affective closeness could look like in online education. Based on three groups of prototypes (measuring cognitive presence in high-tech laboratories, VR classrooms, and creating asynchronous social contact through connected objects), the paper elaborates on how presence can be enacted, each prototype offering opportunities and challenges. Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and hysteresis are then used to explain the difficult move from face-to-face experience to a new form of presence and why some participants may close off alternative imaginaries.