ShantanuT01/DACTYL-Pretraining huggingface dataset:
Andragogy Andragogy is an adult teaching methodology which developed from pedagology (the teaching methodology for children) (Rachal, 2002, p. 210). Before the introduction of the concept (andragogy), pedagogy was the only known teaching methodology. Andragogy was basically developed by a group of researchers to focus more on unique adult needs as opposed to the conventional child needs. In andragogy, there is a strong emphasis on process design as opposed to pedagology, which focuses more on the content plan (Rachal, 2002, p. 210). With focus on process design, andragogy is basically aimed at designing and managing processes that are aimed at facilitating the acquisition of content by adult learners; but in the same manner, it also serves as a content resource for peers, supervisors and specialists. Andragogy was specifically started by a German educationist in 1833, but it is Malcolm Knowles, an American educational researcher, who essentially turned the learning methodology into a popular adult theory (Rachal, 2002, p. 210). However, in later years, Malcolm changed his stand on the adult theory and gave conflicting statements one whether the teaching paradigm was essentially meant for adults or could be applicable to children as well. This conflict of opinion essentially defines the controversy surrounding the use of andragogy as a unique adult teaching methodology. Considering andragogy basically defines the transition from a teacher-centered to a student-centered learning style, critics note that the shift could equally be beneficial to children, as much as it is for adults. This fact characterizes the conflict surrounding andragogy. Nonetheless, it is important to note that such concerns have been dispelled by the fact that proponents of the adult educational methodology were essentially adult teachers and they devised the theory to specifically apply to their unique student group (adults) (Rachal, 2002, p. 210). This makes the teaching methodology uniquely applicable to adult learners. The controversy surrounding andragogy is however not the essence of this study (but contributes to its understanding) because this study focuses more on the basis of the teaching paradigm in imparting knowledge to adult learners. In other words, this study will evaluate the teaching criteria behind its use. The criteria to be evaluated essentially define the platform through which andragogy is implemented and the guidelines to which it is practiced. Comprehensively, this study will analyze the proffered criteria for its applicability and possible areas that may cause its failures (based on existing literature surrounding its use). Voluntary Participation Andragogy has been traditionally known to be based on the ability of teachers to identify the right internal motivating factor among adult learners. However, Lindeman (1926) notes that instructors should not identify the internal motivation among adult learners if it is in form of professional advancement; however, this view has been disputed by other researchers such as Knowl
Introduction Different scholars have proposed a variety of definitions of organisational learning. As one scholar defined it, organisational learning is the process of improving actions through better knowledge and understanding (Garvin, p. 77). It may also be regarded as a process of detecting and correcting error. A learning organization is, therefore, an organisation that is skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge (Argyris, p.8). According to Argyris (1977), it is also an organisation that is good at modifying its own behavior in order to “reflect new knowledge and insights that make it grow into the future”. This paper provides a comparative analysis and evaluation of organisational learning by looking at two different organisations. One is the organisation where I work and the other is HP. Assessing the Need For several years now, my organisation has placed so much emphasis on the need for all staff members to keep learning and upgrading themselves. As a result, so much energy has been spent trying to organisation information in a way that makes it easy for everyone to access it. Part of what my organisation has done to facilitate the culture of learning is to ensure that as people do their work they get to deposit any critical information in a central database that may be used by any staff member willing to do so to learn and benefit from the skills of more skilled staff members. To a great extent, this has made it possible to maintain crucial information and make it available for other staff whenever an employee leaves the organisation. HP came to realise the need for knowledge management in 1995 (Hewlett Packard, p.4). Clearly, the leadership at HP understood the importance of knowledge management and knew that it was possible to leverage on the knowledge the organisation had gathered over the years. To meet the ever demanding expectations of customers, HP management understood that effective knowledge management is an important requirement to ensuring that the organisation can progress successfully. This created a healthy ground for the organisation to develop strong ties with its clients who knew that at any time when they were faced by challenges, HP would be there to deal with their problems (Hewlett Packard, p.4). However, this did not make sense to many of HP’s consultants. In the same way, clients could not at first understand the need for knowledge management as they all felt that they were getting for value for their money and as such, were satisfied with the services that HP was offering. Through different approaches, HP was able to get feedback from both its consultants and clients. Although there were mixed feelings regarding the need for knowledge management for the good of the organisation, an analysis by the company resolved to move on with plans to ensure that knowledge was managed well to provide a good background for organisational learning. Building Blocks Organisations that focused on learning are apparently skilled at five activities. These activities include systematic problem solving, experimentation with new approaches, lea
The question of opposition between religions is rather controversial because religions are based on the system of beliefs which are associated with the human spirituality, but not with any rationales and efforts to achieve the definite goal. In reality, religions in their association with such institutions as churches have more similarities with the market brands than with the aspects of the people’s spirituality. From this point, modern churches compete within the market of the people’s beliefs, and this statement is not a metaphor because the victory in the competition guarantees the progress of the church not only in the religious sphere but also in the social and economic fields. Today, churches are closely connected with the social aspects of the people’s life within communities. As a result, it is possible to speak about ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of the religious competition. This idea is discussed in detail in the book The Churching of America, 1776-2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy written by Finke and Stark. According to the authors, traditional religions or mainline denominations lost their positions when upstart sects developed in the field as ‘winners’ (Finke & Stark, 2005). Although Catholicism is one of the largest and most popular religions in the USA, it is losing its position because of conservative ideals and norms which cannot be relaxed immediately with the help of definite reforms; on the contrary, Pentecostalism develops and attracts more followers because of the orientation to the people’s interests. In spite of the popularity with the public and a great number of followers, Catholicism in the USA can be referred as the ‘loser’ in the rivalry of religions and churches which become “competitive organizations prepared to seek souls” (Finke & Stark, 2005, p. 75). Catholicism can be discussed to be effective as the traditional religion oriented to help people save their souls. As a result, the principles and strategies of Catholicism are ineffective to compete within the church market. In their work, Finke and Stark explain the causes for the decline of those religions which were popular during a long period of time as, for instance, Catholicism which was the first religion spread by the Europeans at the American territories. The authors state that the mainline denominations “were failing to offer credible religion … they had become so accommodated to the secular culture that people could no longer satisfy thei
In Euripedes’ Medea the main character was a woman scorned. She felt as if she is nothing but filth in the eyes of her husband Jason. But instead of merely feeling sorry for himself he concocted an elaborate scheme of revenge and because of her vile emotions and cunning she murdered Jason’s lover, Jason’s father-in-law, and the most sickening of all she also murdered her two sons from Jason. Thousands of years after this piece of literature was written lovers still fight and husbands and wife separate. In the United States the rate of divorce is astounding but man and wife, just like Medea sometimes would not let go of the past and move on with their lives. They concoct schemes to destroy the symbol of their marriage (Gunsberg & Hyowitz 116). Today this phenomenon is known as the Medea Syndrome and the most affected members of the family are not the parents who went through divorce but the children who became the unwilling participants in the ongoing psychological warfare between former husband and wife. Background Medea fell in love with the charming but complicated Jason. In fact she had to do several undesirable things in order for their relationship to blossom. She had to trick the daughters of a powerful leader named Pelias and made them kill their father. She had to pay the price and be exiled in a foreign land. She had to turn her back from her relatives and family in order to be with Jason in Corinth. But her sacrifices and her devotion was never repaid in kind. Instead, Jason chose ambition over her. Jason wanted to have a bright future for himself and so he married the daughter of Creon, King of Corinth. The narrator of the story beautifully summarized her feelings and desperation through the following words: …wasting away in tears ever since she learnt that she was wronged by her husband, never lifting her eye nor raising her face from off the ground; and she lends as deaf an ear to her friend’s warning as if she were a rock or ocean billow, save when she turns her snow-white neck aside and softly to herself bemoans her father dear, her country and her home, which she gave up to come hither with the man who now holds her in dishonor (Euripides par. 1). Jason’s second mistake was to ignore her. His third mistake was to forget that this is the same woman who was cunning enough to destroy Pelias. He thought that she will just move on with her life and this was his terrible miscalculation. In a scheme that no one understood and no one anticipated Medea feigned agreement to the sin of Jason and to throw her opponents off-guard she even gave her rival a gift. No one knew it was poisoned. Her father panicked when he saw her daughter stricken by a powerful venom that consumed her body and when he tried to help her and therefore rubbing his bare flesh with the garment he too succumbed from the deadly substance present in the fibers. One could just imagine the sorrow felt by Jason. The ramifications of Medea’s acti
Cyber terrorism has been used of late to terrorize US government and commercial websites with the most memorable being the one that occurred in July 2009. Englishmen say, “It is better to hold the bull by its horns”. In real life, this saying means that it is advisable to face the problem at hand, head on. Holding the bull by its horns often requires an offensive approach because horny bulls are rough animals. Likewise, when fighting terrorism it is advisable to be on the offensive rather than defensive. A national security strategy for cyberspace that identifies and destroys possible sources of cyber terrorism should be the primary focus for American security agencies. According to the Council of Europe (CE, 2007), cyber terrorism is the use of the internet for terrorist purposes. Cyber terrorism is a crime perpetrated on the international front and cyber security agencies have been puzzled by the complexity of this modern day security threat. CE (2007) asserts that investigators of cyber terrorism are normally challenged when investigating such crimes because digital traces do not allow them to determine the purpose of a given attack. For example, it might be challenging to evaluate whether the attack was intentional or a mere system failure. Information on how to misuse and manipulate the internet is publicly available even to the terrorists. Since the internet is available in most locations in the world, the attack can be launched from anywhere even in the training caves of terrorists. The attacks are also very quick especially the distributed devoid services (DDS). The attack does not depend on the internet speed hence the hacker can even influence or exploit the connection speed of the victim. Worms or viruses can be spread very quickly even without the participation of the attacker. Cyber terrorists normally use camouflage techniques and it is hard to trace the original perpetrator. Although the use of the internet is cheap and requires the use of a small bandwidth connection, the damage caused by a cyber attack can be very costly. Cyber attacks can target various aspects in society such as computer and cell phone networks, financial institutions, army intelligence, and the transport sector. Cyber attacks are likely to cripple crucial services such as banking services, railway and airport control services or it may lead to the loss of crucial information such as military intelligence or contact information. It is paramount to destroy any website which has been found to pose a threat to the national security. An offensive approach calls for constant surveillance of cyberspace and timely interventions. Being on the offensive begins with proper planning and depends on the availability of state of the art equipment that will be used to detect and destroy potential cyber threats. From the offensive perspective, the Department of Homeland security works to monitor and analyze websites in order to determine threats to the homeland security (Yonah & Kraf
Communication is an essential process that accompanies people throughout the whole life. For a contemporary communicator, it is quite important to understand the basics of communication theories and concepts, as well as apply them in his or her professional practice. However, a plethora of communication theories exited before modern facilities and digitalization took place. Indeed, nowadays, technologies and conditions affect the communication process to a great extent. Thus, it might be necessary to percept the fundamental theories and concepts on the mentioned topic through the prism of contemporary and traditional communication efforts and new media messaging strategies. There might be three different prisms through which the communication process can be explained. The first considers communication “as a one-way process of meaning construction, in which the sender attempts to construct or reconstruct the meaning developed by the receiver” (Van Ruler, 2018, p. 368). According to this direction, as an example of digital communication, sending an email to someone is a one-way process that starts being successful after the recipient gets and reads the text. In this case, the key actor in communication is the sender because the recipient plays a passive role and does not affect the process substantially. It should be mentioned that the discussed above direction has lost its reliability today. Then, the second approach views the communication “as a two-way process of meaning construction, in which two or more people construct new meanings together” (Van Ruler, 2018, p. 368). The crucial component of the communication process here is interaction in which the sender and recipient, or the group of ones, actively contribute to the development of information sharing and understanding. The sender disseminates some facts, and the recipient percepts them, analyzes and responds. For instance, within the framework of the second direction of communication theories, a conversation of two people via FaceTime is a two-way process in which both parties are taking an active part. The two approaches above might be difficult to apply to modern reality exhaustively, but not as the following one. The third direction considers communication “as an omnidirectional diachronic process of meaning construction, in which the focus is on the continuous development of meaning itself” (Van Ruler, 2018, p. 368). Theories of this kind also assume that the interaction has a vital role in the communication process but consider it a dynamic interplay between people involved. Interaction here is characterized by continuous functions changing and the importance of a relationship with communication but not with each other. An example is as follows: The UN General Assembly (UNGA) has made a loud statement on the improved organization’s policy regarding gender equality. Here, the A
Introduction Organisationsal change is a contribution to the organisation leadership. Prudent leadership, therefore, becomes a key to any organisation that aspires to change its way of operation or service delivering to the targeted stakeholders (Cañas, 2001). Change may be witnessed in the terms of goods and services, as well as organisation’s operations in both management and business, among other areas (Yeo, 2001). The idea behind a business change means a possible risk of value in an organisation. With all these factors being constant, organisations change requires sound decision making from the organisations leadership. It is noted that leaders consider different quality hence subjecting their organisations to different changes (Covey, 2004). The changes witnessed depend on the leader’s qualities and exposure, among others, like the environment issues. There are various theories of leadership which elaborate how leadership in an organisations affects its possible changes, for example, “Great Man” Theory, Trait Theory, Situational Theory, Behavioral Theory, Contingency Theory, Participative Theory, Management Theory and Relationship Theory (Tomey, 2009). Each leader may have the qualities of one or more theories, hence contributing differently to the organisation. Leaders mentor, control and manage others in the organisation and organisations development, or any kind of change depends on the top leadership. A leader that posses many quality factors has an impact all through the business environment hence initiating the most desired changes in the organisation (Novick, 2008). “Great Man” Theory According to this theory, leaders are born, and leadership skills are inherited from the parents. According to this theory, leaders are not made, and one must come from a background of leaders hence making this quality to be of particular use in th
Representing history is the least gratifying task. No matter what media is used, there will always be numerous inconsistencies, exaggerations and subjective evaluations. While Outside the Law does not exactly fall under the category of documentaries, it still tackles a very complex issue; more to the point, the movie offers a rather unusual perspective to view this event from. However, with the help of careful choice of artistic means of expression and well thought-out mise-en-scenes, together with the introduction of very strong cause-and-effect links and mimesis into the movie, particularly the scenes of the lead character talking to his mother and the skirmish at the end of the movie, Outside the Law manages to get its point across, proving that the Algerian Independence Movement was more than a political movement – it was a battle for the right to be accepted in the society. Tackling a very complex historical event, the movie director had to use one more tool, which challenges the audience’s perception of the conflict between Algeria and France. By introducing the cause-and-effect element, or “a chain of events linked by cause and effect and occurring in time and space” (Bordwell and Thompson 73) into the movie, Bouchareb was risking making his message too on the nose. Nevertheless, the use of the given tool was warranted by the fact that Bouchareb managed to make people see the situation from the perspective of the Algerians. The scene where paratroopers are dropped from the plane into the Algerian setting might seem short, unclear and irrelevant to the rest of the movie, yet the striking contrast between the silent moment of watching paratroopers in the air followed by a snapshot of an ordinary Algerian day, with the narrator reading calmly, “Setif. Autumn 1954” ( Outside the Law 00:15:55) sets the premises for the further scene of outrageous violence to break out. Perhaps, one of the heavies scenes in the movie and, ironically enough, the first intense scene that comes at the very beginning of the film, the lead character losing his father to an accident during the revolt, is a perfect example of mimesis work
Introduction There are many ways of assessing and evaluating ELL students. However, in a multicultural setting, students’ performance based assessment has been successfully achieved through portfolio assessment mode. Portfolio assessment is an authentic student reflection under appropriately a, especially in high schools. A teacher develops portfolio assessment based on his/her interest. Portfolio assessment has five main characteristics, which makes it the best methods to be used among diverse learners. These include; its comprehensiveness, systematic and predetermined, tailored nature, and its authentic. Assessment Mode The comprehensive nature of portfolio assessment makes it useful as it incorporates lot of learning elements. When developing portfolio assessment plan, many people are involve that ensure that all learning element are covered. Portfolio assessment will identify structural language components to be used to assess student. Materials such as charts, boards, sticks, pictures can be applied in assessing student literacy level and skills. A student language mastery, can also be tested through an arrangement of more complex learning materials. As a result, this assessment tool becomes vital in traditional reading view. A student can also be tested over reading and answering comprehensions skills. On the other hand, a student can be given word puzzles , and word construction assessments to check their language mastery. Self-reflection tests have also been applied as a test on traditional reading view (Peregoy & Boyle, 2008). Testing ELL student reading cognitive view has successfully been achieved by assessment portfolio. A student ability to construct ideas during their reading can be assessed through exposing them to tests such as graphic organizers. Students can be made to draw story maps or develop a story plot following the work they have read. Self-reflection essays can be applied to assess how much the students have gained in class. Time records of reading and understanding a material can also be used to measure the competency of a student (Elizabeth & Donald, 2010). Metacognitive assessment is based on the ability of the student to draw a summary of a reading material through a systematic analysis of their t