Executive SummaryStudies in gender have offered many reasons for the differing attitudes and skill levels that male and female undergraduate students possess when it comes to learning technology skills. Male and female students have differing learning styles influenced by such experiential factors as biology, historical inequalities, inconsistent political rights, and problems of sociological constructions. Studies such as Clegg and Trayhurn's (2000) in the United Kingdom (UK), Crews and Butterfield's (2003) in the United States, the European Union's (EU) the Women in Technology North West's surveys (2004), and the World Bank's research (2005) demonstrate that the gender gap is a reality when it comes to technology training, in most institutions and countries, both developed and developing. The gender gap persists despite many efforts to curb the effects of institutional and social inequality. However, the gender gap is different in each context and must be contextualized in each situation; in fact, the gender gap as a term conflates several different arguments and may indeed contribute to misunderstandings of the issue.In May 2003, the Technology Edge Research Project completed a major study of undergraduate liberal arts students and their attitudes concerning the technology skills that they have gained during university. This report builds upon the findings of the Technology Edge Research Project's preliminary needs assessment; this research was documented in a previous article in the Journal of Information and Technology Education (JITE) entitled, "Providing a Technology Edge for Liberal Arts Students" (Butler, Chao, & Ryan, 2003).Elaborating on our findings as they specifically related to gender issues, this paper addresses the following research questions: 1) Is there a gender gap between final year male and female undergraduate students when it comes to information technology (IT) skills?2) What are the differences in attitudes and self-reported skill levels of final year male and female undergraduate students, in both the arts and non-arts? What is the relationship between these attitudes and measured aptitudes?3) How can educators address these differences, when they develop and deploy materials designed to improve IT skills?
The creation of the Wenzhou Spoken Corpus, an online searchable corpus of a modern Chinese dialect, presents a number of challenges that are of interest to the corpus linguistic community. We review issues involved with collection of spoken data, its transcription and markup, as well as the functionality of the search tools. The transcription makes use of Chinese characters as well as IPA symbols for Wenzhou colloquial forms not conventionally represented by characters. XML was adopted as the standard for the basic format of files, with file searches expressed in XPath form. The search tools provide the usual options of restricting searches by age, gender, etc., and yield concordances and tables of collocates. Though the collection of data for the corpus was ‘opportunistic’ in some ways, and so not ideally balanced or representative, it is nevertheless proving to be a valuable tool for corpus-based research on Wenzhou.
A B S T R AC T Numerous challenges face teaching staff in a postsecondary institution who wish to explore their options and integrate technology into their teaching practice. The Arts Technologies for Learning Centre (Arts TLC) at the University of Alberta has adopted a model that enables students to support teaching staff by taking the role of technology mentors to them.The student mentors guide, advise and teach the teaching staff about the appropriate use of technology. The emphasis is less on the production of materials, and more on the development of self-sufficiency for the teaching staff member. The successes, challenges and prospects of this approach are discussed. K E Y WO R D S : mentoring, professional development, technolo gy integration, technolo gy training active learning in higher education
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