In Search Of Understanding

The activities that transpire within the classroom either help or hinder students' learning. Any meaningful discussion of educational renewal, therefore, must focus explicitly and directly on the classroom, and on the teaching and learning that occur within it. This book presents a case for the development of classrooms in which students are encouraged to construct deep understandings of important concepts. Jacqueline Grennon Brooks and Martin Brooks present a new set of images for educational settings, images that emerge from student engagement, interaction, reflection, and construction. They have considerable experience in creating constructivist educational settings and conducting research on those settings. Authentic examples are provided throughout the book, as are suggestions for administrators, teachers, and policymakers. For the new edition of their popular book, the authors have written an introduction that places their work in today's educational renewal setting. Today, they urge, the case for constructivist classrooms is much stronger and the need more critical. Note: This product listing is for the Adobe Acrobat (PDF) version of the book.

Clinton Bennett reflects on four decades of engagement with Muslims and Christian-Muslim relations as a missionary, scholar, and interfaith activist. Set in the context of his personal story, chapters discuss a series of critical questions to the Christian-Muslim relationship reprising earlier writing. Bennett asks: can Christians appreciate the prophet Muhammad as a genuine messenger from God or is this theological treason? How might Christians respond to the Muslim claim that Jesus was a prophet and is not God incarnate? Can Christians with integrity regard the Qur’ān as a word from God, and is there any possibility of rapprochement on the issue of whether Jesus died on the cross? Focusing on the United States, Bennett also describes church-sponsored Christian-Muslim initiatives and offers suggestions on how Christians can rethink their ideas about Muslims and cooperate with them in peace and justice advocacy, and social and community development. Exploring some of the causes of Islamophobia, Bennett set out to challenge Christians to keep the commandment not to bear false witness against their Muslim neighbors.

"In Search of Intercultural Understanding" is a practical guidebook for living and working across cultures. In a hands-on and visual approach, this guide offers new insights and practical advice on adjusting and coping with the experience abroad. With a variety of stories, quotations, exercises and illustrations, the reader is presented with an easy-to-understand survey of cross-cultural issues that will enhance the global experience and provide guidance on becoming interculturally competent.

Epistemology has for a long time focused on the concept of knowledge and tried to answer questions such as whether knowledge is possible and how much of it there is. Often missing from this inquiry, however, is a discussion on the value of knowledge. In The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding Jonathan Kvanvig argues that epistemology properly conceived cannot ignore the question of the value of knowledge. He also questions one of the most fundamental assumptions in epistemology, namely that knowledge is always more valuable than the value of its subparts. Taking Platos' Meno as a starting point of his discussion, Kvanvig tackles the different arguments about the value of knowledge and comes to the conclusion that knowledge is less valuable than generally assumed. Clearly written and well argued, this 2003 book will appeal to students and professionals in epistemology.

This book presents a ‘Traveller’s Guide’ to Deaf Culture, starting from the premise that Deaf cultures have an important contribution to make to other academic disciplines, and human lives in general. Within and outside Deaf communities, there is a need for an account of the new concept of Deaf culture, which enables readers to assess its place alongside work on other minority cultures and multilingual discourses. The book aims to assess the concepts of culture, on their own terms and in their many guises and to apply these to Deaf communities. The author illustrates the pitfalls which have been created for those communities by the medical concept of ‘deafness’ and contrasts this with his new concept of “Deafhood”, a process by which every Deaf child, family and adult implicitly explains their existence in the world to themselves and each other.

This book is intended for anyone interested in learning more about how search works and how it is evaluated. We all use search—it's a familiar utility. Yet, few of us stop and think about how search works, what makes search results good, and who, if anyone, decides what good looks like. Search has a long and glorious history, yet it continues to evolve, and with it, the measurement and our understanding of the kinds of experiences search can deliver continues to evolve, as well. We will discuss the basics of how search engines work, how humans use search engines, and how measurement works. Equipped with these general topics, we will then dive into the established ways of measuring search user experience, and their pros and cons. We will talk about collecting labels from human judges, analyzing usage logs, surveying end users, and even touch upon automated evaluation methods. After introducing different ways of collecting metrics, we will cover experimentation as it applies to search evaluation. The book will cover evaluating different aspects of search—from search user interface (UI), to results presentation, to the quality of search algorithms. In covering these topics, we will touch upon many issues in evaluation that became sources of controversy—from user privacy, to ethical considerations, to transparency, to potential for bias. We will conclude by contrasting measuring with understanding, and pondering the future of search evaluation.

This book provides a broad introduction to search engines by integrating five different perspectives on Web search and search engines that are usually dealt with separately: the technical perspective, the user perspective, the internet-based research perspective, the economic perspective, and the societal perspective. After a general introduction to the topic, two foundational chapters present how search tools can cover the Web’s content and how search engines achieve this by crawling and processing the found documents. The next chapter on user behavior covers how people phrase their search queries and interact with search engines. This knowledge builds the foundation for describing how results are ranked and presented. The following three chapters then deal with the economic side of search engines, i.e., Google and the search engine market, search engine optimization (SEO), and the intermingling of organic and sponsored search results. Next, the chapter on search skills presents techniques for improving searches through advanced search interfaces and commands. Following that, the Deep Web and how its content can be accessed is explained. The two subsequent chapters cover ways to improve the quality of search results, while the next chapter describes how to access the Deep Web. Last but not least, the following chapter deals with the societal role of search engines before the final chapter concludes the book with an outlook on the future of Web search. With this book, students and professionals in disciplines like computer science, online marketing, or library and information science will learn how search engines work, what their main shortcomings are at present, and what prospects there are for their further development. The different views presented will help them to understand not only the basic technologies but also the implications the current implementations have concerning economic exploitation and societal impact.