Information Tasks

Contains over fifty activities designed to help students build their reading, writing, and research skills, grouped in the categories of evaluating, sorting, analyzing and synthesizing, and working with information.

On-line newspapers have become an important source of information for many people. Readers of on-line newspapers may regularly check the news in general, they may follow the news concerning a certain topic, e.g. when people wanted to get all information that was available on September 11, or they may just check for certain facts such as stock prices or the weather forecast. This thesis deals with the question of whether it is possible to recognize the kind of task a Web user is performing by just looking at the user's behavior. Two studies were conducted to examine whether behavioral aspects, such as mouse and scroll movement, mouse clicks or page view duration, give hint on the surfing mode which may be just browsing, information gathering or fact finding. This thesis is meant to provide a basis for the personalization of Websites such as on-line newspapers where personalization is not only based on the analysis of content information or general topic preferences, but, additionally, on the current context represented by the kind of task a user is performing at the very moment.

This book integrates recent research and practice in language teaching into a framework for analysing learning tasks.

This innovative book examines the relationship between foreign (L2) language acquisition and task-based learning from an output perspective, with a concentration on the learner's discourse and retrospection. Author Cynthia Lee explores this issue in an experimental context; with particular reference to Hong Kong Chinese tertiary learners of English. Lee's study contributes to research on L2 acquisition and casts light on task-based learning and pedagogy in Hong Kong classrooms and beyond. English language teaching practitioners, researchers, and applied linguists will find special value in this book.

Human resource practitioners are repeatedly faced with the challenge of effectively using language to clearly describe the work performed on a job. Functional Job Analysis--an internationally recognized and respected job analysis method --has been meeting this challenge for more than forty years. In this book, the authors show how human resource practitioners can use structured task statements and comprehensive rating scales to gain the perspective needed to map the domain of any job. In response to the demands of human resource practitioners, the book focuses on the seven scales used in Functional Job Analysis. More than 450 structured tasks were used to illustrate the breadth and scope of all the levels of these scales. These tasks can be used effectively as benchmarks to chart the work requirements of virtually any job. Personnel practitioners will find insights into the challenges of job analysis, as well as the tools needed to make job analysis more comprehensive, useful, and effective for human resources. Representing the most comprehensive information to date on the use of Functional Job Analysis scales for rating job tasks, this book: *addresses the problems of using language to clearly describe how work is performed on the job; *describes the relation between the need to carefully control the language of job analysis and the structure inherent in the Functional Job Analysis Worker Function scales--a conceptual link showing the reader that the key to understanding work is in the vocabulary used to describe work; *contains the most comprehensive treatment of the way to write clear and comprehensive task statements available in the job analysis literature; and *contains a sample task bank for the job of Functional Job Analysts--aiding the reader in understanding how a complete Functional Job Analysis should look.

Information Tasks summarizes user research, then presents design sketches of systems that illustrate how design is linked to research. This comprehensive user-centered approach provides an agenda for information research, design and education that challenges many accepted beliefs and suggests new directions for information work.