As a pedagogical tool, film can help adult learners understand diverse narratives and disrupt ideology domination, specifically regarding Black women. Despite the increase in visibility in Hollywood, Black women remain negatively depicted in films. The negative depictions often minimize or simply ignore the development or self-actualization of…

The displacement of a majority Latinx community in Echo Park, Los Angeles, California, is happening now. Young Latinx student filmmakers are resisting and reframing gentrification by turning a lens onto the issue, posting their films on YouTube, and giving voice to Latinx residents facing displacement. Four films were studied in depth. By…

Modern social intelligence includes the ability to watch videos and answer questions about social and theory-of-mind-related content, e.g., for a scene in "Harry Potter," "Is the father really upset about the boys flying the car?" Social visual question answering (social VQA) is emerging as a valuable methodology for studying…

In Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), methods to choose the next exercise for a student are inspired from generic recommender systems, used, for instance, in online shopping or multimedia recommendation. As such, collaborative filtering, especially matrix factorization, is often included as a part of recommendation algorithms in ITS. One notable…

Given the Digital Technologies rationale of the Australian Curriculum, it is critical that both teachers and students use design thinking to be creative and innovative producers of digital solutions and knowledge. Teachers and students are increasingly being required to self-produce films and digital content across subject areas. Their productions…

Pragmatic competence is an indispensable dimension of overall language ability, and proper interpretation of implied meanings is a major constituent of pragmatic competence. In this regard, this study aimed to investigate the efficiency of a film-based instruction program devised to facilitate the interpretation of implied meanings in English. It…

The expansion of the "Netflix" TV-network around the globe has made foreign language films and TV-series accessible for formal and informal language learning experiences. As students in educational settings are starting to engage in informal second language (L2) "Netflix" viewing, it is time that new pedagogical approaches…

We investigate generalizability of face-based detectors of mind wandering across task contexts. We leveraged data from two lab studies: one where 152 college students read a scientific text and another where 109 college students watched a narrative film. We automatically extracted facial expressions and body motion features, which were used to…

Mind wandering (MW) reflects a shift in attention from task-related to task-unrelated thoughts. It is negatively related to performance across a range of tasks, suggesting the importance of detecting and responding to MW in real-time. Currently, there is a paucity of research on MW detection in contexts other than reading. We addressed this gap by…

As students are becoming avid online media consumers and creators, participatory culture has shifted the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to one of community involvement (Chan & Herrero, 2010, p. 10). Taking into consideration the challenges and opportunities derived from the integration in formal settings (secondary and…

Presentation of raw text to language learners is not enough to ensure learning. Thus, we present the Smart and Immersive Language Learning Environment (SMILLE), a system that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) for enhancing grammatical information in texts chosen by a given user. The enhancements, carried out by means of text highlighting, are…

This article reports on an autoethnography by two authors who analysed the interrelationship of their experiences as foreign language learners, educators, and researchers. Both participant-researchers had taken advantage of the accessibility of online learning resources to learn new languages, had incorporated digital tools into their teaching…

Disney's animated films have long been a significant source of entertainment for children across the world, and the global reach of Disney has only increased since the company's extremely lucrative acquisition of Pixar, a merger that has produced some of the highest-grossing films of all time. However, while animated Disney films are renowned for…

In order to address concerns with the underrepresentation of spatial thinking in K-12 curricula, (National Research Council, 2006), Valentine and Kopcha (in press) designed and implemented a learning environment integrating cases as alternative perspective (Jonassen, 2011) in the context of eighth-grade mathematics. The design aimed to provide…

Based on virtual conversations drawn from two separate intensive ethnographic studies in Bangladesh and Mongolia, we show that popular cultural texts play a significant role in young adults' heteroglossic language practices. On the one hand, they borrow voices from cultural texts and cross the boundaries of language, i.e., codes, modes, and…