COOPERATION FOR TEACHERS AND EDUCATION IN THE PACIFIC
The Institute of Education (IOE) at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji has recently completed a desk study on “Teachers and Education in the Pacific” (TEP). The first of a multi-phase study, which is co-funded by ADB and AusAID, involves a desk study which concluded in a regional workshop that was hosted by IOE in December 2007. A total of 13 country reports were disseminated and discussed during the workshop. This article reviews the main findings of the desk study and outlines the issues discussed in the TEP workshop that are either common around the region or unique to each country, with particular focus here on possible areas for international cooperation.
Teacher Education in the Pacific Islands: A Preliminary Literature Review
Teacher education in the Pacific is premised on the multiple realities and constraints of education in the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) of the Pacific region. This review is limited to Pacific scholarly writing from within the Pacific islands (PICs) in order to gauge the extent of Teacher Education (TE) Discourse taking place in the islands. Similar to other SIDS, PICs are heavily dependent on educational aid and are beleaguered with issues of smallness, islandness, remoteness and scatteredness. Differentially however, a regional approach to educational development and planning guides educational efforts in Forum member countries since 2001. This paper is prepared as a discussion paper to be used as an entry point into conversation about teacher education research and curriculum planning at the University of the South Pacific in Suva.
Automatic classification of TV news articles based on telop character recognition
The purpose of this study is to develop a multimedia database system for TV news video data. TV news video data consist of speech, characters and images. In this study, telop characters are recognized and given to the news articles as indices for classification. At first, telop frames which include telop characters are detected and then the telop characters are extracted and recognized. Through morphological analysis of the recognized telop characters, keywords are extracted which consist of more than two characters. Their keywords are used as indices to classify the TV news articles. We carried out experiments for 30 days of NHK 5 minutes news and obtained 95.4% telop character extraction rate, 81.4% character recognition rate and 83.8% article classification rate. We improved the article classification rate by 43.4% through character recognition improvement from 44.1% to 81.4%.