2091 research outputs found
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Next Stop Recommender
Full text linkThe earlier precedent research had designed an algorithm which is capable of finding a user’s wandering behaviour pattern and further comparing the extracted pattern with other users’. With the similarity measurement, the precedent research can recommend a user next stop(s) that he or she might be interested according to his or her past wandering behaviours. This research further developed an Android mobile app which integrates different positioning technologies such as QR Code and GPS and the proposed algorithm to provide users a personalized service which can be used in a variety of application domains such like tourism, field trips, and mobile learning. Some participants of the presentation argued that the system should record users’ wandering behaviours in local time instead of the time on their mobile devices. The argument is thoughtful and useful. The next stop of this research will be categorizing users’ wandering patterns based on time and event as well as point of interests. This research is also looking for partners to use the mobile app and to give the research team the feedback in terms of its usability and user perceptions; looking for partners to use the next stop recommender algorithm or app in their existing and prospective research and/or system/app.User wandering behaviours may involve many location visits in different order. The research team has proposed an algorithm which can provide users recommendation for their next visit according to the behaviour pattern similarity amongst users and the connections amongst locations. In order to test the effectiveness of proposed algorithm the research team develops a mobile app – Next Stop Recommender – for Android platform. This paper focuses on the app itself and discusses the potential use of the app and the directions for the algorithm enhancement
Never too Old for Hope: A Group Education Initiative in Long-term Care
No full textThis presentation provides an overview of a project in which an innovative curriculum designed to foster hope and make hope more visible in long-term care was implemented. An outline of the curriculum and its implementation will be presented along with an overview of the resident responses
Synergia Project
Full text linkThe Synergia Project is a new initiative whose purpose is to promote online learning technology to support the diffusion of co-operative knowledge (both formal and tacit) and practice to meet the challenges of building a sustainable, equitable, and socially just future. A key aim of the project is to bridge the international co-operative movement with the emerging movement for a new commons and the global movement for sustainability.
Housed at the Athabasca University (AU) and supported by the participation of British Columbia-Alberta Social Economy Research Alliance (BALTA) in Canada, Co-operatives UK, Schumacher College, and the P2P Foundation, the project commenced in December 2013 with a dialogue process that engages key innovators and experts from the co-op, new commons and sustainability fields to participate in the design and content of an online learning platform using MOOC technology. The project is funded by the AU Research Fund.
The completion of the program design and the confirmation of the MOOC content comprise Stage 1 of the project. Stage 2 entails the completion of the MOOC “curriculum” and the launch of the Synergia MOOC with links to concrete development opportunities on the ground.
The project is being co-ordinated by Mike Gismondi at the Centre for Social Science at AU. John Restakis, Research Associate with Co-operatives UK and Research Investigator with the FLOK Project, is Lead Researcher for the Project and Pat Conaty, Research Associate with Co-operatives UK, is the Research Lead for the UK.Athabasca University; BC-Alberta Social Economy Research Alliance (BALTA); Co-operatives UK; Schumacher College; and the P2P Foundatio
The ‘success’ of formal diversion programs for youth: Understanding why alternatives to court are so popular among youth and law enforcement.
No full textThe diversion of young people from the traditional court process has been supported for many years. Much of the research on diversion policies and program has focused exclusively on how diversion programs operate, such as whether programs actually divert and the types of youth who are diverted. While many have speculated on how young people might view and experience diversion, a thorough examination of how the young people perceive diversion, is noticeably absent from the literature. Using data from interviews with 119 police officers; 106 young offenders who participated in one of two pre-charge diversion programs; and 54 youths who were sent to court (and later diverted from the court process), this paper explores how these youth viewed their experiences in diversio
Multitenancy - Security Risks and Countermeasures
Full text linkSecurity within the cloud is of paramount importance as the interest and indeed utilization of cloud computing increase. Multitenancy in particular introduces unique security risks to cloud computing as a result of more than one tenant utilizing the same physical computer hardware and sharing the same software and data. The purpose of this paper is to explore the specific risks in cloud computing due to Multitenancy and the measures that can be taken to mitigate those risks.Security within the cloud is of paramount importance as the interest and indeed utilization of cloud computing increase. Multitenancy in particular introduces unique security risks to cloud computing as a result of more than one tenant utilizing the same physical computer hardware and sharing the same software and data. The purpose of this paper is to explore the specific risks in cloud computing due to Multitenancy and the measures that can be taken to mitigate those risks
What a librarian can do for your open online course
No full textThis paper was written as the detailed research behind an academic poster presentation made to EDUCAUSE Annual Conference 2012, November 6-9 in Denver. The poster featured a librarian sticking out from a team of tall young players on a wooden gym court. The poster title and tag line was, “Want a faster, smarter team? Add a librarian.” The central photo played into the potential biases of the viewer, by creating the visual pun of the female librarian in a sleeveless dress, pearl necklace and iPad standing short amongst a tall uniformed male sports team. She sticks out from the team. At first glance she doesn’t seem to belong. The purpose of the piece is to encourage the audience to consider working with a team player who might not have been on their list of first round draft picks.
The paper discusses the varied roles and skills of librarians. It uses the six point framework of information literacy as defined by the Association of College & Research Libraries to discuss the potential challenges of delivering information literacy skills within the environment of massive open online courses.
The full paper is linked in AU Space at: http://auspace.athabascau.ca/handle/2149/3218
/MacIsaac_Poster.jpg The poster can be found at: http://www.educause.edu/sites/default/files/library/presentations/E12/PS049/MacIsaac_Poster.jpgInformation literacy tools used in face-to-face, blended, or online course environments are not scalable to massive open online courses, or MOOCs. We need a different approach based on the unique skills librarians bring to curriculum development of Open Education Resources, or OERs. Come explore, share, and inspire innovation on this topic
Who Should you write for? - Competing Literary Systems in Colonial Papua and New Guinea
No full textI gave a paper, entitled “Who Should You Write For? Competing Literary Systems in Papua and New Guinea,” which was well received. I have been invited to submit the paper for publication with Book History; I chaired a panel on “Contesting Cultures” on June 28 and was invited to participate in a workshop on “Transnationalism in Print Cultures” the day after the conference, June 30.Post-war literary decolonization in the British Empire often pitted ideologies and scarce resources against one another in unanticipated ways. In any given colony there could, and often did, exist a rich mix of individual and organizational sponsors of print culture, whether these might be connected with the colonial universities and schools, newspapers, publishers and printers, NGOs, or the colonial administration itself. The motives for encouraging colonized peoples to write for publication were necessarily based in differing notions about the role of the writer in new nations and the priorities of decolonization.
The colonial case study addressed by this presentation is that of the colonies of Papua and New Guinea in the 1960s and 70s, where three literary systems developed concurrently, sponsored respectively by the colonial administration, the newly-formed university and a consortium of missions. Through a detailed examination of the practices of their literary journals, the paper follows the struggle to shape one nation out of two colonies. The argument focuses on one particular year, 1968, when a fiery literary change agent, fresh from over a decade of decolonization in Nigeria, arrived to establish the creative writing courses at the University. The advent of Ulli Beier polarized efforts to develop writers for the new nation, and created parallel, competing systems. The paper follows how this situation developed and the reactions of the colony’s first generation of creative and professional writers to it
Cracking the Code: Towards a Semiotic Understanding of Twitter and Its Use by Media Fans
No full textI arrived at the conference just as it began on the morning of Wed April 10. The conference included three keynotes and a series three concurrent sessions over the course of two days. It was small conference with perhaps 50 presenters, so there were no panels, only individual presentations. This means the audience is in the room to listen solely to the presenter. I presented my paper at 9:30 on Friday April 12. My session was well attended, filling the classroom of about 30-40 seats. I also had a few people tweeting my presentation.
Overall I got a very good response. I did get questions from media fans about the data I collected. I chose to use the time to present my theoretical framework as I focused on the data in the previous conference presentation last Fall. I got some useful feedback from a couple of other researchers working with quantitative data. One in particular felt that I should collect a corpus of fan tweets from my participants to strengthen my structural analysis before submitting an expanded version of the paper to a peer-reviewed journal.Since Twitter joined the social media club in 2006, its use has increased steadily, particularly since 2009 (Deller 2011). Although it has received a lot of attention in the traditional media because of its use in relation to protests in Iran and then Egypt, the percentage of users in the US context remains well below social networking sites like Facebook—8% vs 65% according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project (Madden 2011; Smith 2012). That said, Twitter has gained traction among media fans.
Between September 2010 and April 2011, I collected survey (n= 671) and interview data (n = 71) for a large-scale study on multi-screen television viewing and participatory culture. Just over 36% of the survey respondents said that they used twitter for fan-related activity. Only 10% more said that they had “liked” a TV series on Facebook. Further statistical analysis showed that younger viewers were more likely to use Twitter than older ones.
As more quantitative and qualitative data, produced by industry and the academy alike, becomes available, the time is ripe to formulate more complex understandings of Twitter as a code. Drawing on Barthes (1968) and Fiske (1982, 1987), I take a socially-oriented semiological approach, conceptualizing Twitter as a shared system of meaning in order to critically examine its underlying structural relations. Specifically I map out the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations of Twitter at the micro-level of the tweet and then at the macro-level of the aggregation feed. As an empirical researcher, my interest in Twitter as a code is not an end in itself but rather a basis upon which to build a more rigorous analysis of its uses by media fans. To move from system to use, I draw on Barthes’ (1968) notion of second order of signification.
After outlining the structural relations of Twitter, I will focus on user aggregation and the specific pleasures fans get from following favourite television actors, reality stars, characters and showrunners. The study of fan practices helps media scholars better understand uses and meanings of new technologies in general and social media in particular
A Pastoral or Academic approach to wrath in Thomas of Ireland’s dictionary of quotations, the Manipulus florum (1306)?
No full textI attended the annual meeting of the Canadian Society of Medievalists during Congress 2013. The group of about 50 scholars listened as their colleagues presented papers based on their recent research. I presented a paper that summarized medieval Christian teachings on the morality of anger, focusing on the Manipulus florum of Thomas of Ireland, a 14th-century dictionary of famous quotations. Anger could be a sin, but it could also be virtuous, when correcting sin. I argued that the dictionary’s message about anger was best suited to clerical university students. This runs counter to the dominant view that the book was intended for and reflects the needs of popular preaching. May paper was part of two panels I organized about medieval emotions, like anger. Each culture has its own rules for how to feel, and these change in response to other historical circumstances. My colleagues, from across Canada and Australia, and I explored evidence for how medieval people thought about emotions, with the implication that emotions change over time. Looking back at a distant, though well-documented, historical culture helps us to realize what is changeable in our culture—that’s the lesson of history. Several of us are considering polishing our papers and submitting them for publication by an academic journal. I also participated in a round-table discussion of a recent translation of letters by the 13th-century Bishop of Lincoln, Robert Grosseteste. He was a famous scientists, theologian, and churchman, so this translation helps make his life known to a broader audience. I suggested ways that the collection would be useful for university teachers and researchers.This paper compares the discussion of anger in Thomas of Ireland’s Manipulus florum (1306) with that found in important reference works for preachers from about the same period. Richard and Mary Rouse’s major study of the text argued that Thomas’ “best-selling” and alphabetically arranged Latin dictionary of classical and Christian quotations was intended as an aid to preachers during the late medieval bourgeoning of popular preaching. The Rouses associated the MF with other genres developed during the thirteenth century to digest the Christian intellectual tradition. Through such tools, it is often assumed, the achievements of scholastics trickled down to pulpits and reached the masses of less educated clergy and lay people. Although the text remained a standard reference work for centuries, Chris Nighman has recently argued that the MF was not originally intended for popular preaching, but as an edifying anthology for university students preparing for ecclesiastical careers.
In supporting Nighman’s contention, this paper highlights the gap between scholastic teaching and more popular moral instruction relating to emotional restraint. The MF reflects the nuanced patristic approaches to emotions taken by thirteenth-century scholastics, a period in which the moral valance of emotions were subjected to academic scrutiny. Anger was frequently a paradigm for discussing human responsibility for passions. The MF’s lemma for ira contains the sorts of classical and patristic sententiae from which students built their arguments and which also provided them with guidance in both moderating vicious wrath and in cultivating virtuous zeal through reason—skills needed by aspiring ecclesiastics. Aids used by preachers, however, such as collections of distinctiones by Nicholas de Byard, or William Peraldus’ Summae de vitiis et virtutibus, were most concerned with showing the sinfulness and dangers of wrath, which was one of the seven deadly sins. Treatment of zealous anger was usually perfunctory or downplayed. This pastoral approach to wrath had a venerable tradition, since its emphasis on rhetorical force, rather than intellectual argument, was practical for popular moral instruction. Preachers drawing on such tools sought to counter sinful wrath among their listeners by eliciting feelings of disgust, shame, and fear of the dangers and punishments caused by anger. Although the MF has features useful for preachers, and overlaps with the message conveyed by other tools, it does not appear to be an artifact of popular preaching. The differences highlight the variations in religious teachings about anger in the thirteenth century
Exploring the Usability of Online Courses: The Student Experience
No full textOnline educators from Athabasca University’s Post LPN BN Program presented a poster entitled “ Exploring the Usability of Online Courses: The Student Experience” at the Global University Network for Innovation (GUNI) 6th International Barcelona Conference on Higher Education from May 13-15/13. Researchers are employing usability testing as a strategy to examine how students approach and navigate their online courses in the Post LPN BN program. This information will be used to identify specific features in online courses that enhance the student’s learning experience and provide evidence to inform online teaching and learning.Online education is becoming a more feasible option for students as an increasing number of courses are being offered by distance through the Internet. Today, students and teachers often interact entirely in virtual learning environments. Because teachers are not in the same physical space as students, they are unable to observe how students navigate through, and otherwise use, the online course. We assume that because students complete courses with passing grades that the courses are "user friendly" and providing an optimum learning experience. Potential problems with usability are not captured by teachers because students are engaged in their learning online. Course usability testing is one way that online course designers and instructors can assess courses. This research project explores the usability of selected online undergraduate nursing courses currently being offered by the Center for Nursing and Health Studies to determine their usability from the students' perspective. This information is important as it can inform future course development and assist in making online courses more effective. This evidence will support knowledge mobilization through thoughtful consideration to promote best practice for user engagement and more meaningful student tutor connections