Open Journal Systems at the Victoria University of Wellington Library
Not a member yet
6045 research outputs found
Sort by
“Certainly Getting About the World”: New Zealanders’ Experience of the Middle East as a Place During the Second World War
Get PDFNew Zealand’s longest and most important campaign of the Second World War was in the Middle East. When New Zealand’s Middle Eastern war is discussed, the focus is usually on combat and the lives of New Zealanders on the battlefield. The limited discussion of life behind the lines is dominated by a picture of racism, drunkenness and debauchery with its focal point in Cairo. This article uses primary sources, including diaries, letters and soldier publications, and focusses on how New Zealanders saw the Middle East as a place, through the lenses of the desert, the city, the Holy Land and the ancient world. An examination of these topics reveals a complex and rich picture of respect and loathing, delight and disgust, wonder and disillusionment. Such a picture shows that the one-dimensional understanding of racism and poor behaviour is an entirely inadequate representation of New Zealanders’ Middle Eastern war
Suʻifefiloi: A Samoan Methodology for Transdisciplinary Theorising in Cosmopolitan Worlds
Get PDFAs universities make moves toward transdisciplinary research, suʻifefiloi, the Samoan practice of sewing different parts together, offers a culturally grounded research methodology for transdisciplinary theorising by Pacific scholars. Pacific transdisciplinary actors working on theory within the cosmopolitan context requires, as Gordon writes, a willingness to go beyond discipline areas to produce knowledge. Theory work, as this paper argues, requires transdisciplinarity and a willingness to go beyond one’s discipline area to extend knowledge. Working with Tuhiwai Smith’s assertion on the importance of theory, this paper discusses the usefulness of suʻifefiloi in recent turns to transdisciplinarity
After National Standards: The Curriculum, Progress, and Achievement policy developments
Get PDFThe Labour-led government elected in 2017 quickly decided to get rid of National Standards and set up a Curriculum, Progress, and Achievement Ministerial Advisory Group in 2018. That group reported in 2019 and a related Ministry of Education work programme has begun. This provocation from May 2020 provides some background to the MAG, considers its organisation and membership, and briefly mentions some features of the report and the early response of government. The use of data and the struggle for researchers to keep up with multiple reviews are also discussed
Software literacy in shaping what we know in a software-saturated society
Get PDFToday’s modern societies are increasingly dependent on digital technologies and the software underpinning these technologies in almost every sphere of professional and personal life. These technologies and software are poorly understood as tools that shape our engagement with knowledge, culture and society in the 21st century. None of these tools are ‘neutral.’ They embody social and cultural assumptions about their use and all have particular values embedded in their interfaces and affordances. This paper draws from a funded research project investigating the notion of software literacy (Khoo, Hight, Torrens, & Cowie, 2017). In the project software literacy is defined as the expertise involved in understanding, applying, problem solving and critiquing software when it is used to achieve particular goals. The project team hypothesised there exists three progressive tiers of development towards software literacy in professional contexts. We conducted case studies of engineering and media studies students’ learning of an ubiquitous software such as PowerPoint as well as proprietary discipline-specific software to examine how software literacy is understood, developed and applied in a tertiary teaching-learning context. In this contribution we outline the project findings then use the notion of software literacy as the lens to unpack and illustrate through three everyday examples how software literacy would seem to be an essential part of learning and living in the 21st century
(Re)Shaping spaces for learning: Experiences from Aotearoa New Zealand
Get PDFSchools and universities in Aotearoa New Zealand have been transitioning into new spatial configurations. These spaces are being carefully (re)designed to accommodate technology-rich activity, and to enable collaborative teaching and learning in ways that actively engage students in scaffolded inquiry. As teachers and students shift from traditional classroom layouts into flexible learning arrangements, educators are having to deeply rethink their own practices. In addition, the recent Covid-19 outbreak raised new questions in education about the role of technology in learning. This article argues that it is critical that Aotearoa educators understand (i) how to (re)design and (re)configure learning spaces in ways that support what they value in learning; and (ii) how they can tap on the digital to extend students experiences, both across and beyond schools and universities’ physical settings. The article introduces a way of framing the design and analysis of complex learning situations and reports on qualitative findings from a recent survey, which explored educators’ experiences of learning environments across Aotearoa New Zealand
Affordances of visual representations and sense-making of science
Get PDFVisual thinking is essential in the development of science. Visual representations are also indispensable when scientists disseminate their findings. This paper discusses the ways that research studies on visual representations can inform science learning and teaching. I start by discussing the ways that drawings, charts and graphics represent their referents, and hence highlighting the affordances of these visual representations. Then I discuss how these affordances make visual representations a valuable tool to support science teaching in formal and informal contexts and, in particular, how learning with media graphics can support the learning of Nature of Science for scientific literacy
Alternative education in Aotearoa New Zealand: The politics and poetics of authorisation
Get PDFSecondary students who become disenfranchised from mainstream schools are directed to attend Alternative Education (AE) centres. AE was a grassroots’ initiative in the 1990s led by youth organisations, iwi, community social service agencies and churches to meet the education and pastoral needs of rangatahi. Due to the tenuous links held between AE and the mainstream system and with no government policy work occurring within the sector for the decade prior to 2009, the sector struggled for adequate resourcing and professional recognition. Through a poetic inquiry approach this paper explores three key AE government policy directions over a ten-year period, from 2009 to 2019. Unbuckling prose found within official documents, concrete (visual) poems were created to perform a critical reading of policy. The policy poems form a narrative arc that show the discrediting of AE providers and demonising of students in AE has recently given way to more hopeful directions in policy.
 
Student experiences of online learning due to Covid-19: The social and educational role of the on-campus learning experience
Get PDFBackground: Five weeks into the start of a new academic year, the University of Canterbury (UC) in Christchurch, New Zealand experienced a rapid transition from traditional on-campus education to online distance learning. On-campus lectures were replaced by a combination of interactive live-streamed Zoom sessions, pre-recorded classes, compiled videos and laboratory sessions, and other activities. It was unknown how students’ learning was impacted by this sudden change to an online environment. Purpose: Our research sought to explore the main challenges perceived by students in the transition to an online learning environment in order to gain an understanding of how teaching staff can best address student needs in future emergency situations. Methods: A two part survey was electronically distributed to students enrolled in a 4-year engineering programme and a 3-year sport coaching programme at the University of Canterbury. Results: Student responses indicated a clear desire for structured, in-person delivery of tertiary education. The ability to gain rapid feedback from lecturers was missed, as was social interaction and informal learning among peers. The use of timetabled tutorials and small-stakes assessment items helped facilitate regular contact with the course material and interaction among students and between students and teaching staff. Assessment practices which constrained time to respond to questions, although useful in limiting opportunities for cheating, was unpopular with students and was associated with increased anxiety. Students preferred untimed assessments, such as written assignments and take-home tests. In addition, it was found to be important to provide practise opportunities for modified-for-online assessments prior to formal testing to help reduce stress in an already stressful environment
Completeness of Pledger’s modal logics of one-sorted projective and elliptic planes
Get PDFKen Pledger devised a one-sorted approach to the incidence relation of plane geometries, using structures that also support models of propositional modal logic. He introduced a modal system 12g that is valid in one-sorted projective planes, proved that it has finitely many non-equivalent modalities, and identified all possible modality patterns of its extensions. One of these extensions 8f is valid in elliptic planes. These results were presented in his 1980 doctoral dissertation, which is reprinted in this issue of the Australasian Journal of Logic.
Here we show that 12g and 8f are strongly complete for validity in their intended one-sorted geometrical interpretations, and have the finite model property. The proofs apply standard technology of modal logic (canonical models, filtrations) together with a step-by-step procedure introduced by Yde Venema for constructing two-sorted projective planes
Episodes in Model-Theoretic Xenology: Rationals as Positive Integers in R#
Get PDFMeyer and Mortensen’s Alien Intruder Theorem includes the extraor- dinary observation that the rationals can be extended to a model of the relevant arithmetic R♯, thereby serving as integers themselves. Al- though the mysteriousness of this observation is acknowledged, little is done to explain why such rationals-as-integers exist or how they operate. In this paper, we show that Meyer and Mortensen’s models can be identified with a class of ultraproducts of finite models of R♯, providing insights into some of the more mysterious phenomena of the rational models
Access Repository Dashboard
Do you manage Open Journal Systems at the Victoria University of Wellington Library? Access insider analytics, issue reports and manage access to outputs from your repository in the CORE Repository Dashboard!