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Repair-led learning for design education
No full textDrawing from the experience of Restart Parties (RP) – public community events where technically skilled volunteers help participants to repair their own electric and electronic devices – we explore and propose how to integrate these reparative projects into educational processes of (technological) design in the context of the climate crisis. If repairers hold an advantageous epistemic position to better understand technology by confronting material damages of (electronic) industry and design, then, learning from repair-led design in academic curriculums could bring more caring, just and responsible creative engagements with the world. The chapter employs an unusual strategy: presenting information via a speculative curriculum. By closing the text with a one-semester “Teaching Plan,” we pursue two main objectives: to analyse the RP potential to become a repair-led learning experience to inform design education; and to propose a pilot pedagogical programme for engaging collectively with this type of repair practice. Through the connection between repair and design knowledge for education, we aim to make of design a fairer and restorative creative practice with a capacity to recognise some of its damaging effects and take co-responsibility for them. In other words, this text offers a repair lens to interrogate design learning, its educational practices and spaces.</p
The Australian WEB3 music ‘community’ and the ‘indie’ mainstream
No full textThis paper examines the hesitancy of Australian musicians towards embracing the music non-fungible token (NFT) as a commodity. Drawing on the concepts of cultural autonomy and the digital disruptive sublime, the study argues that the overtly economic nature of NFTs challenges the ideology of creative independence in the hegemonic ‘indie’ music scene. Through interviews with nine Australian musicians who participated in our project, the research finds a cautious curiosity towards the technology, with technical barriers and a perceived cultural disconnect between the NFT ‘community’ and traditional music scenes contributing to hesitation. The paper concludes that attempts to engineer disruption in the music industry through web3/blockchain technology have thus far failed to attract sustained interest from musicians, as the cultural norms and practices associated with NFTs do not align with the values of the existing indie music ecosystem. The findings highlight the difficulties in planning and engineering cultural change within the music industry
What affects teachers’ turnover intention? Examining the impact of teacher professional status
No full textThis study proposes a five-dimensional framework of teacher professional status by integrating Western theories with Chinese philosophical traditions. Drawing on nationally representative survey data from 66 Chinese cities, we theorise and empirically examine how each dimension influences teachers’ turnover intentions. We find that a higher teacher professional status, driven by high entry requirements, increased teacher autonomy, improved workplace conditions, and high professional ethics, significantly reduces teachers’ intention to leave. High professional ethics has the strongest impact on reducing teachers’ intention to leave the profession, whilst professional development has no significant impact on teacher turnover intention. Our findings suggest that enhancing teachers’ professional status, particularly through increasing the ethical standards of the profession, is an effective strategy to address teacher turnover. The findings offer new insights into culturally grounded determinants of teacher retention in non-Western contexts.</p
Game studio simulator:Integrating industry practice and formative individual assessment in collaborative game development capstone projects
No full textCapstone courses, where students work on a large group project at the end of their degree, are common in computing. Many accreditation and industry bodies explicitly require or recommend them. Over the past two decades, capstone courses specifically focused on game development have become increasingly popular. Game development offers students the opportunity to express themselves creatively and learn to work with people from a variety of disciplines such as programming, design, music, and art. In this paper we present the results of 10 years of iteration on a game development capstone course. This course is structured as a year-long collaboration between software engineering and game design students, but maintains separation between the disciplines in terms of supervision and assessment. Based on our experiments and observations, we provide recommendations for teaching practices, team structure, project timeline, and assessment. In these, we focus on emulating and incorporating industry practices, maximising opportunities for formative feedback, and maintaining authentic individual assessment. We have found that our most recent implementation has resulted in improved student satisfaction and learning outcomes compared to previous iterations
Bringing together the HOW and WHY of GenAI in OSCE preparation through Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology
No full textIntroduction: Generative Artificial intelligence (GenAI) use in Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) preparation has not yet been deeply explored. This study investigated how and why pharmacy students use or choose not to use GenAI in OSCE preparation. Methods: A retrospective cohort study. The study retrospectively collected OSCE scores and the seven criteria in the OSCE communication rubric for the primary care (community) station and responses regarding student AI use from a mandatory written self-reflection; students were not privy to the research project when writing their responses. Pharmacy students from second to fourth-year (over 2023-2024) undergraduate pharmacy degrees at Monash University across Australia and Malaysia campuses were included. A summative content analysis converted qualitative data from the OSCE reflections to quantitative data. Qualitative data were deductively coded to The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model to understand reasons for use. Wilcoxon rank sum and t-tests compared quantitative data from reflections to OSCE scores, whilst Fisher exact tests compared categorical themes. Results: Of 997 student reflections, 163 used GenAI for OSCE preparation. Non-AI and AI users on Australian and Malaysian campuses performed similarly overall. However, non-AI users excelled in four of seven rubric criteria. Six themes were identified, with themes 1-3 focusing on AI use for creating OSCE simulations and receiving instant feedback, while themes 4-6 discussed reasons for not using AI. Mapping students who used AI to the UTAUT model showed a large alignment with the belief that students would consequently improve their OSCE grades. Conclusion: The study showed that using open AI for OSCE preparation led to overall similar academic success in OSCEs, suggesting educators still have a role in guiding students to optimise AI use. Further research is needed surrounding how students use AI for OSCEs
COVID-19 lies and truths:Employing the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to gain insights into the persuasive techniques evident in disinformation (fake news)
No full textThe spread of disinformation and the harm this causes continues to be a cybersecurity concern. Technical methods, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), employed to detect disinformation automatically are often inadequate because they fail to consider psychological theory that may help to inform the models. This research aimed to overcome this shortcoming by examining persuasive language evident in disinformation compared with genuine news. It applied the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), a Dual Process Theory, to examine distinguishable cues in COVID-19 news stories: 70 fake and 70 genuine news stories. As predicted, fake news stories were more likely to contain the following cues: emotional appeals, repetition, celebrity figures, visual cues and loudness cues. In contrast, as predicted, genuine news stories were more likely to contain the following cues: rational appeals and statistics. Additionally, we conducted a Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) analysis, which revealed that positive emotions and tones were more prevalent in genuine news stories. However, fake news stories did not contain more negative emotions and tones compared with genuine stories. Loudness cues (e.g., exclamation marks, bold text, overuse of capital letters) stood out as one of the most significant differences in the use of persuasiveness across news types. This study demonstrates the importance of investigating how fake and genuine news compare by applying a psychological lens to interrogate the data and the utility of drawing from the ELM to inform the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) for automatic detection of fake news.</p
Storytelling in Intelligence:Theoretical Foundations
No full textIntelligence analysts frequently generate and assess “stories” to describe and explain what is going on in some situation. This activity has had little theoretical attention. The term narrative abduction is used for the processes by which reasoners estimate the plausibility of explanatory stories. This article provides a theoretical framework with analyses of key concepts, including narratives, narrative truth, narrative plausibility, and explanation. It then presents a normative proto-theory based on the idea that the ideal rational analyst would assess plausibility by reference to four epistemic criteria: explanatory power, narrative development, substantiation, and durability. It also presents a descriptive proto-theory, grounded in prior work in the cognitive science of intelligence analysis, which holds that analysts acquire an intuitive, holistic sense of the plausibility of candidate narratives over the course of attempting to identify and develop the strongest candidate; these intuitive assessments can be crystallized into explicit judgments and rationalized using selected considerations as arguments. These points are illustrated with a new kind of diagram for displaying the structure of narrative abduction challenges. Finally, it sketches the kinds of further research that would be needed to develop proper theories building on the theoretical framework and proto-theories.</p
"It's something you can't wash off; you carry it with you":a qualitative study into teachers' experiences of vicarious trauma symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic in Victoria, Australia
No full textBackground: The COVID-19 pandemic caused unprecedented disruption to education systems worldwide, and exacerbated existing challenges in the teaching profession. The dual demands of academic instruction and pastoral care placed a considerable amount of emotional burden on teachers, compounded by increased exposure to the traumatic experiences of students. This heightened risk of vicarious trauma among teachers has been underexplored, particularly in the context of Victoria, Australia, where one of the world's longest government-mandated lockdowns was implemented.Methods: This study builds on previous research by examining how teachers' roles and responsibilities informally evolved in response to external pressures during the pandemic. Drawing on interview and focus group data from 25 educators in public and private schools across Victoria in 2022, the findings were coded via NVIVO software version 12 and thematically analyzed.Results: Findings suggest that roles of educators evolved during the pandemic as their responsibilities expanded beyond academic instruction to include more pastoral care for students. This, in turn, disclosed different pathways through which educators were exposed to traumatic content from their students, families and other educators. As a result, many participants felt vicarious trauma symptoms, which is explored as various negative emotions.Conclusion: This study highlights the risk of vicarious trauma becoming an issue within the teaching profession. It underscores the need for further research to understand how vicarious trauma is affecting the teaching profession
Treating comorbidities in heart failure:tackling the hidden burden
No full textMost patients with heart failure also have comorbidities that require clinical attention. Comprehensive care should optimise guideline-directed medical therapy while addressing these comorbidities. Recent advances in management include sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitors, glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, finerenone, intravenous iron and vaccinations. GPs are well placed to deliver holistic, patient-centred care to patients with heart failure
Picking strategies in games of cooperation
No full textEvolutionary game theory (EGT) has been pivotal in the study of cooperation, offering formal models that account for how cooperation may arise in groups of selfish, but simple agents. This is done by inspecting the complex dynamics arising from simple interactions between a few strategies in a large population. As such, the strategies at stake are typically hand-picked by the modeler, resulting in a system with many more individuals in the population than strategies available to them. In the presence of noise and with multiple equilibria, the choice of strategies can considerably alter the emergent dynamics. As a result, model outcomes may not be robust to how the strategy set is chosen, sometimes misrepresenting the conditions required for cooperation to emerge. We propose three principles that can lead to a more systematic choice of the strategies in EGT models of cooperation. These are the inclusion of all computationally equivalent strategies; explicit microeconomic models of interactions, and a connection between stylized facts and model assumptions. Further, we argue that new methods arising in AI may offer a promising path toward richer models. These richer models can push the field of cooperation forward together with the principles described above. At the same time, AI may benefit from connecting to the more abstract models of EGT. We provide and discuss examples to substantiate these claims.</p