NUI Maynooth Eprint Archive
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The real cost of teaching in a refugee camp: Asking the difficult questions
No full textThis article asks difficult questions about higher-education courses provided by Western institutions to people living in refugee camps. It critically examines a blended-learning approach that incorporates a massive online open course (MOOC) into a scaffolded higher-education program—the University of Geneva’s Connected Blended Learning model—in the Kakuma refugee camp. It assesses the effectiveness of this approach in an accredited University of Geneva human-rights law course, which ran in the Kakuma camp from 2017 to 2020. On the basis of the long experience of the course leaders and research carried out with students who participated in the course, the article explores ways of improving this model by answering difficult questions about the real cost of teaching in a refugee camp. This paper was co-written by a professor, a researcher, and students who were involved in the course, two of whom are refugees living in Kakuma refugee camp
Economy
No full textThis essay examines the formal and informal economies of video games and attends to the economies within video games. The first part introduces key approaches in the early 2000s when games were primarily sold as a product through retail shops. We then move to the post-2012 phase as games became a service that was downloaded or streamed across multiple platforms. This era ushered in a period of rapid innovation in production logics, business models, and company types. It brought with it a range of creative opportunities and challenges. New platform and performance logics emerged, while free-to-play became the dominant revenue model. Two key processes emerge as important – datafication and platformization. During this period, the industry struggled to retain workers as many companies failed to address project management and diversity issues. Independent, or indie, companies multiplied by choice and necessity. The essay concludes with some reflections on e-sports, gamblification and increasing regulatory pressure
Learning about Ireland through a Syrian Woman's Life Story An autoethnographic research of education resources for Syrian refugees in Ireland
No full textIn 2011 the humanitarian crisis in Syria caused the displacement of millions of Syrian people
who relocated to Europe seeking international protection and became refugees, The Irish
government agreed to accept up to 4000 refugees in 2016. These refugees were supposed to
learn how to belong to their new home culture and integrate with the Irish community that
speaks a different language by engaging in educational courses and events planned by adult
tutors and educators.
My name is Kinda, and I am a Syrian woman who came to Ireland through a reunification
programme. Since my arrival, I have been learning English, adapting to a new culture,
attending meetings, and trying to understand the system. However, I feel like I have lost a
part of my identity as I have been labelled as a refugee and told what I need to learn to
integrate into my new home. It's been a struggle to reconcile who I was with who the new
world expects me to be. There was a distance between me and the educators in Ireland, the
space created a gap between me and the world I used to know, and I discovered that my
beliefs, ideas and skills are not helping me anymore. My disconnection with the educators I
met was not because of the language barrier or the new cultural barrier, it was because Irish
educators did not see me as an experienced individual, they saw me as an object in the
package they had just received. All they have to do is, read the label, open it gently, follow
the criteria, tick the boxes, and mission completed. At least, this is how I experienced this
process.
In this study, I am searching and analysing my personal experience as an adult learner
refugee and as a facilitator working with Syrian adult refugee learners in Ireland. I will
explore Mezirow's perspective on transformative learning theory and Illeris's contribution to
the concept of identity in relation to this theory. I am critically and subjectively analysing
how I was labelled as a refugee, overwhelmed with the knowledge I needed to learn while
struggling to understand the stigma and shame of my new identity as a refugee. The changes
happening in society and the effort to integrate into the Irish culture taught by the educators
left me paralysed with cultural shock, and it was different from the Irish culture that I was
struggling to learn about. I started my own learning process by observing my new world,
writing my feelings, reading what I wrote, changing, losing and finding myself again, but still
feeling fragile. The real change happened when I met adult educators in higher education
who started a discourse with me based on respect for my culture and previous life experience.
The emancipation from labels and assumptions enabled me to join higher education and be a
Master’s student at Maynooth University and finally find myself again.
My voice vanished when I first arrived in Ireland. Today in this thesis, I gained it back, and I
want to add to the European outsider academic scholars an insider voice from the Syrian
refugee community through evocative storytelling research about my learning journey to
integrate into Ireland
Multiple View Texture Mapping: A Rendering Approach Designed for Driving Simulation
No full textSimulation provides a safe and controlled environment ideal for human
testing [49, 142, 120]. Simulation of real environments has reached
new heights in terms of photo-realism. Often, a team of professional
graphical artists would have to be hired to compete with modern commercial
simulators. Meanwhile, machine vision methods are currently
being developed that attempt to automatically provide geometrically
consistent and photo-realistic 3D models of real scenes [189, 139, 115,
19, 140, 111, 132]. Often the only requirement is a set of images of
that scene. A road engineer wishing to simulate the environment of a
real road for driving experiments could potentially use these tools.
This thesis develops a driving simulator that uses machine vision
methods to reconstruct a real road automatically. A computer graphics
method called projective texture mapping is applied to enhance
the photo-realism of the 3D models[144, 43]. This essentially creates
a virtual projector in the 3D environment to automatically assign image
coordinates to a 3D model. These principles are demonstrated
using custom shaders developed for an OpenGL rendering pipeline.
Projective texture mapping presents a list of challenges to overcome,
these include reverse projection and projection onto surfaces not immediately
in front of the projector [53]. A significant challenge was
the removal of dynamic foreground objects. 3D reconstruction systems
create 3D models based on static objects captured in images.
Dynamic objects are rarely reconstructed. Projective texture mapping
of images, including these dynamic objects, can result in visual
artefacts. A workflow is developed to resolve this, resulting in videos
and 3D reconstructions of streets with no moving vehicles on the scene.
The final simulator using 3D reconstruction and projective texture
mapping is then developed. The rendering camera had a motion
model introduced to enable human interaction. The final system is
presented, experimentally tested, and future potential works are discussed
Augustine's Two Cities Doctrine: It's Apologetical Role in the City of God and Relevance to Contemporary Christian Apologetics.
No full textChristian apologetics has had to respond to pressing issues confronting the church at various eras. In recent decades the church has experienced a decline in the number of those who still believe in God or practice the Christian faith. There does not seem to be a “need” for God. The “purpose,” of theistic belief, if we may speak thusly, has faded away in a secularized society that has become seemingly self-sufficient. One reason for this might be that the world has witnessed an unprecedented acceleration in the growth of technology and development in the sciences. Amidst the present situation today, where secularism is visibly present, it behoves the church to find a way of credibly presenting the truths of Christianity. There is need for a robust Christian apologetics
A tale of two selection biases: The independent effects of relative age and biological maturity on player selection in the Football Association of Ireland's national talent pathway
No full textThis study investigated the associations between biological maturation status (classified using the Khamis–Roche method
for the percentage of predicted adult height at the time of observation) and relative age (expressed as a decimal value
relative to the difference between birth date and competition cut-off date) and the extent to which their relative selection
biases existed across competitive age groups in an analysis of players within the Football Association of Ireland’s (FAI)
national talent pathway. The players assessed were either from the U13 FAI National Academy (n=125), the Ireland
U15 national team (n=18), or the Ireland U16 national team (n=16). A moderate to very large selection bias in favour
of early maturing players was observed across all age groups, increasing in magnitude with successive age groups (p <
0.05). A total of 46–72% of players selected into the national talent pathway were early maturing; 0% of U15 and U16
players were late maturing. A relative age effect existed across all competitive cohorts (p < 0.05), although not increasing
with chronological age and smaller in magnitude than maturation biases. A small positive correlation between relative age
and absolute maturity status at U13 was observed, and an inverse correlation between relative age and relative maturity
status at U15 (p < 0.01) was observed. There were no other significant correlations between relative or absolute maturity
status and relative age. We encourage Football Associations to critically reflect upon their criteria for national talent
squad selection; the current system diminishes the chances of selection for late maturing players
SatelliteSkill5—An Augmented Reality Educational Experience Teaching Remote Sensing through the UN Sustainable Development Goals
No full textAdvances in visualisation techniques provide new ways for us to explore how we introduce complex topics like remote sensing to non-specialist audiences. Taking inspiration from the popularity of augmented reality (AR) apps, a free, mobile digital AR app titled SatelliteSkill5, has been developed for both Androids and iPhones in Unity AR. SatelliteSkill5 helps users conceptualise remote sensing (RS) theory and technology by showcasing the potential of datasets such as multispectral images, SAR backscatter, drone orthophotography, and bathymetric LIDAR for tackling real-world challenges, with examples tackling many of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the focus. Leveraging tried and tested pedagogic practices such as active learning, game-based learning, and targeting cross-curricular topics, SatelliteSkill5 introduces users to many of the fundamental geospatial data themes identified by the UN as essential for meeting the SDGs, imparting users with a familiarity of concepts such as land cover, elevation, land parcels, bathymetry, and soil. The SatelliteSkill5 app was piloted in 12 Irish schools during 2021 and 2022 and with 861 students ranging from 12 to 18 years old. This research shows that both students and teachers value learning in an easy-to-use AR environment and that SDGs help users to better understand complex remote sensing theory
AgroCycle Kids - Animation
No full textThe Froebel Department, Maynooth University is a partner in the AgroCycle Project. The AgroCycle Project is a ca. €8 million (ca. €7 million from the European Commission, ca. €1 million from the Government of The People’s Republic of China) Horizon 2020 research and innovation project addressing the recycling and valorisation of waste from the agri-food sector. The project takes a holistic approach to understanding and addressing how to make best use of the full range of waste streams associated with the agri-food industry. It is delivering the AgroCycle Protocol, a blueprint for achieving sustainable agri-food waste valorisation. The resultant AgroCycle Protocol will deliver sustainable waste valorisation pathways addressing the European policy target of reducing food waste by 50% by 2030, as well contributing to the wave of change that is occurring in China in relation to sustainability. This corresponds with the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. This is a video created by Dr Nic an Bhaird and Dr Ní Chléirigh for primary school children. It explains the complex scientific concepts of the circular economy in language suitable for the primary classroom. This video won the The European Think BioBased Challange in 2019 as part of the AgroCycle Kids education package
Public Parents. Reclaiming publicness of education in the new tyrannies
No full textIn this chapter, we explore the publicness of education from the vantage point of contemporary East/Central Europe, a geopolitical area which in 1989 experienced the liberation from Communist totalitarian state systems and Soviet colonial control. In places such as Hungary or Poland, after an initial period of embracement of liberal democracy, we are now observing the formation of new nondemocratic systems, referred to by the Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller as tyrannies (2019). In the new tyrannies, power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a single person who strives for limitless control by transforming all democratic and participatory processes into mechanisms that help execute his will. Contemporary tyrannies rely for their popularity and success on populism and negative ideology, which mobilizes nationalist sentiments vis-a-vis external and internal "enemies," and on mechanisms that help silence dissent and same loyalties through oligarchical arrangements and public corruption. Public schools and universities, whose fragile post-totalitarian autonomy has been eroded by more than three decades of neoliberal restructuring and gradually also the renewed tightening of state control, are now platforms for the fortl1ering of anti-democratic and anti-liberal ag(SI)da. After Habermas (1992, 1998), we understand public sphere as fundamental for democracy but suggest that traditional understanding of the public requires reconsideration, taking into account critiques of his 01iginal concept in light of its exclusiveness and uniformity (Fraser 1990; :Rully 2012) and contemporary applicability in specific geopolitical contexts. How can we understand publicness in the conditions where tl1e public sphere, including public education, is appropriated by an undemocratic state power? What are the possibilities for reclaiming publicness in general and publicness of education in particular in political conditions, which undermine traditional meaning of publicness as an area outside of the state where free and unrestrained discussion concerning public
good is possible (Habermas 1992, 1998)? How can we use a particular case (Wittgenstein 1965, p. 23) of a geopolitical situation to illuminate publicness's conceptual entanglement and its possible political uses and implications
The Slow Learner: Feeling our way to Thinking about Lifelong learning
No full textThis article is a critique of the current formal education system as a construct for
consumerism, where the value of learning is geared towards increasingly limited
instrumentalist ends. It considers alternative ways of educating the population to prepare
for a century of disruption and upheaval as we transition from an unsustainable fossil fuelbased economy, where competition and acquisition are lauded to a less frenetic, but
ultimately more egalitarian reflective future. It argues against the short-term myopia of
credentialism, determined by election cycle politics and competitive advantage, and
instead posits a humanistic vision for community education and teaching innovation that
takes the longue durée regard of the history of human relations into account. Accepting
Gellner’s exo-socialisation model for mass education in the industrial age, it asks what will
replace this in a post-industrial world. Beginning with the principles of widening
participation and social inclusion as the starting points for a socially just education, it argues
that relationships are central for emancipatory education to take effect. It uses two
programmes offered by Maynooth University’s Department of Adult and Community
Education, the Communiversity and the Critical Skills modules: A Social Analysis of Everyday
Life, as examples of programmes that have inclusion, equality and diversity, and social
justice as core principles in their modus operandi. Here participation, dialogue, reflection,
and a willingness to engage offer hope for an intergenerational lifelong learning approach
to education in the twenty-first century that is ‘thought led’ rather than ‘market driven’