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Life events, depression and supportive relationships affect academic achievement in university students
Get PDFStudents often simultaneously deal with shifting support networks, stressful life changes and psychological distress which may affect academic achievement.
Methods: 285 students completed the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) to assess depression and the Computerized Life Events Assessment Record (CLEAR), to establish life events and supportive relationships. Module grades were used to measure academic achievement. A general linear model was used with student grade as the dependent variable and life events, depression and supportive relationships as independent variables. Confounding variables included age and sex.
Results: A three-way interaction between life events, depression and lack of supportive relationships was found. It indicated the performance of depressed students depended on whether they had supportive relationships and that this interaction also depended on whether they had experienced a life event in the past year.
Conclusions: Universities need to provide more support to students with life stress as they transition into university life
Impact of CRM strategy on relationship commitment and new product development: mediating effects of learning from failure
Get PDFDespite all the benefits that customer relationship management (CRM) offers to companies, various studies show high rates of failure when implementing CRM schemes. This study aims to explain how CRM can capitalize on the notion of learning behavior from failures in order to improve the relationship building and innovation performance in high technology ventures. Questionnaire survey data were collected from 234 CEOs and General Managers from ICT firms based in Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou, China. Subsequently, both hierarchical linear regression and SEM was conducted to test the hypothesized relationships. Findings show that CRM positively affects both NPD and commitment to long-term relationships and confirm that learning behaviour from failure mediates the main effects of CRM, which consists of strategic and market orientation foci, in combination with internal marketing and knowledge management. Specifically, although all four aspects of CRM are important to NPD, knowledge management is of particular importance
The need to disentangle assessment and feedback in higher education
Get PDFIn contemporary higher education systems, the processes of assessment and feedback are often seen as coexisting activities. As a result, they have become entangled in both policy and practice, resulting in a conceptual and practical blurring of their unique purposes. In this paper, we present a critical examination of the issues created by the entanglement of assessment and feedback, arguing that it is important to ensure that the legitimate purposes of both feedback and assessment are not compromised by inappropriate conflation of the two. We situate our argument in the shifting conceptual landscape of feedback, where there is increasing emphasis on students being active players in feedback processes working with and applying information from others to future learning tasks, rather than regarding feedback as a mechanism of transmission of information by teachers. We surface and critically discuss six problems created by the entanglement of assessment and feedback: students’ focus on grades; comments justifying grades rather than support learning; feedback too late to be useful; feedback subordinated to all other processes in course design; overemphasis on documentation of feedback; and the downgrading of feedback created by requirements for anonymous marking. We then propose a series of strategies for preserving the learning function of feedback, through models that give primacy to feedback within learning cycles. We conclude by offering suggestions for research and practice that seek to engage with the challenges created by the entanglement of assessment and feedback, and that maintain the unique purposes of assessment and feedback
Digital ethnography in higher education teaching and learning—a methodological review
Get PDFTo understand how the digitalization of higher education influences the inter-relationship between students, teachers, and their broader contexts, research must account for the social, cultural, political, and embodied aspects of teaching and learning in digital environments. Digital ethnography is a research method that can generate rich contextual knowledge of online experiences. However, how this methodology translates to higher education is less clear. In order to explore the opportunities that digital ethnography can provide in higher education research, this paper presents a methodological review of previous research, and discusses the implications for future practice. Through a systematic search of five research databases, we found 20 papers that report using digital ethnographies to explore teaching and learning in higher education. The review synthesizes and discusses how data collection, rigour, and ethics are handled in this body of research, with a focus on the specific methodological challenges that emerge when doing digital ethnographic research in a higher education setting. The review also identifies opportunities for improvement—especially related to participant observation from the student perspective, researcher reflexivity in relation to the dual teacher-researcher role, and increased diversity of data types. This leads us to conclude that higher education research, tasked with understanding an explosion of new digital practices, could benefit from a more rigorous and expanded use of digital ethnography
PhD Work with Robothespian on display at Centre of Contemporary Culture Barcelona
No full textWork that I carried out during my PhD at the EventLab is now on display as part of Brain(s), an exhibition at the Centre of Contemporary Culture Barcelona (CCCB). The exhibition explores humankind’s ongoing fascination with the brain and how history, art, science and philosophy have studied and represented the minds of both human and artificial beings.
This research project was developed as part of my PhD at the EventLab, Universitat de Barcelona. I developed a telepresence system using the Robothespian as part of the European project, BEAMING. The system allowed participants to ’embody’ a remotely located humanoid robot in real-time and interact with the destination and people in the physical location of the robot.
The conference is in Barcelona until 11 December 2022
SuperPoint features in endoscopy
Get PDFThere is often a significant gap between research results and applicability in routine medical practice. This work studies the performance of well-known local features on a medical dataset captured during routine colonoscopy procedures. Local feature extraction and matching is a key step for many computer vision applications, specially regarding 3D modelling. In the medical domain, handcrafted local features such as SIFT, with public pipelines such as COLMAP, are still a predominant tool for this kind of tasks. We explore the potential of the well known self-supervised approach SuperPoint [4], present an adapted variation for the endoscopic domain and propose a challenging evaluation framework. SuperPoint based models achieve significantly higher matching quality than commonly used local features in this domain. Our adapted model avoids features within specularity regions, a frequent and problematic artifact in endoscopic images, with consequent benefits for matching and reconstruction results. Training code and models available https://github.com/LeonBP/SuperPointEndoscopy
The transformation, expansion and success of a homelessness charity
No full textThe King’s Arms Project (KAP) homelessness charity experienced a dramatic transformation during my eight years of leadership. The organisation went through a period of growth and success, opening numerous services and gaining national recognition. The public works I present in the context statement have improved the lives of homeless people in Bedford, provided a local response to an international refugee crisis, developed dignified and skilled support for Asylum Seekers and forged partnerships to improve county-wide systems and services.
Using Tracey and Stott’s (2017) framework for organising social innovation, I reflect that my public works were enabled by intrapreneurial changes. This provided the foundation for entrepreneurship; during this phase KAP launched multiple new services, including three of the four public works I present. The success of the entrepreneurship activities provided an opportunity to work across organisations in a phase called extrapreneurship. It is within this phase that the fourth public work I present was realised.
I analyse my experience and works, taking an autoethnographic approach, and applying four areas of enquiry: Leadership, Organisational Culture, Sensemaking and Spirituality. I discuss literature within these areas, connecting it to my experience. As I reflect, it provides clarity to confusing events and structure to the methods I used to produce my public works.
I conceptualise the learnings from the public works in several models which provide both methods to end homelessness and a leadership approach for change and organisational success. The homelessness models highlight the importance of relationships in ending homelessness and include a model for support providers. The leadership models build on existing literature to provide approaches for change and organisational culture alignment
Are non-primary exports the source for further economic growth in the UAE?
Get PDFThis paper investigates whether non-primary exports directly or indirectly cause economic growth in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This study performs the Johansen test to examine the presence of co-integration between the variables in an augmented production function. The Granger causality test is performed to investigate the short-run causality between non-primary exports and economic growth, while the long-run causality is investigated by employing the Toda and Yamamoto procedure. The empirical analysis indicates that the variables are co-integrated, and that short-run causality runs from non-primary exports to economic growth; results exhibit no evidence of direct causality from non-primary exports to economic growth in the long-run
Migrants with insecure legal status and access to work: the role of ethnic solidarity networks
Get PDFThis article explores the complexities of ethnic solidarity and ethnic capital in enabling participation on labour markets for migrants with insecure legal status in the UK. By drawing together research insights and data from a questionnaire survey of 178 Iraqi-Kurdish migrants with insecure legal status, four focus groups and ten expert interviews, this paper examines how ‘unauthorised’ migrants get access to the segmented labour market at a time of increased in-border controls in the UK. It argues that conflict-generated diasporas such as the Kurds display a distinct solidarity with their community members with insecure legal status and provide access to the labour markets against the tangible threat of in-border migration enforcement. We term this form of solidarity as stretched solidarity which emerges during risky, difficult and destitute times and it is a reluctant act of empathy and socio-political position. This paper identifies the social phenomenon of stretched solidarity and sets out a model for understanding its embeddedness within conflict-generated diasporic networks
The rapture and rupture of the lived body
No full textAbout Chapter:
This chapter demonstrates resonates the phenomenological concerns for a queer lived body; the experiential encounter, shared and reciprocal perception, risk, and how this combines through flesh in a manifestation of Self/s. It utilises case studies drawn from performance art to test the containment of the artist's corporeal bodies and how their actions puncture the normality of societal convention through extreme encounters. In consideration of the intercorporeal space these works are used to also examine the effect that reciprocally exists between artists/audiences who may encounter rupture or rapture.
About the Book:
This book introduces the study and application of performance art through phenomenology, inviting readers to explore contemporary performance art and activate their own practices. Using queer phenomenology to unpack the importance of a multiplicity of self/s, the book teaches readers how to be academically rigorous when capturing embodied experiences. Through approachable exercises, definitions of key phenomenological terms, and interviews and insights from some of the best examples of transgressive performance art practice, the work enriches the wider scholarship of theater studies. Situated within contemporary phenomenological scholarship, the book will appeal to radical artists, educators, and practitioner-researchers