1,720,991 research outputs found
Facilitating learning at multiple levels with Systems Thinking‐assisted serious games: Insights from the SUSTAIN project
No full textThis study focuses on the potential of Systems Thinking-assisted serious games to facilitate learning at multiple levels. These levels refer both to the actors (primarily the designers and the players, but also the facilitators and the educators) involved throughout the main stages of a serious game lifecycle and the typology of learning that is facilitated (i.e., single or double-loop learning). From a methodological point of view, this study presents and discusses an action research-based case study aimed at developing a Systems Thinking-assisted board game in the field of urban sustainability. Systems Thinking (in terms of methods, principles, and tools) is employed in all the phases of the design and use of the serious game and is key in fostering learning, both for the players and the game designers. Overall, this paper not only provides novel insights into the field of serious games but also leads to the proposal of a core set of methodological suggestions based on Systems Thinking principles and methods that can assist academics and practitioners in creating and using board games for educational purposes
Facilitating learning at multiple levels with Systems Thinking-assisted serious games: Insights from the SUSTAIN project
No full textThis study focuses on the potential of Systems Thinking-assisted serious games to facilitate learning at multiple levels. These levels refer both to the actors (primarily the designers and the players, but also the facilitators and the educators) involved throughout the main stages of a serious game lifecycle and the typology of learning that is facilitated (i.e., single or double-loop learning). From a methodological point of view, this study presents and discusses an action research-based case study aimed at developing a Systems Thinking-assisted board game in the field of urban sustainability. Systems Thinking (in terms of methods, principles, and tools) is employed in all the phases of the design and use of the serious game and is key in fostering learning, both for the players and the game designers. Overall, this paper not only provides novel insights into the field of serious games but also leads to the proposal of a core set of methodological suggestions based on Systems Thinking principles and methods that can assist academics and practitioners in creating and using board games for educational purposes
Endangered Commons? Modeling the Effects of Demographic Trends Coupled with Admission Rules to Common Property Institutions
Full text linkThis study investigates the long-term effects of demographic trends and admission rules on common properties in the Province of Trento, Italy, which we refer to as historical commons. Historical commons have evolved into socio-ecological systems over the centuries, meaning that communities governed collectively natural resources and lands essential for community survival. Communities and the admission rules that determine their composition are an important constituting element of historical commons because they have developed local ecological knowledge and practices of sustainable use of natural resources. Our study hypothesizes that commons continuity is endangered because of the declining trend of the size of communities being influenced by demographic trends coupled with admission rules. Grounding our research in systems dynamics, we use empirical data including demographic projections and existing admission rules to simulate their effect on the site of the community using the Province of Trento, Italy, as our study region. To achieve that, three types of historical commons are identified: open, semi-open, and closed, each with different admission criteria based on inheritance and/or residency. Results indicate that inheritance-based admission rules can significantly reduce the number of commoners over time, potentially endangering the continuity of these self-governance institutions. The study discusses the results in light of the literature on historical commons’ continuity to evaluate different policies affecting the size of the community grounding on different mental models. The study concludes that a simulation approach can promote an anticipatory approach to the co-design of policies to ensure inclusive continuity of historical commons
SUSTAINABILITY LITERACY THROUGH GAME-BASED LEARNING
No full textSustainability and sustainable development have been recognized as the major challenges of the 21st century and to achieve this objective there is the need to think of education not as the traditional, analytic way of transferring knowledge, but as an experience that is centred on the student. Its purpose is to assist them in acquiring the necessary skills to constantly assess the environment, operate and adapt to it through a continuous and iterative process of revision from their frame of reference and finally equip them with the necessary material/tools that will help them comprehend and tackle complexity.
The objective of the current paper is to present an effort in the context of an E+ project on Higher Education to use serious games as a means to teach sustainability. To achieve the objective a board game will be designed and developed that will utilize the principles of Systems Thinking for the game mechanisms and design.
A systems thinking perspective implies the existence of interconnected elements to fulfill a function or a purpose over time. Those elements can be of physical or information composition. Modelling the system under study in this way allows policy-makers to make decisions based on scientific analysis of future scenarios and provide them with a supporting tool that could be used in synergy while planning and defining policies to get economic and socio¬-environmental benefits.
Causal Loop Diagrams (CLD) are qualitative representations of the system under study and illustrate in a clear manner the causal relations among the various elements. Furthermore, they can illustrate the feedback loops and nonlinearities that may be present in the system and give rise to dynamic behavior.
The SUSTAIN CLD is composed by different variables, that represent areas of interest in a general modern urban system. The model, in fact, considers general aspects as GDP and population, as well as environment, transport, urban planning and waste and water management.
As the CLD will be the basis for the future development of the game, the core of the model is represented by the most important parameter for deciding who will win the game, i.e. the Attractiveness of city. This variable is the synthesis of multiple variables that belong to many aspects of urban system, defining the “wellbeing” of the population who lives in it.
The most important effect due to variations in Attractiveness of city is a variation of the number of people who lives in the city; this generates many impacts on different urban levels, triggering as many feedback loops. In fact, the majority of feedback loops we identified passes through the “Population” variable. It's kind of natural that this happens as, in the end, urban systems exist because of its inhabitants, indeed.
The most important feedback loops were identified and then divided in three main groups. The first group is composed by loops belonging to the “core” of the model, that is the relation between population, GDP and Industries and Services. The second group is composed by loops which belong to the “environmental” part of the model. The last loop describes how traffic congestion has effect on usage of public transport and, in turns, effects on pollution.
The next steps of the research include the development of a quantitative model and the translation of the model’s variable to mechanisms and elements of a board game
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Habitat potential and connectivity assessment to support land-use planning: a case study in an Alpine valley floor
No full textThe land-use and cover changes are the major causes of the biodiversity loss. This is particularly true in the contexts of Alpine valley floor, where increasing human-driven pressures affect remnant habitats and fragile ecosystems. To pursue biodiversity conservation, aiming environmentally sustainable development, spatial planning should maintain landscape ecological functions in order to guarantee the habitats and supporting processes for as many species as possible. Besides, planners as well as other stakeholders involved in land-use changes need value-based information or at least information easily obtainable that provides clear insights on the ecological consequences of these land-use changes.
Currently, the assessments of the ecological impact of project or plan proposals have several shortcomings. Spatial planning often disregards the different biodiversity components, just focused on species richness of protected areas. Most of landscapeoriented indices fails especially in providing an understanding of disruptive changes of ecological processes.
A former project, to which I contributed, was meant to provide an assessment of biodiversity assets for the Trento Province (northern Italy) in order to support environmental decision by a decision support system: the Information System of Ecological Value, or Sistema Informativo della Sensibilità Ambientale (SISA). This has been furnishing to planners value-based information, through a reliable and transparent evaluation, based on expert judgments, but this has some limitations for contexts of the valley floor and concerning ecological processes.
The attempt to solve the above mentioned shortcomings and the SISA limitations fostered the motivation behind this study. To this end, a methodology for ecological assessment was proposed. The overall objective is to support land-use planning towards development of ecologically sustainable landscapes. In particular, the ecological assessment concerns the main processes supporting local biodiversity in human dominated and fragmented landscapes: habitat functioning and functional connectivity. The study has focused on one specific environmental context, i.e. the landscapes of the Alpine valley floor.
A secondary objective of the study was to develop a decision support system easily applicable by environmental agency officers or planners. This means requiring as few data as possible in order to permit reliable evaluation of planning ecological consequences even in the cases where poor data sets are available. These objectives were pursued through the following steps and intermediate objectives:
a) Review the current studies on ecological/biodiversity impact assessment applications, in order to identify the shortcomings and key-issues that need to be addressed (chapter 2).
b) Description of the relevant characteristics of targeted environment. In this study the chosen environment was Alpine valley floor, showing it requires urgent attention regarding biodiversity conservation (chapter 3).
c) Development of a methodology for the assessment of landscape ecological functioning, attempting to overcome the literature limitations reported from literature review (chapter 4)
d) Application of the proposed methodology on a case study within Alpine valler floor, to test the applicability and usefulness of the proposal (chapter 5 and 6).
The study derived the main theoretical foundation from landscape ecology; in particular, the main theoretical references were meta-population and spatial graph theory.
The proposed approach starts by acknowledging that patches of habitats are open or constrained by landscape barriers and interact with others throughout habitat networks. The evaluation approach relies on a dynamic, rather than a static, interpretation of ecosystems and living communities, by considering spatial attributes of habitat functioning. This is meant to include more components of biodiversity, rather than simple species number. Thus, different ecosystems could have been valued not only by the presence of species, but also by the virtue of the processes acting in the landscape and sustaining them.
The assessment framework involves three nested levels, each characterized by its own objects and properties, according to the complexity of hierarchical systems. The quality of each object depends on the quality of nearby objects at the same level and on the quality of upper-level (or lower-level) objects. This enables to evaluate “emergent properties” of a landscape; consequently allows assessing cumulative impacts on habitat functioning due to land-use changes, as shown in the case of master plans’ mosaic for study area. The overall habitat loss resulted larger than that resulted by summation of single habitat losses.
The connectivity analyses include both structural and functional characteristics, using barrier effect and spatial graph concepts. Besides the distances, the species response to landscape features and finer-scale movement decisions are considered. The spatial graph of connectivity allows evaluating importance of patches by their contribution to overall connectivity. Thus, it permits to visualize remnant possible paths for species dispersal in highly fragmented areas. Moreover, the spatial-graph based approach allows assessing indirect impacts due to fragmentation. Since the loss of a habitatnode may affect not only nearby habitats but even the functioning of the whole habitat network, it is possible to scan the impacts “spreading” along the habitat networks.
The methodology output consists in a GIS-layer and rule sets hierarchically structured in a geodatabase. Once a land use changes, by performing the rule sets is possible update all related information providing assessment for land-use change scenarios (i.e. planning or project proposal).
The qualitative multi-attribute evaluation, proposed at the end of methodology procedure, performs a clear separation between prediction and assessment of impacts, according to guidelines for environmental impact assessment. This evaluation is meant to translate species-specific assessments into ecological relevance values.
This makes the proposed methodology suitable for EIA applications and consequently may support the same environmental decision targeted by the SISA project
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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