Concept Mapping Strategy For Academic Writing Tutorial In Open And Distant Learning Higher Institution

Universitas Terbuka (UT) an open and distant higher education institution of Indonesia conducts the in-service teacher education program. In order to complete the program, the students – mostly teachers - have to submit the final academic paper. In fact, most of the UT students have difficulty to write this academic paper. UT offers an academic writing course to solve this writing program. Most of the student view academic writing still as a difficult assignment. Most of the students view academic writing as a difficult assignment to complete. UT has to find an appropriate instructional strategy that can facilitate student to write the academic writing assignment. One of the instructional strategy that can be selected to solve the academic writing problems is concept mapping. The aim of this study is to elaborate the implementation of concept map as an instructional strategy to facilitate the open and distance learning students io complete academic writing assignments. A design based research was applied to measure the effectiveness of using concept mapping strategy in helping students to gain academic writing skills. The steps of research and development model from Borg, Gall and Gall which consist of instructional design and development phases were implemented in this study. The result of this study indicated that students were facilitated and enjoyed the process of academic writing used the concept map strategy

Utopia/Dystopia, Race, Gender, and New Forms of Humanism in Women's Science Fiction

This thesis aims to uncover new forms of humanism grounded in a critique of systems that produce and reify race and gender by staging a conversation between six contemporary works of science fiction (SF) written by women from Italy, France, Spain, and the UK, and five acclaimed theorists in the fields of gender, queer, postcolonial, humanist, and cultural studies: Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Gayatri Spivak, Paul Gilroy, and Jack Halberstam. As outlined in the second chapter, I focus, in particular, on Butler’s conception of subjects who ‘become’ through affective encounters, Braidotti’s critical posthumanism, Spivak and Gilroy’s respective notions of ‘planetarity,’ and Halberstam’s theory of a ‘queer art of failure.’ In doing so, this thesis asserts the complementarity of academic and science fictional enquiries into what I view as examples of new forms of humanism that arise from historicised interrogations of systems of race and gender. The first chapter introduces the way in which SF appeals to women writers who embrace the genre’s political energy and its anti-racist, anti-sexist, and humanistic potential by tracing a genealogy of European women’s SF from the seventeenth century to the present day. The second half of the thesis reads examples of politically charged SF from my corpus alongside the critical theory outlined in the second chapter, in order to demonstrate how SF engages with new forms of humanism through a critique and reformulation of issues of race and gender. I follow this analysis with an exploration of the way in which SF’s unique spatial attributes can probe the borders of the planetary humanisms or ‘planetarity’ proposed by Gilroy and Spivak. I finally assess, by way of a conclusion, the extent to which SF can reassemble and amplify the achievements of these new forms of anti-racist and anti-sexist humanism

Manager’s and citizen’s perspective of positive and negative risks for small probabilities

So far „risk‟ has been mostly defined as the expected value of a loss, mathematically PL, being P the probability of an adverse event and L the loss incurred as a consequence of the event. The so called risk matrix is based on this definition. Also for favorable events one usually refers to the expected gain PG, being G the gain incurred as a consequence of the positive event. These “measures” are generally violated in practice. The case of insurances (on the side of losses, negative risk) and the case of lotteries (on the side of gains, positive risk) are the most obvious. In these cases a single person is available to pay a higher price than that stated by the mathematical expected value, according to (more or less theoretically justified) measures. The higher the risk, the higher the unfair accepted price. The definition of risk as expected value is justified in a long term “manager‟s” perspective, in which it is conceivable to distribute the effects of an adverse event on a large number of subjects or a large number of recurrences. In other words, this definition is mostly justified on frequentist terms. Moreover, according to this definition, in two extreme situations (high-probability/low-consequence and low-probability/high-consequence), the estimated risk is low. This logic is against the principles of sustainability and continuous improvement, which should impose instead both a continuous search for lower probabilities of adverse events (higher and higher reliability) and a continuous search for lower impact of adverse events (in accordance with the fail-safe principle). In this work a different definition of risk is proposed, which stems from the idea of safeguard: (1Risk)=(1P)(1L). According to this definition, the risk levels can be considered low only when both the probability of the adverse event and the loss are small. Such perspective, in which the calculation of safeguard is privileged to the calculation of risk, would possibly avoid exposing the Society to catastrophic consequences, sometimes due to wrong or oversimplified use of probabilistic models. Therefore, it can be seen as the citizen‟s perspective to the definition of risk