1,805 research outputs found
Virtual worlds in Australian and New Zealand higher education: remembering the past, understanding the present and imagining the future
3D virtual reality, including the current generation of multi-user virtual worlds, has had a long history of use in education and training, and it experienced a surge of renewed interest with the advent of Second Life in 2003. What followed shortly after were several years marked by considerable hype around the use of virtual worlds for teaching, learning and research in higher education. For the moment, uptake of the technology seems to have plateaued, with academics either maintaining the status quo and continuing to use virtual worlds as they have previously done or choosing to opt out altogether. This paper presents a brief review of the use of virtual worlds in the Australian and New Zealand higher education sector in the past and reports on its use in the sector at the present time, based on input from members of the Australian and New Zealand Virtual Worlds Working Group. It then adopts a forward-looking perspective amid the current climate of uncertainty, musing on future directions and offering suggestions for potential new applications in light of recent technological developments and innovations in the area
Using theory to inform capacity-building: Bootstrapping communities of practice in computer science education research
In this paper, we describe our efforts in the deliberate creation of a
community of practice of researchers in computer science education
(CSEd). We understand community of practice in the sense in
which Wenger describes it, whereby the community is characterized
by mutual engagement in a joint enterprise that gives rise to a
shared repertoire of knowledge, artefacts, and practices.
We first identify CSEd as a research field in which no shared
paradigm exists, and then we describe the Bootstrapping project,
its metaphor, structure, rationale, and delivery, as designed to create
a community of practice of CSEd researchers. Features of
other projects are also outlined that have similar aims of capacity
building in disciplinary-specific pedagogic enquiry. A theoretically
derived framework for evaluating the success of endeavours of
this type is then presented, and we report the results from an
empirical study. We conclude with four open questions for our
project and others like it: Where is the locus of a community of
practice? Who are the core members? Do capacity-building models
transfer to other disciplines? Can our theoretically motivated
measures of success apply to other projects of the same nature
Deep graphical regression for jointly moderate and extreme Australian wildfires
Recent wildfires in Australia have led to considerable economic loss and property destruction, and there is increasing concern that climate change may exacerbate their intensity, duration, and frequency. Hazard quantification for extreme wildfires is an important component of wildfire management, as it facilitates efficient resource distribution, adverse effect mitigation, and recovery efforts. However, although extreme wildfires are typically the most impactful, both small and moderate fires can still be devastating to local communities and ecosystems. Therefore, it is imperative to develop robust statistical methods to reliably model the full distribution of wildfire spread. We do so for a novel dataset of Australian wildfires from 1999 to 2019, and analyse monthly spread over areas approximately corresponding to Statistical Areas Level 1 and 2 (SA1/SA2) regions. Given the complex nature of wildfire ignition and spread, we exploit recent advances in statistical deep learning and extreme value theory to construct a parametric regression model using graph convolutional neural networks and the extended generalised Pareto distribution, which allows us to model wildfire spread observed on an irregular spatial domain. We highlight the efficacy of our newly proposed model and perform a wildfire hazard assessment for Australia and population-dense communities, namely Tasmania, Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth.</p
Ideological Origins of the Australian Antarctic, 1839-1933
This thesis examines Australian ideas about the Antarctic in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. It seeks to go beyond the dominant diplomatic, geopolitical, legal, and scientific lenses through which Australian engagement with the Antarctic region has been viewed by tracing the genealogy of Australian ideas about the Antarctic. It focuses particularly on the development of the ideas that Australia had a unique interest in the Antarctic based on geographical proximity, that the Antarctic was destined to become an Australian possession, and that it would eventually become a source of enormous wealth for Australia and Australians. These ideas are used to reconstruct late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century visions of an Australian empire stretching “from the equator to the South Pole”, a vision that was substantially fulfilled by the 1930s. The thesis argues that these ideas and visions highlight the significance of expansionism in nineteenth and early-twentieth century Australian thought and suggests that this expansionism can usefully be understood as a form of imperialism. It further argues that analysing Australian engagement with the Antarctic within the framework of empire and imperialism provides a valuable insight into the broader phenomenon of expansion by small, newly-formed, states in this period and into the interrelationship between processes of state formation and imperial expansion
Deep graphical regression for jointly moderate and extreme Australian wildfires
Recent wildfires in Australia have led to considerable economic loss and
property destruction, and there is increasing concern that climate change may
exacerbate their intensity, duration, and frequency. Hazard quantification for
extreme wildfires is an important component of wildfire management, as it
facilitates efficient resource distribution, adverse effect mitigation, and
recovery efforts. However, although extreme wildfires are typically the most
impactful, both small and moderate fires can still be devastating to local
communities and ecosystems. Therefore, it is imperative to develop robust
statistical methods to reliably model the full distribution of wildfire spread.
We do so for a novel dataset of Australian wildfires from 1999 to 2019, and
analyse monthly spread over areas approximately corresponding to Statistical
Areas Level~1 and~2 (SA1/SA2) regions. Given the complex nature of wildfire
ignition and spread, we exploit recent advances in statistical deep learning
and extreme value theory to construct a parametric regression model using graph
convolutional neural networks and the extended generalized Pareto distribution,
which allows us to model wildfire spread observed on an irregular spatial
domain. We highlight the efficacy of our newly proposed model and perform a
wildfire hazard assessment for Australia and population-dense communities,
namely Tasmania, Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth
Forgetting complex propositions
This paper uses possible-world semantics to model the changes that may occur
in an agent's knowledge as she loses information. This builds on previous work
in which the agent may forget the truth-value of an atomic proposition, to a
more general case where she may forget the truth-value of a propositional
formula. The generalization poses some challenges, since in order to forget
whether a complex proposition is the case, the agent must also lose
information about the propositional atoms that appear in it, and there is no
unambiguous way to go about this.
We resolve this situation by considering expressions of the form
, which quantify over all possible (but
minimal) ways of forgetting whether . Propositional atoms are modified
non-deterministically, although uniformly, in all possible worlds. We then
represent this within action model logic in order to give a sound and complete
axiomatization for a logic with knowledge and forgetting. Finally, some
variants are discussed, such as when an agent forgets (rather than
forgets whether ) and when the modification of atomic facts is done
non-uniformly throughout the model
Celebrating the Past, Embracing the Future: A Select Bibliography of Published and Unpublished Materials Authored and Edited by Members of CARALL During the Period 1984-2005
This Select Bibliography, with Appendices, chronicles the published and unpublished work of Members of the Caribbean Association of Law Libraries (CARALL) over the past 21 years of its existence. In this regard, only materials produced between 1984 and 2005 have been included, with the exception of one item which predates this period
- …