Making Content Relevant (Or Not): Exploring the Outcomes of a Project-Based Curriculum in Post-Secondary Art Appreciation

Because college students often struggle to understand the relevance of isolated and abstract art content to their programs of study and daily lives, this study explores the potential to generate meaningful education through a project-based curriculum in a college Art Appreciation course. Informed by research from educational psychology and neuroscience, this curriculum design was intended to help students (all non-art majors) connect course content to their social, emotional and physical realities and offer the potential to improve them. In class, students explored forms of visual communication, various media, and the relationship between art and culture before applying their findings to the design of a public artwork for their nearly art-free campus. Based on a constructivist epistemology and a phenomenological methodology, this study utilized participant observation, student projects and illustrated reflections as data sources. The results suggest positive outcomes, such as demonstrable understanding and application of course content as well as shortcomings, specifically the potential to fortify and actualize these connections

Developing transferable management skills through Action Learning

There has been increasing criticism of the relevance of the Master of Business Administration (MBA) in developing skills and competencies. Action learning, devised to address problem-solving in the workplace, offers a potential response to such criticism. This paper offers an insight into one university’s attempt to integrate action learning into the curriculum. Sixty-five part-time students were questioned at two points in their final year about their action learning experience and the enhancement of relevant skills and competencies. Results showed a mixed picture. Strong confirmation of the importance of selected skills and competencies contrasted with weaker agreement about the extent to which these were developed by action learning. There was, nonetheless, a firm belief in the positive impact on the learning process. The paper concludes that action learning is not a panacea but has an important role in a repertoire of educational approaches to develop relevant skills and competencies

Higher-order thoughts in action : Consciousness as an unconscious re-description process

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How do Securities Laws Influence Affect, Happiness, & Trust?

This Article advocates that securities regulators promulgate rules based upon taking into consideration their impacts upon investors\u27 and others\u27 affect, happiness, and trust. Examples of these impacts are consumer optimism, financial stress, anxiety over how thoroughly securities regulators deliberate over proposed rules, investor confidence in securities disclosures, market exuberance, social moods, and subjective well-being. These variables affect and are affected by traditional financial variables, such as consumer debt, expenditures, and wealth; corporate investment; initial public offerings; and securities market demand, liquidity, prices, supply, and volume. This Article proposes that securities regulators can and should evaluate rules based upon measures of affect, happiness, and trust in addition to standard observable financial variables. This Article concludes that the organic statutes of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission are indeterminate despite mandating that federal securities laws consider efficiency among other goals. This Article illustrates analysis of affective impacts of these financial regulatory policies: mandatory securities disclosures; gun-jumping rules for publicly registered offerings; financial education or literacy campaigns; statutory or judicial default rules and menus; and continual reassessment and revision of rules. These regulatory policies impact and are impacted by investors\u27 and other people\u27s affect, happiness, and trust. Thus, securities regulators can and should evaluate such affective impacts to design effective legal policy

The Value Added Approach of Entrepreneurial Philanthropy

Entrepreneurs add value to society beyond the wealth creation process and the creation of new products and services, through their engagement in philanthropy. The increasing prominence of high net worth entrepreneurs engaging in philanthropy, whose focus is typically on global social problems, is worthy of scholarly attention. Accurate reflections of the current practice of entrepreneurial philanthropy are required, in order for researchers to develop knowledge and understand the phenomenon of entrepreneurial philanthropy. Entrepreneurial philanthropy has emerged from practices of entrepreneurship, and the methods and practices associated with venture capital investment. Any analysis of entrepreneurial philanthropy requires careful consideration of the extent to which the practices and behaviours common to entrepreneurship can easily transfer over to the field of philanthropy

Promoting engagement and learning in first year university studies: The role of personalisation

Student engagement in higher education can be conceptualised as involving three components: students’ social needs and circumstances, the cognitive characteristics of academic studies, and the prevailing institutional ethos or philosophy that specifies the relationships that students have with learning and knowledge. This paper reports on an investigation into student engagement in a first-year human development course at the University of Waikato at Tauranga, New Zealand where the teaching staff has a commitment to relating learning to individual experiences. Information from an end-of-course survey indicates that a philosophy of personalisation promotes learning engagement. Students reported that they were required to think a lot or a great deal, that they put time into the course assessments, and that they valued the human development course itself

Artificial consciousness and the consciousness-attention dissociation

Artificial Intelligence is at a turning point, with a substantial increase in projects aiming to implement sophisticated forms of human intelligence in machines. This research attempts to model specific forms of intelligence through brute-force search heuristics and also reproduce features of human perception and cognition, including emotions. Such goals have implications for artificial consciousness, with some arguing that it will be achievable once we overcome short-term engineering challenges. We believe, however, that phenomenal consciousness cannot be implemented in machines. This becomes clear when considering emotions and examining the dissociation between consciousness and attention in humans. While we may be able to program ethical behavior based on rules and machine learning, we will never be able to reproduce emotions or empathy by programming such control systems—these will be merely simulations. Arguments in favor of this claim include considerations about evolution, the neuropsychological aspects of emotions, and the dissociation between attention and consciousness found in humans. Ultimately, we are far from achieving artificial consciousness