117,607 research outputs found
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A Tale of Two Globes: Exploring the North/South Divide in Engagement with Open Educational Resources
In this chapter we consider what evidence exists of a divide between the Global North and Global South in terms of engagement with open educational resources (OER), understanding engagement as the production and sharing of educational materials online. We discuss whether identifying educators as contributors or consumers of OER can be empirically grounded, and advocate advancing internet access in developing countries to reach a global balance where sharing is key
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A Tale of Evaluation and Reporting in UK Smart Cities
Global trends towards urbanisation are associated with wide-ranging challenges and opportunities for cities. Smart technologies create new opportunities for a range of smart city development and regeneration programmes designed to address the environmental, economic and social challenges concentrated in cities. Whilst smart city programmes have received much publicity, there has been much less discussion about evaluation of smart city programmes and the measurement of their outcomes for cities. Existing evaluation approaches have been criticised as non-standard and inadequate, focusing more on implementation processes and investment metrics than on the impacts of smart city programmes on strategic city outcomes and progress. To examine this, the SmartDframe project conducted research on city approaches to the evaluation of smart city projects and programmes, and reporting of impacts on city outcomes. This included the ‘smarter’ UK cities of Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Milton Keynes and Peterborough. City reports and interviews with representative local government authorities informed the case study analysis. The report provides a series of smart city case studies that exemplify contemporary city practices, offering a timely, insightful contribution to city discourse about best practice approaches to evaluation and reporting of complex smart city projects and programmes
WHY CAN HUNTER-GATHERER GROUPS BE ORGANIZED SIMLARLY FOR RESOURCE PROCUREMENT, BUT THEIR KINSHIP TERMINOLOGIES ARE STRIKINGLY DISSIMILAR: A CHALLENGE FOR FUTURE CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCH
Cross-cultural research involves explanatory arguments framed at the meta-level of a cohort of societies, each with its own historical development as an internally structured and organized system. Historically, cross-cultural research on hunter-gatherer groups initially was in accord with the general anthropological interest in determining the ideational basis for differences in systems of social organization, but more recent work has shifted emphasis to the phenomenal level of factors affecting the mode of adaptation to an external environment. This has left a major lacuna in our understanding of the reasons for cross-cultural differences among ideational systems such as kinship terminologies in hunter-gatherer societies. I address this lacuna in this article through cross-cultural comparison of hunter-gatherer kinship terminologies at an ideational, qualitative level. The means for so doing is first worked out using the kinship terminology of the Hadza, an East African hunter-gather group. Next, comparison of the Hadza and their kinship terminology with two other hunter-gatherer groups prominent in the anthropological literature, along with their kinship terminologies, makes evident a major disjunction between, on the one hand, the similarity of hunter-gatherer societies at the phenomenal level of activities such as food procurement and, on the other hand, striking differences among the same groups at the ideational level of the structural organization of their kinship terminologies. The reason for the striking differences between the ideational and the phenomenal levels is not immediately evident and remains a topic to be addressed in future cross-cultural research
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Scientists and software engineers: A tale of two cultures
The two cultures of the title are those observed in my field studies: the culture of scientists (financial
mathematicians, earth and planetary scientists, and molecular biologists) developing their own software, and the culture of software engineers developing scientific software. In this paper, I shall describe some problems arising when scientists and software engineers come together to develop scientific software and discuss how these problems may be ascribed to their two different cultures
Because We Smile: Jonathan Swift\u27s Enthusiastic Magnifying Glass
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was intellectually before his time. His insights into the human condition reveal a belief in the not-hopeless corruption of humanity. To capture this state of the human condition, he used two key symbols: wind and machine. These two symbols represent the two sides of the dialectical argument into which Swift forces his readers. What guide should direct humanity-enthusiasm and emotional stimulation (wind) or reason and objective systems (the machine)? Preoccupied with these two ideas, Swift uses his scatological satires to level all of humanity. Swift forces his readers onto their knees in the mud and mire and only after moving them toward repenting of all vain pride does Swift allow his audience the redemption of laughter
The Italian version of the Thinking About Life Experiences Questionnaire and its relationship with gender, age, and life events on Facebook
The present study provided a cross-cultural validation of the Thinking About Life Experiences Scale-revised (TALE-R) in an Italian sample of Facebook users (n = 492; female = 378; male = 114; mean age 26.1) to test for replication and universality of the TALE-R three-factor model. Furthermore, it explored the interrelations among gender, age, the scores at the TALE-R and the frequency of posting textual/visual information about individuals' life events on Facebook. Results at exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis gave empirical support to both of a tripartite model for the functions of autobiographical memory (i.e., directive-behavior, social-bonding, and self-continuity) and measurement invariance of this three-factor model across gender and age. Further results at linear correlation and regression analyses showed that directive-behavior and self-continuity functions of autobiographical memory are significantly related to the ways people use Facebook for personal documentation. Age differences more than gender influence this association. Discussion and conclusion reported both theoretical and empirical implications of the findings of the study
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