3,776 research outputs found
Digital Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: Culture, Language, Social Issues
Digital collaboration has been established in higher education for many years. But when the Covid-19 pandemic struck, digital learning and virtual mobility became of utmost importance for higher education. In the international project "Digital and International Virtual Academic Cooperation" (DIVA), scholars from Israel, Australia, and Germany focused on intercultural learning and online collaboration. Based on their findings, they show how digital arrangements can be used in higher education, how digital teaching can be theorized, and what potential can be gained for post-pandemic teaching
Developing great teachers through professional development: a comparative international case study in England, Israel, South Korea, and Turkey
This comparative international case study explores teacher quality, that is, how teachers, who are regarded as great, train and develop. In particular, the thesis investigates ways in which participation in professional development programmes contributes to teachers’ professional knowledge and the personal virtues involved in teaching chemistry at secondary school level in England, Israel, South Korea, and Turkey as case study nations.
The study employs a comparative case study approach. Empirical data collection was preceded by a document analysis and a comprehensive literature review which revealed three themes, namely community of practice, pedagogical content knowledge, and professional beliefs and virtues as impacting teachers in becoming great teachers. These themes were explored in practice utilising qualitative data collection methods, namely semi structured interviews with science teachers (mainly chemistry) who participated in professional development programmes and through observing lessons and professional development activities of teachers teaching science to 14-18-year-olds. Data was collected in South Korea, Israel, Turkey, and the United Kingdom (England) over a 1-year period. A volunteer sample of 40 science teachers (10 teachers for each country) were interviewed. Ten professional development activities were observed. The total length of observed PD activities was 1500 minutes. Nine science teachers were observed in four countries. The total length of observed lessons was 525 minutes. Four focus group interviews with the participation of 18 teachers were conducted. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data.
The data shows that great teacher appears differently in the four nations. A great teacher is identified variously as an amalgamation of a lifelong learner (South Korea), a moral exemplar (Turkey), a reflective practitioner (England), and an educator (Israel). Great teachers as lifelong learners promote students’ practical wisdom and wise decision-making ability, skills which are required to live a good life. Moral exemplars transmit their personal moral values to their students. Reflective practitioner teachers demonstrate intellectual and performance virtues in practice. As educators, great teachers motivate their students to be good human beings. The results of the study reveal that practical wisdom is an essential lens for making teachers educationally wise people. Great teacher is perceived to empower practical wisdom, which helps teachers establish mutual understanding and let them have more space to draw
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upon intellectual, social, moral and performance virtues through collaboration, mutual engagement and sharing in community of practice. The teachers in the study who participated in community-based professional development programmes enhanced the intellectual, moral, performance, and social virtues, pedagogical content knowledge associated with being a great teacher. The study finds that nations whose educational systems build strong connections between teachers through development and application of learning communities tend to generate a higher proportion of great teachers and that those teachers have positive and extensive influences on each other’s intellectual and personal development. This research also found that one of the most important dispositions that enable teachers to become responsible for students' learning is passion in science teaching. The teachers' passion, motivation, and love for teaching helped them to expand their professional knowledge and techniques of instruction in distinctive manners. The character traits that a great teacher must possess should receive a lot of consideration. Emphasise also should be on developing character strengths in the professional development. Community of practice has potential to achieve this through mutual engagement, shared repertoire and joint enterprise.
The research emphasizes the vital role of teachers' passion for science teaching in enabling them to take responsibility for their students' learning. It advocates for the development of character strengths in teacher professional development, particularly through the cultivation of community of practice, characterized by mutual engagement, shared repertoire, and joint enterprise. This comparative study offers valuable insights into the dynamic interplay of teacher development, enhancing the quality of education across diverse contexts
Cultures of Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century: Literary and Cultural Perspectives on a Legal Concept
In the early twenty-first century, the concept of citizenship is more contested than ever. As refugees set out to cross the Mediterranean, European nation-states refer to "cultural integrity" and "immigrant inassimilability," revealing citizenship to be much more than a legal concept. The contributors to this volume take an interdisciplinary approach to considering how cultures of citizenship are being envisioned and interrogated in literary and cultural (con)texts. Through this framework, they attend to the tension between the citizen and its spectral others - a tension determined by how a country defines difference at a given moment
Impact of the Increased Use of Telehealth on Health Care Management and Administration: The Case of New Care Management Practices
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges to healthcare systems worldwide, forcing them to adapt and implement alternative modes of healthcare delivery quickly. Telehealth, the delivery of healthcare services through telecommunication technologies, has become crucial in providing continuous care while reducing the risk of virus transmission. This qualitative study aimed to explore healthcare managers\u27 perceptions of the use of telehealth and its impact on healthcare practices during the pandemic, particularly in terms of provision and quality control. A purposive sample of 10 healthcare managers from different healthcare settings in the United States participated in semi-structured interviews conducted via video conferencing. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings revealed six overarching themes: (1) perceived benefits of telehealth, including increased accessibility, convenience, and efficiency; (2) challenges and limitations of telehealth; (3) role of telehealth in shaping healthcare practices; (4) implications for quality control, including the need for standardization, training, and evaluation measures; (5) leadership and innovation in telehealth; and (6) future of telehealth in healthcare management. This study provides insights into how healthcare managers perceive the use of telehealth and how it shapes healthcare practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings suggest that telehealth can potentially improve healthcare provision and quality control, but its implementation requires addressing challenges and limitations and adapting to evolving healthcare needs. Future research can build on these findings by exploring the perspectives of other stakeholders, such as healthcare providers and patients, and examining the long-term effects of telehealth on healthcare practices
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum
Auditable and performant Byzantine consensus for permissioned ledgers
Permissioned ledgers allow users to execute transactions against a data store, and retain proof of their execution in a replicated ledger. Each replica verifies the transactions’ execution and ensures that, in perpetuity, a committed transaction cannot be removed from the ledger. Unfortunately, this is not guaranteed by today’s permissioned ledgers, which can be re-written if an arbitrary number of replicas collude. In addition, the transaction throughput of permissioned ledgers is low, hampering real-world deployments, by not taking advantage of multi-core CPUs and hardware accelerators.
This thesis explores how permissioned ledgers and their consensus protocols can be made auditable in perpetuity; even when all replicas collude and re-write the ledger. It also addresses how Byzantine consensus protocols can be changed to increase the execution throughput of complex transactions. This thesis makes the following contributions:
1. Always auditable Byzantine consensus protocols. We present a permissioned ledger system that can assign blame to individual replicas regardless of how many of them misbehave. This is achieved by signing and storing consensus protocol messages in the ledger and providing clients with signed, universally-verifiable receipts.
2. Performant transaction execution with hardware accelerators. Next, we describe a cloud-based ML inference service that provides strong integrity guarantees, while staying compatible with current inference APIs. We change the Byzantine consensus protocol to execute machine learning (ML) inference computation on GPUs to optimize throughput and latency of ML inference computation.
3. Parallel transactions execution on multi-core CPUs. Finally, we introduce a permissioned ledger that executes transactions, in parallel, on multi-core CPUs. We separate the execution of transactions between the primary and secondary replicas. The primary replica executes transactions on multiple CPU cores and creates a dependency graph of the transactions that the backup replicas utilize to execute transactions in parallel.Open Acces
Mapping the Focal Points of WordPress: A Software and Critical Code Analysis
Programming languages or code can be examined through numerous analytical lenses. This project is a critical analysis of WordPress, a prevalent web content management system, applying four modes of inquiry. The project draws on theoretical perspectives and areas of study in media, software, platforms, code, language, and power structures. The applied research is based on Critical Code Studies, an interdisciplinary field of study that holds the potential as a theoretical lens and methodological toolkit to understand computational code beyond its function. The project begins with a critical code analysis of WordPress, examining its origins and source code and mapping selected vulnerabilities. An examination of the influence of digital and computational thinking follows this. The work also explores the intersection of code patching and vulnerability management and how code shapes our sense of control, trust, and empathy, ultimately arguing that a rhetorical-cultural lens can be used to better understand code\u27s controlling influence. Recurring themes throughout these analyses and observations are the connections to power and vulnerability in WordPress\u27 code and how cultural, processual, rhetorical, and ethical implications can be expressed through its code, creating a particular worldview. Code\u27s emergent properties help illustrate how human values and practices (e.g., empathy, aesthetics, language, and trust) become encoded in software design and how people perceive the software through its worldview. These connected analyses reveal cultural, processual, and vulnerability focal points and the influence these entanglements have concerning WordPress as code, software, and platform. WordPress is a complex sociotechnical platform worthy of further study, as is the interdisciplinary merging of theoretical perspectives and disciplines to critically examine code. Ultimately, this project helps further enrich the field by introducing focal points in code, examining sociocultural phenomena within the code, and offering techniques to apply critical code methods
An End, Once and for All: Mass Effect 3, Video Game Controversies, and the Fight for Player Agency
Since the success of the player-led Mass Effect 3 ending controversy, player-led video game controversies have become mainstream sites of industrial and ideological contention between developers, players, and the culture itself. This dissertation focuses on the history of the Mass Effect 3 ending controversy, the game’s specific textual qualities that encouraged player protest, and the negotiations between players and developers in online spaces that persuaded developers to alter the game’s ending based on player demands. Using the Mass Effect 3 as its primary object, this dissertation argues this controversy—as well as subsequent player-led video game controversies—was not simply the result of dissatisfaction with a single plot point or representation in the text or video game community, but the complex negotiation of creative differences between players and developers over the production and control of video game texts and culture. Video games and their controversies are rooted in the medium\u27s intrinsic qualities of interactivity, choice, labor and the need for shared production between developers and players to progress and produce a video game text, which encourages the development of a sense of agency and ownership over the text for both groups. This dissertation argues that video games are not just texts that developers create and that players play, but rather texts produced through the co-creative production practice that Axel Bruns has defined as “produsage”—texts where producers act in dual roles as users while users to also act as producers—that allow players a creative stake in the outcome of a video game text, encourages a sense of agency and ownership, and collapses traditional boundaries between developers and players. Video game controversies naturally arise when players perceive a loss of agency and control over the video game text and attempt to reclaim control over ownership of the text through controversy
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