Proceedings of the Twentieth Conference of the Association of Christians in the Mathematical Sciences

The proceedings of the twentieth conference of the Associate of Christians in the Mathematical Sciences held at Redeemer University College from May 27-30, 2015

Understanding what influences engineering faculty course decisions using activity systems analysis

Engineering faculty members often publish about their courses, but what is lacking from these articles is an understanding of why they make the decisions they make during the course design activity. Using cultural historical activity theory as a theoretical framework, this dissertation looks at how seven award-winning engineering faculty members approach their syllabus and their course. The course syllabus acted as a tool for faculty to both share about their course and course design process, and to communicate their beliefs to their students and to others within their disciplinary communities. However, the course syllabus was not always used in the way that participant faculty intended, and was often under-utilized by many of the students. As a result, participant faculty relied on their beliefs about teaching and learning, and the stakeholder position they held in their departments, as tools as they wrote their course syllabuses and taught their courses

Reading the Game: Exploring Narratives in Video Games as Literary Texts

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)Video games are increasingly recognized as powerful tools for learning in classrooms. However, they are widely neglected in the field of English, particularly as objects worthy of literary study. This project argues the place of video games as objects of literary study and criticism, combining the theories of Espen Aarseth, Ian Bogost, Henry Jenkins, and James Paul Gee. The author of this study presents an approach to literary criticism of video games that he names “player-generated narratives.” Through player-generated narratives, players as readers of video games create loci for interpretative strategies that lead to both decoding and critical inspection of game narratives. This project includes a case-study of the video game Undertale taught in multiple college literature classrooms over the course of a year. Results of the study show that a video game introduced as a work of literature to a classroom increases participation, actives disengaged students, and connects literary concepts across media through multimodal learning. The project concludes with a chapter discussing applications of video games as texts in literature classrooms, including addressing the practical concerns of migrating video games into an educational setting

Montage As A Participatory System: Interactions with the Moving Image

Full version unavailable due to 3rd party copyright restrictionsRecent developments in network culture suggest a weakening of hierarchical narratives of power and representation. Online technologies of distributed authorship appear to nurture a complex, speculative, contradictory and contingent realism. Yet there is a continuing deficit where the moving image is concerned, its very form appearing resistant to the dynamic throughputs and change models of real-time interaction. If the task is not to suspend but encourage disbelief as a condition in the user, how can this be approached as a design problem? In the attempt to build a series of design projects suggesting open architectures for the moving image, might a variety of (pre-digital) precursors from the worlds of art, architecture and film offer the designer models for inspiration or adaptation? A series of projects have been undertaken. Each investigates the composite moving image, specifically in the context of real-time computation and interaction. This arose from a desire to interrogate the qualia of the moving image within interactive systems, relative to a range of behaviours and/or observer positions, which attempt to situate users as conscious compositors. This is explored in the thesis through reflecting on a series of experimental interfaces designed for real time composition in performance, exhibition and online contexts

The Application of Text Mining and Data Visualization Techniques to Textual Corpus Exploration

Unstructured data in the digital universe is growing rapidly and shows no evidence of slowing anytime soon. With the acceleration of growth in digital data being generated and stored on the World Wide Web, the prospect of information overload is much more prevalent now than it has been in the past. As a preemptive analytic measure, organizations across many industries have begun implementing text mining techniques to analyze such large sources of unstructured data. Utilizing various text mining techniques such as n -gram analysis, document and term frequency analysis, correlation analysis, and topic modeling methodologies, this research seeks to develop a tool to allow analysts to maneuver effectively and efficiently through large corpuses of potentially unknown textual data. Additionally, this research explores two notional data exploration scenarios through a large corpus of text data, each exhibiting unique navigation methods analysts may elect to take. Research concludes with the validation of inferential results obtained through each corpus’s exploration scenario

Online and Distance Education for a Connected World

Learning at a distance and learning online are growing in scale and importance in higher education, presenting opportunities for large scale, inclusive, flexible and engaging learning. These modes of learning swept the world in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The many challenges of providing effective education online and remotely have been acknowledged, particularly by those who rapidly jumped into online and distance education during the crisis. This volume, edited by the University of London’s Centre for Online and Distance Education, addresses the practice and theory of online and distance education, building on knowledge and expertise developed in the University over some 150 years. The University is currently providing distance transnational education to around 50,000 students in more than 180 countries around the world. Throughout the book, contributors explore important principles and highlight successful practices in areas including course design and pedagogy, online assessment, open education, inclusive practice, and enabling student voice. Case studies illustrate prominent issues and approaches. Together, the chapters offer current and future leaders and practitioners a practical, productive, practice- and theory-informed account of the present and likely future state of online and distance higher education worldwide

Linking Differential Equations to Social Justice and Environmental Concerns

Special issue of the CODEE Journal in honor of its founder, Professor Robert Borrelli

Linking Differential Equations to Social Justice and Environmental Concerns

Special issue of the CODEE Journal in honor of its founder, Professor Robert Borrelli