Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Dyscalculia in higher education

This research study provides an insight into the experiences of dyscalculic students in higher education (HE). It explores the nature of dyscalculia from the student perspective, adopting a theoretical framework of the social model of disability combined with socio-cultural theory. This study was not aimed at understanding the neurological reasons for dyscalculia, but focussed on the social effects of being dyscalculic and how society can help support dyscalculic students within an HE context. The study s primary data collection method was 14 semi-structured interviews with officially identified dyscalculic students who were currently, or had been recently, studying in higher education in the UK. A participant selection method was utilised using a network of national learning support practitioners due to the limited number of participants available. A secondary data collection method involved reflective learning support sessions with two students. Data were collected across four research areas: the identification process, HE mathematics, learning support and categorisations of dyscalculia. A fifth area of fitness to practise could not be examined in any depth due to the lack of relevant participants, but the emerging data clearly pinpointed this as a significant area of political importance and identified a need for further research. A framework of five categories of dyscalculic HE student was used for data analysis. Participants who aligned with these categories tended to describe differing experiences or coping behaviours within each of the research areas. The main findings of the study were the importance of learning support practitioners in tackling mathematical anxiety, the categorisations of dyscalculic higher education students, the differing learning styles of dyscalculic and dyslexic students, and the emergence of four under-researched dyscalculic characteristics: iconicity, time perception, comprehension of the existence of numbers that are not whole and dyscalculic students understanding of non-cardinal numbers

Culture on Trial: Law, Custom, and Justice in a Taiwan Indigenous Court

Indiana University, Department of Anthropology, 2020Taiwan (Republic of China) has made incremental progress in recent decades towards securing the lifeways and lands of the island’s sixteen officially recognized indigenous Austronesian groups. Recently, the Taiwan government has turned to its judiciary and created a system of indigenous courts designed to be more respectful of indigenous peoples’ cultural differences and to help secure their judicial rights in Taiwan courtrooms. This study examines the face-to-face encounters occurring within Taiwan’s special indigenous court units, or yuanzhuminzu zhuanye fating, to answer the question: How do notions of indigenous culture and state law emerge in and shape the interactions of courtroom actors and outcomes in cases involving indigenous custom and tradition? Drawing on seventeen months of ethnographic research, this study follows the development and operation of the special indigenous court units in Hualien, Taiwan, a venue overseeing a high volume of cases addressing local indigenous peoples’ customs and traditions. In the special units, matters of ambiguity, encounter, and refusal were pivotal. Examining these themes, this research shows that rather than supporting a pluralistic framework, Taiwan’s special indigenous court units formed sites of significant state power that reinscribed Han Chinese preferences and understandings of indigeneity. That power, however, was never complete. Ambiguities in law, encounters with alterity, and strategic litigation created unanticipated fractures that permitted new expressions of indigenous identity and critiques of state power. In these fractures, the special units intermittently emerged as extra-ordinary institutional spaces for debate and experimentation with the capacity to reshape state and local understandings of belonging, custom, and law. More broadly, legal actors’ efforts to manage ambiguities in law, encounters between indigenous and non-indigenous views, and local practices of refusal exposed the fragility and instability of law in the modern state. Here, instability of law has consequences far beyond immediate disputes as indigenous and human rights constitute a critical resource for Taiwan’s enactment of sovereignty and serve as a mechanism for distinguishing the country from the People’s Republic of China. As such, this study sheds new light on articulations of indigenous identity, constructions of indigenous and human rights, performances of sovereignty, and practices in inchoate legal institutions drawn from the East Asia context

Assembling practice in clinical placements at a new medical school

Sociological studies of undergraduate medical education classically concentrated on students and tutors in the clinical environment and paid scant attention to course structures, systems of assessment or the institutional context in which medical education is embedded (Merton, Becker, Foucault, Atkinson, Bosk). Like them, this thesis offers a close ethnographic focus on the clinical experience, but combines it with a sociology of associations that explores the network of institutions and processes that impinge on it. Employing an ‘extended case method’ it focuses on the creation of a new medical school, and building on previous studies applies new materialist perspectives to explore the development and processes of regulation, the organization of supervision and assessment, and the embodied nature of practice (Burawoy). After an analysis of the original aims and development of the GMC’s Tomorrows’ Doctors it examines the school’s early years, focusing on the assessment of professionalism. It shows how the need to transfer information between the school and the NHS shaped assessment, and explores the clinical legitimation of the types of assessment to inform a discussion of their exchange-value and use-value. It presents the results of observations in clinical placements through Foucault’s perspective of the gaze and the ‘implicit labour of language’ in the assembly of practice, and by treating the senses used in patient consultations as mediators. It shows how patient-centered practice continues to reproduce a traditional individualized medicine and its hierarchy, and argues that patients in the community of practice serve as exemplars for comparison, learning, and the definition of the field of medicine itself. Following Kuhn’s assertion that scientific communities are best discovered by examining patterns of education and communication, this broader perspective makes an original contribution to the sociology of knowledge as well as to the fields of professional education and healthcare provision

Variations on the Loops: An investigation into the use of digital technology in music education in secondary schools

This thesis examines how nine teachers in four New Zealand secondary schools are using digital technology in music education in order to gain a greater understanding of how it is used, why it is used and what constraints may exist that hinder implementation. This thesis contends that although there was evidence of considerable use of digital technology in the schools, particularly in composition activities, a range of factors are influencing the choices teachers are making as to how they are using it. Despite the potential digital technology may have to transform classroom activities in music education, usage, in most cases, remains fundamentally conservative and heavily informed by traditional Western art music practices. A multi-site case study approach guided this investigation. Initial descriptive numerical data were gathered from teacher and student questionnaires. Further data came from the semi-structured interviews with teachers and small groups of students in each of the four cases. Findings from the data showed that although the teachers participating in the study had a range of digital technology available to them and they made use of it on a regular basis, a range of factors influenced the choices they made when using it in their classrooms. Amongst this range of factors influencing the choices they made, the most important appeared to be the requirements of an external examination system that is remains informed by Western art music practices and in particular on the cognitive dimensions of analysis, harmony, music history, traditional aural skills and an understanding of music notation and theory. Even though there are specific references to a range of styles and genres in the mandated national curriculum, Western art music practices remain most important to most of the teachers. Findings from the student data showed that the students participating in this study appeared to have a high level of digital literacy and were able to use digital technology in both formal and informal learning situations. A number of the students also discussed and demonstrated their informal music learning skills in performance and composition activities. For these students, contemporary music practices are very important to them and if they do not receive the information they need at school they know how to access it using a range of digital devices in an informal learning environment. This thesis contends that to be a successful music educator in the 21st century, the ability to work with Western art music practices and contemporary music practices is becoming an increasingly important skill