Anti-Creativity, Ambiguity and the Imposition of Order

Though there are many ways of describing markers of creativity, one of the most persuasive was one of the earliest we encountered: the ability to tolerate ambiguity. It is precisely that ambiguity, valued in the arts for its richness of interpretive possibility, that is perhaps most at risk in the current sector and institutional climate of imposed order. An insistence on a rigidly enforced language of learning outcomes seems to value tidiness and clarity over the excitement and engagement of open-ended exploration. An emerging pedagogical correctness (focusing on easily assessable and quantifiable outcomes) threatens invention and critical questioning as not only an aim for students but also for teachers as part of the task of developing engagement with the culture of a specific discipline. This paper will, first, explore the idea of tolerance of ambiguity through the history of its critical discussion and relation to notions of metaphor and imagination. It will then look at the history and experience of participants in one specific group exercise designed to address issues of ambiguity, categorization and organisation. This exercise, drawing on the recognition of and imaginative connection between properties of natural objects, has been used widely in a range of educational and developmental settings with sometimes startling and certainly memorable results. It may not always, however, be seen as conforming to current demands for rigid clarity of intentions and learning outcomes, and can raise issues of the legitimacy of questioning, surprise and hidden agendas as pedagogical strategies and prompts to imaginative leaps. Finally, it will contextualise this discussion by looking in a broader way at the tone of imposed order in pedagogical literature, its application in e-learning methodology, and the ways that it may tend to discourage rather than reinforce cultures of creativity in teaching practice

Composing graphical user interfaces in a purely functional language

This thesis is about building interactive graphical user interfaces in a compositional manner. Graphical user interface application hold out the promise of providing users with an interactive, graphical medium by which they can carry out tasks more effectively and conveniently. The application aids the user to solve some task. Conceptually, the user is in charge of the graphical medium, controlling the order and the rate at which individual actions are performed. This user-centred nature of graphical user interfaces has considerable ramifications for how software is structured. Since the application now services the user rather than the other way around, it has to be capable of responding to the user's actions when and in whatever order they might occur. This transfer of overall control towards the user places heavy burden on programming systems, a burden that many systems don't support too well. Why? Because the application now has to be structured so that it is responsive to whatever action the user may perform at any time. The main contribution of this thesis is to present a compositional approach to constructing graphical user interface applications in a purely functional programming language The thesis is concerned with the software techniques used to program graphical user interface applications, and not directly with their design. A starting point for the work presented here was to examine whether an approach based on functional programming could improve how graphical user interfaces are built. Functional programming languages, and Haskell in particular, contain a number of distinctive features such as higher-order functions, polymorphic type systems, lazy evaluation, and systematic overloading, that together pack quite a punch, at least according to proponents of these languages. A secondary contribution of this thesis is to present a compositional user interface framework called Haggis, which makes good use of current functional programming techniques. The thesis evaluates the properties of this framework by comparing it to existing systems

Teaching programming with computational and informational thinking

Computers are the dominant technology of the early 21st century: pretty well all aspects of economic, social and personal life are now unthinkable without them. In turn, computer hardware is controlled by software, that is, codes written in programming languages. Programming, the construction of software, is thus a fundamental activity, in which millions of people are engaged worldwide, and the teaching of programming is long established in international secondary and higher education. Yet, going on 70 years after the first computers were built, there is no well-established pedagogy for teaching programming. There has certainly been no shortage of approaches. However, these have often been driven by fashion, an enthusiastic amateurism or a wish to follow best industrial practice, which, while appropriate for mature professionals, is poorly suited to novice programmers. Much of the difficulty lies in the very close relationship between problem solving and programming. Once a problem is well characterised it is relatively straightforward to realise a solution in software. However, teaching problem solving is, if anything, less well understood than teaching programming. Problem solving seems to be a creative, holistic, dialectical, multi-dimensional, iterative process. While there are well established techniques for analysing problems, arbitrary problems cannot be solved by rote, by mechanically applying techniques in some prescribed linear order. Furthermore, historically, approaches to teaching programming have failed to account for this complexity in problem solving, focusing strongly on programming itself and, if at all, only partially and superficially exploring problem solving. Recently, an integrated approach to problem solving and programming called Computational Thinking (CT) (Wing, 2006) has gained considerable currency. CT has the enormous advantage over prior approaches of strongly emphasising problem solving and of making explicit core techniques. Nonetheless, there is still a tendency to view CT as prescriptive rather than creative, engendering scholastic arguments about the nature and status of CT techniques. Programming at heart is concerned with processing information but many accounts of CT emphasise processing over information rather than seeing then as intimately related. In this paper, while acknowledging and building on the strengths of CT, I argue that understanding the form and structure of information should be primary in any pedagogy of programming

A Concise History of Western Music for Film-makers

The use of music in films has become almost ubiquitous in both drama and documentary. Music is used regularly in cinema, broadcasting and more recently, in interactive media. Yet audiences often criticise makers for its overuse, especially in actuality television. The problem is not merely concerned with the volume and placement of music, but of the internal nature and structure of the musical material itself. This article contextualises the history of western music in a way which may be able to help inform film makers and broadcasters about how music might be used more advantageously to accompany moving pictures

Enhancing preparation for higher education

Evidence from national and international studies points to the lack of preparation for Higher Education (HE) as a major factor for student non-completion of courses. This paper reports the findings of a study designed to enhance potential students’ understandings of the expectations of independent learning and assessment. It seeks to provide evidence of the ways in which students and their families can be supported in their understanding of the values and practices of a HE institution. Data are drawn from questionnaires distributed to potential pre-entry students and their parents/carers/friends. The findings illustrate that in allowing for opportunities for pre-entry students to develop a transparent understanding of the expectations of HE study, that they can be supported in the transition to HE by parents/carers/friends. It is hoped that the outcomes of this research will contribute to a more informed transition to HE

Importance of meteorological variables for aeroplankton dispersal in an urban environment

Passive wind dispersal is one of the major mechanisms through which organisms disperse and colonize new areas. The detailed comprehension of which factors affect this process may help to preserve its efficiency for years to come. This is especially important in the current context of climate change, which may seriously alter weather regimes that drive dispersal, and is crucial in urban contexts, where biodiversity is dramatically threatened by pollution and fragmentation of natural patches. Despite its interest, the analysis of factors affecting aeroplankton dispersal in urban environments is rare in literature. We sampled aeroplankton community uninterruptedly every 4 hours from 17th May to 19th September 2011 in the urban garden of Parco d'Orléans, within the campus of the University of Palermo (Sicily). Sampling was performed using a Johnson-Taylor suction trap with automatized sample storing. Weather variables were recorded at a local meteorological station. Overall, 11,739 insects were caught during the present study, about 60% of these belonged to the order Hymenoptera, with particular presence of families Agaonidae and Formicidae. The suction trap also captured specimens of very small size, and in some cases, species caught were new records for Italy. Composition and abundance of aeroplankton community was influenced by alternation day/night, as well as by daily fluctuations of climatic variables, for example fluctuating temperature . The diversity of samples was also studied and resulted higher when wind blew from the nearby green area. Our findings confirm that passive transport of arthropods strictly depends on weather conditions, and that the presence of natural areas within the urban environment significantly contribute to raise aeroplankton diversity, eventually fuelling overall biodiversity at a local scale. We discuss how climate change may affect future dispersal of these organisms

Interpreting Rich Pictures using Content Analysis

Rich pictures have roots in soft systems and are widely used by practitioners to understand complex problems from many stakeholder viewpoints. This study uses rich pictures as a tool for collaborative drawing to explore international student experience in Scotland. Historically rich pictures are difficult to interpret and are often used to gain a holistic understanding of a system of concern and thus are disregarded in terms of providing in-depth qualitative data. We will explore the use of inter-coder content analysis to gain a deep understanding of group thinking. In the context of this study, using content analysis, our findings revealed a detailed understanding of Scottish culture and traditions from the perspective of international students. We determine that visuals have a vast capacity to communicate, irrespective of possible language, culture and education barriers, and thus offer unique insight into a complex system of stakeholder understanding

Hidden expectations: Scaffolding subject specialists' genre knowledge of the assignments they set

Subject specialists’ knowledge of academic and disciplinary literacy is often tacit. We tackle the issue of how to elicit subject specialists’ tacit knowledge in order to develop their pedagogical practices and enable them to communicate this knowledge to students. Drawing on theories of genre and metacognition, a professional development activity was designed and delivered. Our aims were to (1) build participants’ genre knowledge and (2) scaffold metacognitive awareness of how genre knowledge can enhance their pedagogical practices. The findings reveal that participants built a genre-based understanding of academic literacy and that the tasks provided them with an accessible framework to articulate and reflect upon their knowledge of disciplinary literacy. Participants gained metacognitive awareness of misalignments between what they teach and what they expect from students, their assumptions about students’ prior learning and genre-based strategies to adapt their practice to students’ needs. Our approach provides a theoretically grounded professional development tool for the HE sector

Palm yellows phytoplasmas and their genetic classification

Palm yellows phytoplasmas have been a subject of debate because of two recent outbreaks. Firstly, a lethal yellowing-type phytoplasma disease was recorded on a number of palm species of mainly the genus Phoenix in Florida in 2008. Shortly afterwards, Sabal palmetto which has never been threatened by a phytoplasma before, was suddenly attacked by a phytoplasma strain similar to the one that attacked Phoenix in 2008. Both these recent outbreaks have made phytoplasmologists realize the need to characterize palm phytoplasma strains in order to rapidly determine the phytoplasma palm yellows in future disease outbreaks. Various workers have made attempts to genetically characterize palm phytoplasmas but a lot of crucial knowledge is still lacking. This review focuses on the little progress that has been made to characterize palm phytoplasmas and we also recommend further steps to provide more tools for characterization.Keywords: Cocos nucifera, palm yellows phytoplasmas, Sabal palmetto, Phoenix.African Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 12(22), pp. 3376-338