Being for nature: Exploring the design of pedagogical greenspaces to support children’s connection to nature in the urban context

Children today are born into a complex and contradictory world of entwined social and ecological problems with increasing levels of uncertainty. As the number of plant and animal species plummets in what scientists describe as the sixth mass extinction, the flow of people to urban areas continues to rise. Simultaneously, the decline of children’s routine experience of nature is widely reported with direct impacts on health, wellbeing and the development of positive environmental attitudes. In the nexus of these interrelated problems lies an opportunity for urban design which promotes both ecosystem and human flourishing. The purpose of this thesis is to critically examine how the design of pedagogical green spaces, namely school yards and urban parks can enhance children’s connection to nature. For the main research component, I conducted a five-week observational study of outdoor schools in Stockholm. The purpose of the study was to record the relation between the qualities of various significant nature situations and the physical properties of the spaces that they occurred within. The results suggest that it is possible to determine which physical elements are frequently part of significant nature situations. By including these elements within the design of pedagogical greenspaces, it is likely that a high potential for nature connection could be provided. Furthermore, the results show the qualities of significant nature situations can be divided into 5 key categories: restorative experiences, creative experiences, sensory experiences, physical free play and nature school which were recorded alongside the physical properties present in each situation. The results show that the first four categories are linked to specific physical attributes while nature school activities utilised a combination of different properties. Consequently, there is a potential to design greenspaces which support specific types of nature situations. The results can be utilised by urban planners and designers as a guide for designing and evaluating pedagogical greenspaces based on the development of different types of significant nature situations. An important implication of the study is the finding that many of the physical properties that enhance the likelihood of human nature connection, occur within healthy ecosystems and as such is a powerful motivator for development of urban greenspaces that simultaneously enhance ecosystem resilience with human health and wellbeing

Student-Directed Blended Learning with Facebook Groups and Streaming Media: Media in Asia at Furman University

Furman University prizes itself on being an engaged learning, liberal arts institution with extensive faculty-student interaction. 96% of students live on campus, leading some to question whether reducing face-to-face instructional time makes any sense pedagogically. Coming from a different institution that encouraged faculty to create hybrid courses, and seeing the creativity and freedom that offered, I wanted to experiment with the format in this new institutional environment. Would it still be effective? What adaptations would be necessary, and how would students react to this different course format? In Fall 2013, I taught a carefully designed blended learning course that met once weekly for two hours and offered students extensive choices for meeting the course and unit learning objectives, using Facebook groups to report on and discuss their progress and communicate with their peers. This case study examines the course experience and outcomes. It discusses practical and logistical elements of teaching a flipped-classroom, hybrid version of a general-education, Asian Studies course. The case study delves into student responses to the freedom provided by the course requirements and the implications of using Facebook as a learning management system. Finally, the case study analyzes the role of courses like Media in Asia at a residential campus like Furman University and the broader role of hybrid pedagogy in the liberal arts context. It concludes with recommendations for institutional support of hybrid course initiatives

6th International Conference on Multimodality - Conference guide with abstracts

The aim of the conference was to contribute to moving forward the field of multimodal research and to help connect the diverse community of scholars working within it. 6ICOM is a place where we can explore the full range of different ways in which multimodality has been taken up and where we can recognize their points of connection. The conference was organised with support from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, who fund MODE. MODE is a node of the National Centre for Research Methods based in the Institute of Education and aims to develop and promote multimodal methods for researching digital data and environments. 6ICOM’s programme includes an impressive set of paper presentations (125) and invited keynotes (5). The presenters engage with a wide range of disciplines, ideas and methods, reflecting the diverse character of multimodality and latest developments in the field. They speak to a range of contexts, theoretical and methodological approaches, technologies and types of data

Networked young citizens in China: exploring cybercivic participation and learning among university students

This study explores how young citizens in China engage in civic life by the use of social media. It is inspired by an understanding of young people as the digital generation and as present citizens. Previous literature has identified the rise of online civic participation as a possible solution for youth political ignorance and political apathy. However, the lack of contextualised cases and detailed investigations leads to this virtual ethnographic study, which proposes a notion of youth cybercivic participation and examines its potential for constructing a transformed public sphere and for contributing to a transformed process of Chinese democratisation. The thesis aims to discuss the contribution of youth cybercivic participation to education reform in the digital age, especially from the perspectives of young people. The study focuses on a group of 18-24-year-old Chinese university students. Data was collected through online participant observation and offline in-depth interviews. Research findings reveal that popular civic topics that students raised online include patriotism, volunteering, social justice, lifestyle politics, local and global involvement, and other controversial issues. The forms of cybercivic engagement include lurking, announcing, promoting, and community-constructing. Various factors may trigger or hinder students’ participation, such as offline civic interests, needs, sense of political efficacy, media using habits and civic capability. In terms of the influence of their participation, students reported that they felt more informed, enlightened, and powerful online, while some of them remained confused, cynical and powerless offline. Four categories of civic identities were identified: insouciant bystanders, interested participants, good citizens and active citizens. I argue that social media have expanded and diversified youth civic awareness and knowledge, but have not automatically developed youth civic capabilities. Consequently, citizenship education should explore a new model of reflective cybercivic learning which integrates dutiful and actualising civic learning

Animating the Ethical Demand:Exploring user dispositions in industry innovation cases through animation-based sketching

This paper addresses the challenge of attaining ethical user stances during the design process of products and services and proposes animation-based sketching as a design method, which supports elaborating and examining different ethical stances towards the user. The discussion is qualified by an empirical study of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in a Triple Helix constellation. Using a three-week long innovation workshop, UCrAc, involving 16 Danish companies and organisations and 142 students as empirical data, we discuss how animation-based sketching can explore not yet existing user dispositions, as well as create an incentive for ethical conduct in development and innovation processes. The ethical fulcrum evolves around Løgstrup's Ethical Demand and his notion of spontaneous life manifestations. From this, three ethical stances are developed; apathy, sympathy and empathy. By exploring both apathetic and sympathetic views, the ethical reflections are more nuanced as a result of actually seeing the user experience simulated through different user dispositions. Exploring the three ethical stances by visualising real use cases with the technologies simulated as already being implemented makes the life manifestations of the users in context visible. We present and discuss how animation-based sketching can support the elaboration and examination of different ethical stances towards the user in the product and service development process. Finally we present a framework for creating narrative representations of emerging technology use cases, which invite to reflection upon the ethics of the user experience.</jats:p

Relationship marketing based competing model for knowledge sharing in incubator

Knowledge sharing (KS) is referred to as an important strategy for improving innovation, productivity, efficiency and competitiveness of organizations. Outcomes of KS are explained from different standpoints. However, previous studies significantly fail to explore the outcomes of KS from a relationship marketing (RM) perspective. This study examined the outcomes of KS on an organization’s performance and its relationship with customers in business incubators. The study demonstrated that individual KS promoted by social relations, positively affect relationship with customers. Drawing on the theoretical foundations of social capital theory and relationship marketing concepts, a conceptual framework was formulated to examine the impact of KS on organizational performance and customer relationship. Tenant startup team members in business incubators in Malaysia were the units of analysis. A random sampling method was employed to derive the sample size from the population. This quantitative study used a cross-sectional survey method data which was collected from 104 respondents. Sixteen hypothetical relationships were examined by adopting the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) based on the Partial Least Squares (PLS) using SmartPLS 2.0. Results suggest that the model has a good predictive ability. In addition, results revealed that the overall relationship between KS and customer relationship is significant. The findings indicate that KS is perceived to have a positive effect on customer relationship as well as a positive influence on the work performance in individuals, teams and organizations. A competing model is proposed based on the findings to better portray the scenario in the Malaysian context. This research expands the understanding of the effects of KS on organizations from the RM perspective in the business incubators of Malaysia

Accessibility of Health Data Representations for Older Adults: Challenges and Opportunities for Design

Health data of consumer off-the-shelf wearable devices is often conveyed to users through visual data representations and analyses. However, this is not always accessible to people with disabilities or older people due to low vision, cognitive impairments or literacy issues. Due to trade-offs between aesthetics predominance or information overload, real-time user feedback may not be conveyed easily from sensor devices through visual cues like graphs and texts. These difficulties may hinder critical data understanding. Additional auditory and tactile feedback can also provide immediate and accessible cues from these wearable devices, but it is necessary to understand existing data representation limitations initially. To avoid higher cognitive and visual overload, auditory and haptic cues can be designed to complement, replace or reinforce visual cues. In this paper, we outline the challenges in existing data representation and the necessary evidence to enhance the accessibility of health information from personal sensing devices used to monitor health parameters such as blood pressure, sleep, activity, heart rate and more. By creating innovative and inclusive user feedback, users will likely want to engage and interact with new devices and their own data

Year of the Golden Jubilee: Culture Change in the Past, Present and Future

Part 1 of the IACCP Proceedings contains the abstracts and links to the recordings of the XXVI Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2022. (c) 2023, International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychologyhttps://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/iaccp_proceedings/1011/thumbnail.jp