Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Internationalizing education: evaluating the growth of intercultural communication and competency in students through an international negotiation project using an online law office

Graduates will need to be able to recognize and appreciate culture in a way that minimizes conflict, promote understanding and to establish a relationship of trust and confidence. The need for competency in intercultural communication and an awareness of ethical challenges sets out a challenge for academics. This study examines the types of learning and characteristics developed by students when working on a ten‐week international negotiation project. It questions whether the study was an effective learning tool to raise consciousness of cultural diversity and effectively address the ‘stumbling blocks’ identified in intercultural communication. Using the findings from this, the study will consider the factors academics should consider when designing high quality, equitable and global study programmes in order for students to develop cross‐cultural capacities and aptitudes in order to be able to perform, professionally and socially, in a multicultural environment

Large emergency-response exercises: qualitative characteristics - a survey

Exercises, drills, or simulations are widely used, by governments, agencies and commercial organizations, to simulate serious incidents and train staff how to respond to them. International cooperation has led to increasingly large-scale exercises, often involving hundreds or even thousands of participants in many locations. The difference between ‘large’ and ‘small’ exercises is more than one of size: (a) Large exercises are more ‘experiential’ and more likely to undermine any model of reality that single organizations may create; (b) they create a ‘play space’ in which organizations and individuals act out their own needs and identifications, and a ritual with strong social implications; (c) group-analytic psychotherapy suggests that the emotions aroused in a large group may be stronger and more difficult to control. Feelings are an unacknowledged major factor in the success or failure of exercises; (d) successful large exercises help improve the nature of trust between individuals and the organizations they represent, changing it from a situational trust to a personal trust; (e) it is more difficult to learn from large exercises or to apply the lessons identified; (f) however, large exercises can help develop organizations and individuals. Exercises (and simulation in general) need to be approached from a broader multidisciplinary direction if their full potential is to be realized

Resources for Workplace Diversity: An Annotated Practitioner Guide to Information

[Excerpt] We are pleased to offer this updated edition of Resources for Workplace Diversity: An Annotated Practitioner Guide to Information, a unique offering of The Workplace Diversity Network. Our goal is to assemble a selected, annotated list of compelling and useful resources available to help diversity practitioners create organizations that are diverse and productive. As a working group, we agreed that useful resources would include newly published books as well as historic, seminal works that provide insight and illumination irrelevant of their age. In the updated edition, we’ve expanded existing sections, added new ones and referenced online access where possible. Designed with practitioner needs in mind, Resources for Workplace Diversity is meant to be an evolving document, one that will grow according to the needs and recommendations of its users. To capture the advantage of networking, we invite you to suggest additional resources that you have found to be valuable

Games for a new climate: experiencing the complexity of future risks

This repository item contains a single issue of the Pardee Center Task Force Reports, a publication series that began publishing in 2009 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.This report is a product of the Pardee Center Task Force on Games for a New Climate, which met at Pardee House at Boston University in March 2012. The 12-member Task Force was convened on behalf of the Pardee Center by Visiting Research Fellow Pablo Suarez in collaboration with the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre to “explore the potential of participatory, game-based processes for accelerating learning, fostering dialogue, and promoting action through real-world decisions affecting the longer-range future, with an emphasis on humanitarian and development work, particularly involving climate risk management.” Compiled and edited by Janot Mendler de Suarez, Pablo Suarez and Carina Bachofen, the report includes contributions from all of the Task Force members and provides a detailed exploration of the current and potential ways in which games can be used to help a variety of stakeholders – including subsistence farmers, humanitarian workers, scientists, policymakers, and donors – to both understand and experience the difficulty and risks involved related to decision-making in a complex and uncertain future. The dozen Task Force experts who contributed to the report represent academic institutions, humanitarian organization, other non-governmental organizations, and game design firms with backgrounds ranging from climate modeling and anthropology to community-level disaster management and national and global policymaking as well as game design.Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centr

Amalgamating sustainable design strategies into architectural curricula

In the era of climate change, rising sea levels, the hole in the ozone layer and current food crisis, sustainability is no longer a matter of choice; it is a must. While the term sustainability manages to embed itself in all aspects of contemporary life, sustainability in the built environment requires special attention. Designs created by architects and planners play a fundamental part in shaping the way we live, behave and interact with our surroundings. Smith (2001) argued that instilling sustainable design in curricula at schools of architecture is a significant method of encouraging sustainable architectural design in practice. This is particularly important in non-sustainable societies such as those of the Middle East. For these reasons, this study aims at exploring ‘sustainability strategies,’ as they may be described, adopted in different schools of architecture. The research surveys architectural curricula at different Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) exempted schools of Architecture, at part 1 and 2 levels. Meanwhile, it also observes the contradiction and difficulties of teaching sustainable architectural design in Egyptian and Middle Eastern societies, whose cultural fabric does not encourage environmental awareness. Finally, the study attempts to investigate, in an increased level of detail, how sustainable design education fits into the undergraduate and postgraduate curricula of the Architectural Engineering and Environmental Design Department (AEED) at the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport (AASTMT) in Alexandria, Egypt. The paper concludes that the proper application of sustainable design strategies at early stages of architecture education has developed architects with sturdy understanding of their environment, climate and local identity, which can never happen if this is addressed in postgraduate studies or at later stages of the Architecture career

Values-Based Network Leadership in an Interconnected World

This paper describes values-based network leadership conceptually aligned to systems science, principles of networks, moral and ethical development, and connectivism. Values-based network leadership places importance on a leader\u27s repertoire of skills for stewarding a culture of purpose and calling among distributed teams in a globally interconnected world. Values-based network leadership is applicable for any leader needing to align interdependent effort by networks of teams operating across virtual and physical environments to achieve a collective purpose. An open-learning ecosystem is also described to help leaders address the development of strengths associated with building trust and relationships across networks of teams, aligned under a higher purpose and calling, possessing moral fiber, resilient in the face of complexity, reflectively competent to adapt as interconnected efforts evolve and change within multicultural environments, and able to figure out new ways to do something never done before

East Lancashire Research 2008

East Lancashire Research 200