1,021 research outputs found
A Critical Review Of Post-Secondary Education Writing During A 21st Century Education Revolution
Educational materials are effective instruments which provide information and report new discoveries uncovered by researchers in specific areas of academia. Higher education, like other education institutions, rely on instructional materials to inform its practice of educating adult learners. In post-secondary education, developmental English programs are tasked with meeting the needs of dynamic populations, thus there is a continuous need for research in this area to support its changing landscape. However, the majority of scholarly thought in this area centers on K-12 reading and writing. This paucity presents a phenomenon to the post-secondary community. This research study uses a qualitative content analysis to examine peer-reviewed journals from 2003-2017, developmental online websites, and a government issued document directed toward reforming post-secondary developmental education programs. These highly relevant sources aid educators in discovering informational support to apply best practices for student success. Developmental education serves the purpose of addressing literacy gaps for students transitioning to college-level work. The findings here illuminate the dearth of material offered to developmental educators. This study suggests the field of literacy research is fragmented and highlights an apparent blind spot in scholarly literature with regard to English writing instruction. This poses a quandary for post-secondary literacy researchers in the 21st century and establishes the necessity for the literacy research community to commit future scholarship toward equipping college educators teaching writing instruction to underprepared adult learners
A War of Words: The Forms and Functions of Voice-Over in the American World War II Film — An Interdisciplinary Analysis
Aside from being American World War II films, what else do the following films have in common? The Big Red One; Hacksaw Ridge; Harts War; Mister Roberts; Stalag 17; and The Thin Red Line — all have voice-over in them. These, and hundreds of other war films have voice-overs that are sometimes the thoughts of a fearful soldier; the wry observations of a participant-observer; or the declarations of all-knowing authoritative figures. There are voice-overs blasted out through a ships PA system; as the reading of a heart-breaking letter; or as the words of a dead comrade, heard again in the mind of a haunted soldier. This thesis questions why is voice-over such a recurring phenomenon in these films? Why is it conveyed in so many different forms? What are the terms for those different forms? What are their narrative functions?
A core component of this thesis is a new taxonomy of the six distinct forms of voice-over: acousmatic, audioemic, epistolary, objective, omniscient, and subjective. However, the project is more than a structuralist taxonomy that merely serves to identify, and define those forms. It is also a close examination of their narrative functions beyond the unimaginative trope that voice-over in war films is simply a convenient storytelling device. Through interdisciplinarity — combined with a realist framework — I probe the correlations between: the conditions, codification, and suppression of speech within the U.S. military, and the manifestations of that experience through the cinematic device, and genre convention of voice-over.
In addition, I present a radically new interpretation of the voice-overs in The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998) as being both a choric meta-memorial to James Jones; and a Greek tragedy — with its replication of the stagecraft of Aeschylus, in its use of the cosmic frame, and the inclusion of a collective character, which I have named ‘The Chorus of Unknown Soldiers’.
The overall result is a more logical, and nuanced explanation of the forms, functions, and prevalent use of voice-over in the American World War II film
Situated Andragogy: Exploring the Interrelationships Between People, Place and Practice on Novel Experiential Learning Journeys of Freelance Learner-Practitioners Working in the UK Film and High-End Television Industries
The UK Film and High-End Television production workforce is predominantly employed on a project-by project basis, and employment contracts are often freelance. With the shift in production techniques from analogue (celluloid film) to digital together with the development of new digital technologies, the production workforce needs to engage in continual learning to sustain a career in technical craft areas of film production. Although some training is available through sector bodies such as Skillset, there are a number of barriers to accessing training. For example, the cost of taking time away from self-employed work to engage in the training and the challenge that learner-practitioners need to have a period of working in the industry before they can access some resources can inhibit access to these initiatives.
This situation invokes two questions. First, why does operational skills development take place for learner-practitioners working in precarious employment and in the absence of formal training schemes such as those offered by BFI and Skillset? Secondly, if learning is occurring in this precarious workplace setting, can these learning experiences be expressed graphically by way of a learning model?
The thesis builds on the relatively un-researched area of experiential learning within the context of a freelance workplace. The contribution of the research lies in the way it considers the lived experiences of learner-practitioners working in, or closely with, the camera production unit, in eight different production contexts, and their personal learning journeys.
The research has analysed qualitative data from a series of semi-structured interviews with working practitioners, through the application of four theoretical frameworks: Fiske (1992), Garnett & O’Beirne (2013), Jarvis (2004) and Russ-Eft (2011), identifying patterns and trends in the lived experiences of these practitioners. From this analysis, a model expressing the learner-practitioner’s individual experiential learning journey is proposed. The new model shows how the relationship between people and place influences the experiential learning journey of practitioners. The model structures the range of pathways an individual learner-practitioner can choose to take within their own experiential learning journey. The choice of pathways are not only influenced by external factors, but also influence and inform (and are shaped by) an individual’s approach to learning, leading to the continued development of the learner-practitioners’ practice. The new experiential learning model expresses the holistic experiences of freelance learner-practitioners within the technical-craft domain of film production.
The model provides a contribution to experiential learning, enabling freelance learner-practitioners to explicitly explore the range of opportunities available to them to engage in experiential learning. Practitioners can use the model to reflect on their learning experiences and inform decisions on how to develop and maintain their socio-technical skills, navigating a successful career in an industry of continued technological change. This research contributes to the theory of experiential learning that takes place within a freelance workplace
Role-Playing Reality: Queer Theory, New Materialisms, and Digital Role-Play
This thesis works to reconfigure who or what the situated agencies in digital role-play are to realise the more-than-human dimensions and embodiments of play. In doing so, it finds that all the collaborators in digital role-play [players, avatars, interfaces, networks, software, media content, art, performances, gestics, imaginings, alongside other games] disclose the emergent and latent relations and sensations that characterise play. In recognising all these elements as vital and active companions in role-play, this work addresses the question of what the realities of digital role-play are: where realities signify the actualities of what happens when human and nonhuman bodies entangle during play as well as the substances of reality – performance and affect, matter and meaning, space and time – all of which determine role-play. World of Warcraft (Blizzard 2004-) is taken as the primary example in this thesis, though the affordances of its role-players are irradiated alongside other games, art, literature, performances, and materials that likewise ‘play’ with fiction. Alongside these modalities, the Argent Archives, a massive collection of content posted by role-players who play World of Warcraft, evidences the lifeworlds of digital role-play. Since digital role-play is rarely studied, and the Argent Archives never so, this thesis explores foundational questions regarding the realities of play: what they comprise and how players actively create emergent gameworlds with their arts and acts. This thesis employs a methodology of promiscuity, that is, promiscuity as method in order to reckon with the entanglements of play. Inspired by the works of queer theorists and new materialists, which centre bodies, affects, and entanglements, a correspondingly promiscuous methodology follows the labyrinthine folds of encounter that define play while emphasising its intimate, sensual, troubling, and perverse aspects
Fictional Practices of Spirituality I: Interactive Media
"Fictional Practices of Spirituality" provides critical insight into the implementation of belief, mysticism, religion, and spirituality into worlds of fiction, be it interactive or non-interactive. This first volume focuses on interactive, virtual worlds - may that be the digital realms of video games and VR applications or the imaginary spaces of life action role-playing and soul-searching practices. It features analyses of spirituality as gameplay facilitator, sacred spaces and architecture in video game geography, religion in video games and spiritual acts and their dramaturgic function in video games, tabletop, or LARP, among other topics. The contributors offer a first-time ever comprehensive overview of play-rites as spiritual incentives and playful spirituality in various medial incarnations
From the Ground Up: Designerly Knowledge in Human-Drone Interaction
There are flying robots out there — you may have seen and heard them, droning over your head. Drones have expanded our human capacities, lifting our sight to the skies, but not without generating intricate experiences. How are these machines being designed and researched? What design methods, approaches, and philosophies are relevant to the study of the development (or decline) of drones in society? In this thesis, I argue that we must re-frame how drones are studied, from the ground up, through a design stance. I invite you to take a journey with me, with changing lenses from the work of others to my own intimate relationship with this technology. My work relies on exploring the fringes of design research: understudied groups such as children, alternative design approaches such as soma design, and peripheral methods such as autoethnography.This thesis includes four articles discussing perspectives on designerly knowledge, composing a frame surrounding the notion that we may be missing out on some of the aspects of the wicked nature of human-drone interaction (HDI) design. The methods are poised on phenomenology and narratives, and supported by the assumption that any subject of study is a sociotechnical assemblage. Starting through a first-person perspective, I offer a contribution to the gap in research through a longitudinal autoethnographic study conducted with my children. The second paper comes in the form of a pictorial expressing a first-person experience during a design research workshop, and what that meant for my relationship with drones as a research material. The third paper leaps into a Research through Design project, challenging the solutionist drone and offering instead the first steps in a concept-driven design of the unlikely pairing of drones and breathing. The fourth paper returns to the pictorial form, suggesting a method for visual conversations between researchers through the tangible qualities of sketches and illustrations. Central to this thesis, is the argument for designerly approaches in HDI and championing the need for alternative forms of publication and research. To that end, I include two publications in the form of pictorials: a publication format relying on visual knowledge and with growing interest in the HCI community
Examining Psychosocial Characteristics of Female Serial Murderers
Previous studies of serial murderers have focused primarily on male serial murderers.The reason for this is unknown, but is primarily reflective of media patterns, gender roles, and social norms that often exclude females from conversations surrounding female serial murder. This study focused on the psychosocial characteristics of female serial murderers. Both solo female serial murderers and serial murderers who worked with one partner were studied. Using a grounded theory approach, based on the review of 11 secondary data case studies, 12 female serial murderers were studied; six who murdered individually and six who murdered within a team. Six main themes emerged: presence of early childhood trauma, presence of antisocial behavior, presence of sexual deviance, presence of team disintegration, and presence of romantic instability. These findings contribute to the knowledge about female serial murderers. Positive social change may occur through confirmation of previous findings and additional knowledge for law enforcement, behavioral analysts, and forensic professionals, which may assist with the identification and incarceration of female serial offenders
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