AN ENACTIVE APPROACH TO TECHNOLOGICALLY MEDIATED LEARNING THROUGH PLAY

This thesis investigated the application of enactive principles to the design of classroom technolo- gies for young children’s learning through play. This study identified the attributes of an enactive pedagogy, in order to develop a design framework to accommodate enactive learning processes. From an enactive perspective, the learner is defined as an autonomous agent, capable of adapta- tion via the recursive consumption of self generated meaning within the constraints of a social and material world. Adaptation is the parallel development of mind and body that occurs through inter- action, which renders knowledge contingent on the environment from which it emerged. Parallel development means that action and perception in learning are as critical as thinking. An enactive approach to design therefore aspires to make the physical and social interaction with technology meaningful to the learning objective, rather than an aside to cognitive tasks. The design framework considered in detail the necessary affordances in terms of interaction, activity and context. In a further interpretation of enactive principles, this thesis recognised play and pretence as vehicles for designing and evaluating enactive learning and the embodied use of technology. In answering the research question, the interpreted framework was applied as a novel approach to designing and analysing children’s engagement with technology for learning, and worked towards a paradigm where interaction is part of the learning experience. The aspiration for the framework was to inform the design of interaction modalities to allow users’ to exercise the inherent mechanisms they have for making sense of the world. However, before making the claim to support enactive learning processes, there was a question as to whether technologically mediated realities were suitable environments to apply this framework. Given the emphasis on the physical world and action, it was the intention of the research and design activities to explore whether digital artefacts and spaces were an impoverished reality for enactive learning; or if digital objects and spaces could afford sufficient ’reality’ to be referents in social play behaviours. The project embedded in this research was tasked with creating deployable technologies that could be used in the classroom. Consequently, this framework was applied in practice, whereby the design practice and deployed technologies served as pragmatic tools to investigate the potential for interactive technologies in children’s physical, social and cognitive learning. To understand the context, underpin the design framework, and evaluate the impact of any techno- logical interventions in school life, the design practice was informed by ethnographic methodologies. The design process responded to cascading findings from phased research activities. The initial fieldwork located meaning making activities within the classroom, with a view to to re-appropriating situated and familiar practices. In the next stage of the design practice, this formative analysis determined the objectives of the participatory sessions, which in turn contributed to the creation of technologies suitable for an inquiry of enactive learning. The final technologies used standard school equipment with bespoke software, enabling children to engage with real time compositing and tracking applications installed in the classrooms’ role play spaces. The evaluation of the play space technologies in the wild revealed under certain conditions, there was evidence of embodied presence in the children’s social, physical and affective behaviour - illustrating how mediated realities can extend physical spaces. These findings suggest that the attention to meaningful interaction, a presence in the environment as a result of an active role, and a social presence - as outlined in the design framework - can lead to the emergence of observable enactive learning processes. As the design framework was applied, these principles could be examined and revised. Two notable examples of revisions to the design framework, in light of the applied practice, related to: (1) a key affordance for meaningful action to emerge required opportunities for direct and immediate engagement; and (2) a situated awareness of the self and other inhabitants in the mediated space required support across the spectrum of social interaction. The application of the design framework enabled this investigation to move beyond a theoretical discourse

Suspicion, control and desire - a criminological analysis of secretive conduct and smart devices

The topic of this thesis is the connection between secrecy and the onlife reality, a blurring line between being online and offline. Specifically, it offers a novel criminological perspective on how the smart technological devices integrated in the onlife ecology (with its technologies, features, design, instant online access, and messaging) aid specific instances of 'secretive conduct', involving regular and mundane episodes of suspicion, control and desire towards our kin, partners, co-worker, and perfect strangers. While most studies on smart technology (phones, pc, homes, watches, cars) concern privacy and security, as well as the elements of isolation and social disintegration - this thesis offers an innovative contribution in the field of criminology. The elements which protect our devices, such as touch ID and face recognition have created an un-accessible wall against other users, both online and offline; the character of such elements and their effects is a central concern of this thesis, revolving around suspicion, control and desire such a condition induces. Using a cultural criminology perspective, this work will theorize the ecology of onlife reality, the secretive conduct that characterises its environment; interpreting how tools of monitoring and control appear to have taken over any 'space' - from public to private. It appears that not only is anything observable - but it is done in a covert and discreet manner - the Goffmanian front & back stage result constantly under scrutiny. In this context, the users become increasingly effected by this covert scrutiny. The smartphone functions as a quintessential tool that allows such a blur - leading into the onlife question of crime and cybercrime. Advancing an experimental 'hybrid' methodology that attempts to unite both digital and 'in-person' ethnographic considerations, the research makes use of informal and incidental 'confessions' of smart technology users, such as their personal or witnessed secretive conducts. The analysis concentrates on specific abusive episodes in which the use of onlife devices allow all sorts of secretive conducts, with direct or indirect elements of harm: these are treated as social 'vignettes', and include parents secretly monitoring their children, partners making assumptions on the other's whereabouts, perpetuating elements of stalking, blackmailing, monitoring, all in a remote and apparently 'secured' environment. This work contributes to cultural criminology with analysis of the blasé approach to such elements of secretive conduct becoming integral in the onlife habitus of smartphone users. Secrecy is becoming a central element of onlife ecology, taking place unwillingly, and mostly unknowingly. To act in secret, to monitor in secret - wanting to see, control, and observe all become central elements of the onlife

Inventory’s paper assembly: fierce sociology, sovereignty and self-organisation in London’s small press publishing scene 1995 to 2005

This study attempts to deliver an intellectual history of the journal Inventory and its place within theories of knowledge, publishing, artistic practice, ethnography, politics and critical theory. The initial movement of the thesis, Chapter 1, establishes Inventory’s formal structure as a journal. Chapter 2 establishes the presuppositions and models for the use of a journal or magazine as a platform for heterodox cultural practice and inquiry. The study then follows Inventory’s proposition of a method derived from the fusion of the heterogeneous sociology of Georges Bataille and his circle in Chapter 3; and the speculative aesthetic theory, and ‘anthropological materialism’, of Walter Benjamin in Chapter 4. In Chapters 3 and 4 Inventory’s ‘constellation of methods’: surrealism – as a mode of research and publishing, rather than as a visual art – meets ethnography, the study of the culture of all humankind on a common plane of praxis. This partisan reappropriation of surrealist and ethnographic method is shown to generate a complex para-academic publishing and research project, one which has a relation to, but ultimately exceeds, contemporary theories of either the ‘artist as anthropologist’ (Joseph Kosuth), ‘ethnographic surrealism’ (James Clifford) or ‘the artist as ethnographer’ (Hal Foster). Chapter 5 discusses the journal’s presentation as writing or literature and the relation between the whole and its parts developed philosophically in the previous chapters in terms of the form of the journal itself as a constellation and the writing it cohered around and presented. This chapter therefore also discusses the development of mental or perceptual spaces of resistance to the restructuring of space discusses in the preceding chapter through experimental writing and publishing (artist projects, found texts, visionary or prophetic texts). The study subsequently situates the intellectual and cultural productions of Inventory journal within the dynamic social, political and cultural context of London in the 1990s and 2000s. This contextualisation is achieved by engagement, in Chapter 6, with a specific site of dissemination for Inventory, Info Centre (1999-2000), through it the journal associated with parallel cultural and political practices of self-publishing and self-organisation by artists, writers and activists in the late-1990s and 2000s. I argue that these practices sought to challenge existing forms of organisation, knowledge production, cultural and social totality during a period of capitalist restructuring of work, social reproduction, the urban environment and the institutions of art. The opposition to this restructuring and its re-colonisation of space in London is conceived both in terms of the production of critical commentaries on the production of space in the city (urban sociology, psychogeography); contesting established cultural histories (e.g. of surrealism, the Situationist International and conceptual art); creation of small autonomous institutions and development of mental or perceptual spaces of resistance through experimental writing and publishing. I argue that Inventory itself takes on a ‘self-institutional’ form in this situation, and as journal provides a space and singular spaces (in terms of individual contributions) for independent critical thinking (artist projects, urban sociology, found texts, visionary or prophetic texts). Chapter 7 presents the journal’s contribution to critical accounts of practices and legacies of urbanism (housing, city planning, spatial practices and government) in London in the post-war period and during the period of the journal’s publication (1995-2005). The journal’s identification of, and opposition to, forces restructuring London spatially during this period is conceived in terms of the production of critical commentaries on the production of space in the city (urban sociology and psychogeography). The Conclusion evaluates the aims of the study and reevaluates Inventory journal on the basis of the critical traditions surveyed in the prior chapters and in terms of problems arising from the path the journal followed and gaps between its projected programme or method and the achievements it attained

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