Programming MPSoC platforms: Road works ahead

This paper summarizes a special session on multicore/multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoC) programming challenges. The current trend towards MPSoC platforms in most computing domains does not only mean a radical change in computer architecture. Even more important from a SW developer´s viewpoint, at the same time the classical sequential von Neumann programming model needs to be overcome. Efficient utilization of the MPSoC HW resources demands for radically new models and corresponding SW development tools, capable of exploiting the available parallelism and guaranteeing bug-free parallel SW. While several standards are established in the high-performance computing domain (e.g. OpenMP), it is clear that more innovations are required for successful\ud deployment of heterogeneous embedded MPSoC. On the other hand, at least for coming years, the freedom for disruptive programming technologies is limited by the huge amount of certified sequential code that demands for a more pragmatic, gradual tool and code replacement strategy

Composing Possibilities: Open Educational Resources and K-12 Music Education

Music open educational resources (OER) have the potential to fill gaps in access to instructional materials for K-12 music teachers and learners, and to support teachers and learners as content creators and collaborators in meeting educational goals. This study explores the current state of music OER, the audiences that these resources serve to benefit, and the opportunities and challenges involved in adopting an open approach to the development of music education resources

Creating Change through Arts, Culture, and Equitable Development: A Policy and Practice Primer

Across the nation, artistic and cultural practices are helping to define the sustainability of urban, rural, and suburban neighborhoods. In the design of parks and open spaces; the building of public transit, housing, and supermarkets; in plans for addressing needs for community health and healing trauma; communities are embracing arts and culture strategies to help create equitable communities of opportunity where everyone can participate, prosper, and achieve their full potential. And artists are seeing themselves -- and being seen by others -- as integral community members whose talents, crafts, and insights pave the way to support community engagement and cohesion."Creating Change through Arts, Culture, and Equitable Development: A Policy and Practice Primer" highlights both promising and proven practices that demonstrate equity-focused arts and culture policies, strategies, and tools. The report describes the role of arts and culture across the nine sectors below. Within each policy chart there are goals, policies, and implementation strategies that can help achieve communities of opportunity. These policies have yielded such outcomes as: support for Native artists in reservation-based cultural economies, the creation of a citywide cultural plan, engaging low-income youth of color in using digital media, and efforts to address redevelopment, employment, food access, and environmental justice

Separation of Church and School: Guidance for Public Charter Schools Using Religious Facilities

Public charter school leaders and advocates are dedicated to growing the number of high-quality public charter schools available to all families, especially those in communities where there are very few opportunities to attend a high-quality public school. To realize the promise that public charter school expansion can bring, public charter schools need reasonable access to facilities in every community.This is a guidebook to help public charter school leaders -- and the advocates, attorneys, and others who support them -- navigate the increasingly complicated legal landscape surrounding public charter school use of a facility owned or operated by a religious organization. By presenting an analysis of the legal standards that govern application of the Establishment Clause and offering practical advice on how to ensure compliance with the it when a public charter school decides to locate in a religious-owned facility, this guidebook will help charter school leaders protect their access to an important facilities option and foster continued public charter school growth

Serious Games in Cultural Heritage

Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented

Constructive Feedback Course

This short online course aims to help the students develop an understanding of what constructive feedback is and offers them an opportunity to practise giving such feedback in the context of texts related to science, engineering and technology. The course is conceived as a preparation course for the EAST Project during which engineering students from Gaza were asked to act as critical friends offering content-oriented feedback to pre-sessional students at the University of Glasgow. We believe the course can be offered on its own, either in isolation or as part of a wider mentoring scheme for students who want to develop skills in ‘leadership by example’[2]. The course can easily be adapted for any discipline - this would require changing the samples in tasks 5 and 6. The course is intended to be delivered over two weeks and it is run online and asynchronously. In terms of design, it follows the framework of exploration - integration - application (Garrison and Arbaugh, 2007), with each stage being progressively more complex, challenging and open-ended. The students work in groups and the teacher monitors interactions and motivates them to stay on task and track in regard with deadlines via a closed Facebook group. The final task requires submitting an assessed assignment which the tutor gives feedback on. After that there is an extra week for reflection and evaluation. Timings for each activity are approximate and may need to be adjusted depending on the general progress of the course. See the course overview for details. The main technology used is Google Docs and it is recommended that the students have gmail accounts. Although students without gmail accounts are still able to access and edit the materials, tracking their contributions will not be possible. When setting up the documents, attention has to be paid to shareability settings so that there is no barrier to access. Padlet is used for sharing personal experiences and reflections at the beginning and end of the course respectively. A closed Facebook group is used as a news and discussions forum and for collective feedback. A public blog may be used for documenting the process. All the documents are created by the teacher; he or she creates an empty template for each group[3] and pastes the subsequent tasks into them on the task start date. This increases the teacher’s workload but helps them monitor their students’ progress and has a motivational effect on the students. An alternative approach would to be to ask the students to copy the template, and the task instructions could be provided in other ways, for example via Facebook, in order to decrease the workload. The course can be enriched by synchronous sessions during which the teacher can provide collective feedback and the students have an opportunity to ask questions and express their concerns. Adding a video element, for example to introduce the whole course, individual tasks or to give feedback, may constitute an added value too