Oxymoron, a Non-Distance Knowledge Sharing Tool for Social Science Students and Researchers

Oxymoron is a World Wide Web based knowledge capitalization and sharing tool that was conceived and developed by a multidisciplinary team, comprised of adult education and distributed systems professionals from France and Switzerland. Oxymorons aim is to support and facilitate the work of students and researchers in social science by providing them with a system where they can contribute and obtain knowledge about the relevant readings in their fields of interest

“MacGyver-Meets-Dr. Ruth”: Science Journalism and the Material Positioning of Dr. Carla Pugh

This article examines the rhetorical consequences of foregrounding female scientists\u27 materials through an analysis of seven news articles on Dr. Carla Pugh, a surgeon who designs medical patient simulators. Journalists foreground Pugh\u27s materials by positioning her as both “MacGyver,” creatively assembling simulators from everyday objects, and “Dr. Ruth,” willingly discussing intimate parts. These positions avoid focusing on Pugh\u27s personal life or body but still ultimately gender her and her work. The MacGyver position associates Pugh with gendered activities, objects, and spaces while undermining her affiliation with the technical aspects of design. Meanwhile, the Dr. Ruth position implies Pugh\u27s knowledge comes from inherent bodily expertise, making certain scientific fields appear more natural for women

Criminal intent or cognitive dissonance: how does student self plagiarism fit into academic integrity?

The discourse of plagiarism is speckled with punitive terms not out of place in a police officer's notes: detection, prevention, misconduct, rules, regulations, conventions, transgression, consequences, deter, trap, etc. This crime and punishment paradigm tends to be the norm in academic settings. The learning and teaching paradigm assumes that students are not filled with criminal intent, but rather are confused by the novel academic culture and its values. The discourse of learning and teaching includes: development, guidance, acknowledge, scholarly practice, communicate, familiarity, culture. Depending on the paradigm adopted, universities, teachers, and students will either focus on policies, punishments, and ways to cheat the system or on program design, assessments, and assimilating the values of academia. Self plagiarism is a pivotal issue that polarises these two paradigms. Viewed from a crime and punishment paradigm, self plagiarism is an intentional act of evading the required workload for a course by re-using previous work. Within a learning and teaching paradigm, self plagiarism is an oxymoron. We would like to explore the differences between these two paradigms by using self plagiarism as a focal point

[Black] Teachers Resisting Damaged-Centered Research: Community Listening Exchanges as a Reciprocal Research Tool in a Gentrifying City

Gentrification impacts many cities across the nation. Affordable housing task forces and legislation meant to address housing inequities are becoming more common, yet the authentic experiences of those affected are often unacknowledged. Absent from the discussion of gentrification are the voices of those deeply impacted, some who are at the center of the work to maintain communities: Black teachers, Black students, and Black families. In many school districts, teachers do not have the opportunity to address the systemic issues that impact their students and communities. Still, it is impossible to ignore the ways societal injustice seeps into the classroom. This article discusses our work as a teacher participatory action research collective exploring the intersection of housing and educational displacement in a rapidly gentrifying community in Southwest Atlanta, Georgia. We highlight our roles as community-centered educators and detail how we intentionally and thoughtfully worked to create a reciprocal space to engage communities in Community Listening Exchanges. We present Community Listening Exchanges as a justice-centered innovation to community-engaged research and scholarship. Our critical and collaborative approach to generating and analyzing data allowed us to uncover how housing and educational displacement relies on deficit narratives to justify the removal of marginalized people. We offer CLEs as a reciprocal research tool that deviates from traditional qualitative research and resists anti-Black, damage-centered narratives

Transdisciplinarity seen through Information, Communication, Computation, (Inter-)Action and Cognition

Similar to oil that acted as a basic raw material and key driving force of industrial society, information acts as a raw material and principal mover of knowledge society in the knowledge production, propagation and application. New developments in information processing and information communication technologies allow increasingly complex and accurate descriptions, representations and models, which are often multi-parameter, multi-perspective, multi-level and multidimensional. This leads to the necessity of collaborative work between different domains with corresponding specialist competences, sciences and research traditions. We present several major transdisciplinary unification projects for information and knowledge, which proceed on the descriptive, logical and the level of generative mechanisms. Parallel process of boundary crossing and transdisciplinary activity is going on in the applied domains. Technological artifacts are becoming increasingly complex and their design is strongly user-centered, which brings in not only the function and various technological qualities but also other aspects including esthetic, user experience, ethics and sustainability with social and environmental dimensions. When integrating knowledge from a variety of fields, with contributions from different groups of stakeholders, numerous challenges are met in establishing common view and common course of action. In this context, information is our environment, and informational ecology determines both epistemology and spaces for action. We present some insights into the current state of the art of transdisciplinary theory and practice of information studies and informatics. We depict different facets of transdisciplinarity as we see it from our different research fields that include information studies, computability, human-computer interaction, multi-operating-systems environments and philosophy.Comment: Chapter in a forthcoming book: Information Studies and the Quest for Transdisciplinarity - Forthcoming book in World Scientific. Mark Burgin and Wolfgang Hofkirchner, Editor

Evolution of Communication Skills in Virtual Product Development Process: Experience From EGPR

More than a decade of continuous international collaboration of several European universities in teaching new product development in virtual environment gives unique opportunity to investigate evolution and development of communication techniques for NPD collaboration in virtual environment. This chapter provides theoretical and practical view on different aspects: technical evolution of ICT tools, development and fostering of communication flow, personal aspects of IT communication, with important emphasis on building of trust within virtual teams. The reader can extract from this chapter guidelines for work in collaborative virtual environment, to run effectively either small projects, meetings and lectures or even more complex projects, distributed among several dislocated teams. The chronological overview of the continuous virtual communication in the last 15 years gives also fair suggestions about future evolution for the next decade

Curricular Goals, Music and Pacing: The Case Study for Hip Hop Music in Children\u27s Educational Television

As an answer to the McCollum and Bryant (2003) charge for scholars to use the pacing index that they created to measure the pace of current children\u27s programs, this paper examines the use of Hip Hop music in a children\u27s television show, Hip Hop Harry, and the relationship that this show has with the eighty-five shows that were analyzed in McCollum and Bryant\u27s initial study. Hip Hop Harry is an Emmy award nominated show on The Learning Channel, which prides itself on using Hip Hop culture and music as a medium to educate preschoolers from diverse backgrounds. Through content analysis, the paper highlights the curriculum goals presented in eight of the show\u27s episodes, reveals the pacing index of the show, and exposes the difference between traditional curriculum-based programming and the use of the Hip Hop format of curriculum-based programming as a tool to educate children

Curricular Goals, Music and Pacing: The Case Study for Hip Hop Music in Children\u27s Educational Television

As an answer to the McCollum and Bryant (2003) charge for scholars to use the pacing index that they created to measure the pace of current children\u27s programs, this paper examines the use of Hip Hop music in a children\u27s television show, Hip Hop Harry, and the relationship that this show has with the eighty-five shows that were analyzed in McCollum and Bryant\u27s initial study. Hip Hop Harry is an Emmy award nominated show on The Learning Channel, which prides itself on using Hip Hop culture and music as a medium to educate preschoolers from diverse backgrounds. Through content analysis, the paper highlights the curriculum goals presented in eight of the show\u27s episodes, reveals the pacing index of the show, and exposes the difference between traditional curriculum-based programming and the use of the Hip Hop format of curriculum-based programming as a tool to educate children

Fake News: Finding Truth in Strategic Communication

Fake news is an old phenomenon that has become a new obsession and a menace to society due to technological advancement and the proliferation of social media, which has changed traditional journalism norms. As the spread of false information has increased these past few years, it has become increasingly difficult for information consumers to distinguish between facts and fakes. A comprehensive systematic literature review to extract themes revealed the major factors responsible for spreading fake news. This qualitative interpretative meta-synthesis (QIMS) aims to better understand and offer solutions to combat fake news. This Ph.D. dissertation will serve as a guide for ethical communication practice and a reference for future research studies