Big Data Techniques to Improve Learning Access and Citizen Engagement for Adults in Urban Environments

This presentation explores the emerging concept of ‘Big Data in Education’ and introduces novel technologies and approaches for addressing inequalities in access to participation and success in lifelong learning, to produce better life outcomes for urban citizens. It introduces the work of the new Urban Big Data Centre (UBDC) at the University of Glasgow, presenting a case study of its first data product – the integrated Multimedia City Data (iMCD) project. Educational engagement and predictive factors are presented for adult learners, and older adult learners, in a representative survey of 1500 households. This was followed up with mobility tracking data using GPS data and wearable camera images, as well as one year’s worth of contextual data from over one hundred web sources (social media, news, weather). The chapter introduces the complex dataset that can help stakeholders, academics, citizens and other external users examine active aging and citizen learning engagement in the modern urban city, and thus support the development of the learning city. It concludes with a call for a more three-dimensional view of citizen-learners’ daily activity and mobility, such as satellite, mobile phone and active travel application data, alongside administrative data linkage to further explore lifelong learning participation and success. Policy implications are provided for addressing inequalities, and interventions proposed for how cities might promote equal and inclusive adult learning engagement in the face of continued austerity cuts and falling adult learner numbers

Toys for Boys? Women's Marginalization and Participation As Digital Gamers

This paper develops out of ongoing research into the location and use of digital gaming in practices of everyday life. Specifically this paper draws on a questionnaire based survey of just under four hundred undergraduate students and twenty-three follow up interviews. This paper suggests that the women in this research play digital games significantly less than their male counterparts, and suggests that this is largely due to digital games continuing to be viewed, both culturally and by the gaming industry, as belonging to men. However, this paper suggests that for some women video and computer gaming can be an important social activity, and for others mobile telephone based gaming can offer a less restricted and more accessible leisure activity.Gender, Digital Gaming

Smartphones

Many of the research approaches to smartphones actually regard them as more or less transparent points of access to other kinds of communication experiences. That is, rather than considering the smartphone as something in itself, the researchers look at how individuals use the smartphone for their communicative purposes, whether these be talking, surfing the web, using on-line data access for off-site data sources, downloading or uploading materials, or any kind of interaction with social media. They focus not so much on the smartphone itself but on the activities that people engage in with their smartphones

A river basin as a common-pool resource: a case study for the Jaguaribe basin in Brazil

Rainfall variability and the associated water stress are of major concern in semi-arid regions subject to conflicts between water users. To achieve sustainable and stable agricultural performance it is necessary to understand\ud the interaction between natural processes and human response. This paper investigates the applicability of common-pool resource (CPR) concepts to understand governance of water resources in semi-arid river basins. This is done by evaluating the governance of water resources in the Jaguaribe basin in the semi-arid Northeast of Brazil. The results show that common-pool resource concepts offer valuable insights for explaining variations in water resource use and availability at the river basin scale. The water system in a river basin can be characterized as one large CPR consisting of asymmetrically linked smaller CPR’s. This study showed that CPR concepts are useful for explaining agricultural productivity, stability and equitability in a semi-arid river basin. The asymmetry of a river basin CPR is the cause of unidirectional externalities towards downstream. The topography, the sequence of rainfall events and distribution of reservoir capacities in a river basin strongly\ud influence the extent to which convergence of resource flow can compensate for these externalities