The Resistance Dilemma

How organized resistance to new fossil fuel infrastructure became a political force and how this might affect the transition to renewable energy. Organized resistance to new fossil fuel infrastructure, particularly conflicts over pipelines, has become a formidable political force in North America. In this book, George Hoberg examines whether such place-based environmental movements are effective ways of promoting climate action, if they might inadvertently feed resistance to the development of renewable energy infrastructure, and what other, more innovative processes of decision-making would encourage the acceptance of clean energy systems. Focusing on a series of conflicts over new oil sands pipelines, Hoberg investigates activists' strategy of blocking fossil fuel infrastructure, often in alliance with Indigenous groups, and examines the political and environmental outcomes of these actions. After discussing the oil sands policy regime and the relevant political institutions in Canada and the United States, Hoberg analyzes in detail four anti-pipeline campaigns, examining the controversies over the Keystone XL, the most well-known of these movements and the first one to use infrastructure resistance as a core strategy; the Northern Gateway pipeline; the Trans Mountain pipeline; and the Energy East pipeline. He then considers the “resistance dilemma”: the potential of place-based activism to threaten the much-needed transition to renewable energy. He examines several episodes of resistance to clean energy infrastructure in eastern Canada and the United States. Finally, Hoberg describes some innovative processes of energy decision-making, including strategic environment assessment, and cumulative impact assessment, looking at cases in British Columbia and Lower Alberta

2012 Annual Report

https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/msb_annual_reports/1009/thumbnail.jp

Defining and Identifying Attention Capture Deceptive Designs in Digital Interfaces

Many tech companies exploit psychological vulnerabilities to design digital interfaces that maximize the frequency and duration of user visits. Consequently, users often report feeling dissatisfied with time spent on such services. Prior work has developed typologies of damaging design patterns (or dark patterns) that contribute to financial and privacy harms, which has helped designers to resist these patterns and policymakers to regulate them. However, we are missing a collection of similar problematic patterns that lead to attentional harms. To close this gap, we conducted a systematic literature review for what we call 'attention capture damaging patterns' (ACDPs). We analyzed 43 papers to identify their characteristics, the psychological vulnerabilities they exploit, and their impact on digital wellbeing. We propose a definition of ACDPs and identify eleven common types, from Time Fog to Infinite Scroll. Our typology offers technologists and policymakers a common reference to advocate, design, and regulate against attentional harms

The Academic Grind: A Critique of Creative and Collaborative Discourses Between Digital Games Industries and Post-Secondary Education in Canada

ABSTRACT Digital game development, seeking opportunities to extend its reach and augment its capabilities in a competitive global market, requires the institutions around it to respond and reconfigure to its needs. In Canada, collaborations between digital game industries and educational institutions coalesce around the need to identify and draw students into a tailored educational stream where narrowly defined forms of creativity and knowledge maintain a fluidity amenable to the needs of capital. Provincial and federal government endorsement, supplemented with targeted policy measures, presides over a repurposing of the relationship between post-secondary education, business, and society as a whole, translating monopolies of labour and knowledge into monopolies of power. For educational institutions however, this process of adaptation is necessarily an incomplete one. Using document data, along with interviews of administrators and professionals who negotiate the space between industry and education, the dissertation targets three regions of Canada with idiosyncratic industrial ecosystems, institutional networks, administrative imperatives, and specific demands for skilled game development labour. In Vancouver, Montréal, and Southern Ontario, the disciplining of students as ideal neoliberal subjects magnifies class divisions, unevenly addresses struggles around gendered working conditions in a male dominated industry, and exacerbates ongoing tensions regarding labour in digital media industries. This dissertation contends that the further intensification of the flexibility of educational institutions and their attempt to adapt to the speed of digital capital is a moment of high risk: in negotiating their adequacy and legitimacy in a neoliberal mode of capital, educational programs and their students are exposed to rapidly changing market conditions, competing agendas, and economic crises. The contingencies and contradictions present within administrative subjectivities generate spaces to establish the terms of a recomposition of post-secondary education that requires new arrangements of affinity within educational networks

Backfiring and favouring:how design processes in HCI lead to anti-patterns and repentant designers

Design is typically envisioned as aiming to improve situations for users, but this can fail. Failure can be the result of flawed design solutions, i.e. anti-patterns. Prior work in anti-patterns has largely focused on their characteristics. We instead concentrate on why they occur by outlining two processes that result in anti-patterns: 1) backfiring, and 2) favouring. The purpose of the paper is to help designers and researchers better understand how design processes can lead to negative impacts and to repentant designers by introducing a richer vocabulary for discussing such processes. We explore how anti-patterns evolve in HCI by specifically applying the vocabulary to examples of social media design. We believe that highlighting these processes will help the HCI community reflect on their own work and also raise awareness of the opportunities for avoiding anti-patterns. Our hope is that this will result in fewer negative experiences for designers and users alike

New Trends in e-Learning

Guidance work is needed to learn about the current state of e-learning and to guide future research. In recent studies, e-learning environments appear to be under different headings in recent years. These new topics are mainly aimed at providing an up-to-date explanation on e-learning in this section. New trends in e-learning will be covered under artificial intelligence (AI), micro credentials, big data, virtual and empowered reality, blended learning, cloud e-learning, gamification, mobile learning, Internet of things, and online video. With this study, it is aimed to shed light on the concept of e-learning. In addition, e-learning environments focus on new possibilities for learners. Everyday, e-learning environments bring out new antagonistic concepts. As these new concepts rapidly entered our lives, they began to become indispensable materials in the field of education. New e-learning environments are being used as platforms that are related to each other. They essentially support the concept of e-learning

Sustainability Matters

Calgary, Alberta is a culturally diverse urban metropolis. Sprawling and car-dependent, fast-growing and affluent, it is dominated by the fossil fuel industry. For 30 years, Calgary has struggled to turn sustainability rhetoric into reality. Sustainability Matters is the story of Calgary’s setbacks and successes on the path toward sustainability. Chronicling two decades of public conversations, political debate, urban policy and planning, and scholarly discovery, it is both a fascinating case study and an accessible introduction to the theory and practice of urban sustainability. A clear-eyed view of the struggles of turning knowledge into action, this book illuminates the places where theory and reality converge and presents an approach to municipal development, planning, and governance that takes seriously the urgent need to address climate change and injustice. Addressing a wide variety of topics and themes, including energy, diversity, economic development, and ecological health, Sustainability Matters is both a critique of current practice and a vision for the future that uses the city of Calgary as a microcosm to address issues faced by cities around the world. This is essential reading not only for every Calgarian working for a vibrant and sustainable future, but for all those interested in in the future of cities in a post-carbon world

Celebrating Faculty Accomplishment 2013

https://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/celebratingfaculty/1001/thumbnail.jp

Community tracking in a cMOOC and nomadic learner behavior identification on a connectivist rhizomatic learning network

This article contributes to the literature on connectivism, connectivist MOOCs (cMOOCs) and rhizomatic learning by examining participant interactions, community formation and nomadic learner behavior in a particular cMOOC, #rhizo15, facilitated for 6 weeks by Dave Cormier. It further focuses on what we can learn by observing Twitter interactions particularly. As an explanatory mixed research design, Social Network Analysis and content analysis were employed for the purposes of the research. SNA is used at the macro, meso and micro levels, and content analysis of one week of the MOOC was conducted using the Community of Inquiry framework. The macro level analysis demonstrates that communities in a rhizomatic connectivist networks have chaotic relationships with other communities in different dimensions (clarified by use of hashtags of concurrent, past and future events). A key finding at the meso level was that as #rhizo15 progressed and number of active participants decreased, interaction increased in overall network. The micro level analysis further reveals that, though completely online, the nature of open online ecosystems are very convenient to facilitate the formation of community. The content analysis of week 3 tweets demonstrated that cognitive presence was the most frequently observed, while teaching presence (teaching behaviors of both facilitator and participants) was the lowest. This research recognizes the limitations of looking only at Twitter when #rhizo15 conversations occurred over multiple platforms frequented by overlapping but not identical groups of people. However, it provides a valuable partial perspective at the macro meso and micro levels that contribute to our understanding of community-building in cMOOCs