Life is Complicated: The Urgent Call to Support Student Wellbeing through Social Emotional Learning

Abstract: Students face increased mental health challenges, including depression, anxiety, trauma, racial trauma, and suicide risk, in addition to opportunity gaps. Despite educators’ work to support students through mental health services and despite the existence of social emotional learning (SEL) programs within the school environment, the impact on student learning and long-term post high school outcomes can feel overwhelming. There is also a perception that the responsibility for SEL belongs only to social workers, psychologists and counselors. The primary research question is; how does embedding of SEL practices vary within instructional, non-instructional, and leadership roles? The related questions are: to what extent does staff capacity building for SEL practices incorporate support for the social emotional competence of both staff and students, and how does race relate to social emotional learning practices for staff and students? This study explores the context, conditions, culture, and competencies (Wagner et al., 2006) for District 321, utilizing qualitative and existing quantitative data. The findings detail the critical role of ongoing professional development to increase culturally responsive social emotional learning practices, build social emotional competencies of all staff, model SEL for students, and embed SEL within all practices and instruction. In addition, moving beyond social emotional learning programs for District 321, the consistent social emotional competency development of every employee is emphasized in consideration of the positive impact on student learning, school culture, and student and staff wellbeing

LEARNING IN OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE (OSS) DEVELOPMENT: HOW ORGANIZATIONAL AND NATIONAL CULTURE IMPACT DEVELOPERS’ LEARNING

Participants in an OSS/FLOSS development project often span national and organizational boundaries, as developers from different countries and corporations join the project. A project team’s national and organizational culture creates opportunities for learning from others, but may also lead to conflict and inhibit learning. This research examines developers’ learning in an OSS project, and the cultural context in which learning takes place. We focus on single- and doubleloop learning and examine the impact of the team’s national and organizational culture on a developer’s learning. Archival and survey data are collected from two large-scale Sourceforge projects. This research can contribute to the OSS literature by examining the impact of team interactions on developers’ learning. Practically, administrators and managers stand to gain insight into the learning benefits of participation in OSS projects, and thus better assess their value as a training ground for global software development

Using Cloud Services in a Modern Learning Management System

LMS (Learning Management Systems) today are being widely used in almost every educational facility. In the last years all conceivable use cases that need to be carried out by such LMS have been defined and the features a modern LMS needs to offer are very clear. Rarely do we find something a teacher or student needs that an LMS cannot offer. So the task for LMS developers shifted from offering all tools a teacher or student needs to make these tools as convenient to use as possible. Our goal in this research work is to describe the web services we use in TeachCenter, an LMS that has been widely used for the past years at Graz University of Technology to simplify the use of certain components. It can be pointed out that cloud services have to be an integral part of a modern LMS

Towards intelligent distributed computing : cell-oriented computing

Distributed computing systems are of huge importance in a number of recently established and future functions in computer science. For example, they are vital to banking applications, communication of electronic systems, air traffic control, manufacturing automation, biomedical operation works, space monitoring systems and robotics information systems. As the nature of computing comes to be increasingly directed towards intelligence and autonomy, intelligent computations will be the key for all future applications. Intelligent distributed computing will become the base for the growth of an innovative generation of intelligent distributed systems. Nowadays, research centres require the development of architectures of intelligent and collaborated systems; these systems must be capable of solving problems by themselves to save processing time and reduce costs. Building an intelligent style of distributed computing that controls the whole distributed system requires communications that must be based on a completely consistent system. The model of the ideal system to be adopted in building an intelligent distributed computing structure is the human body system, specifically the body’s cells. As an artificial and virtual simulation of the high degree of intelligence that controls the body’s cells, this chapter proposes a Cell-Oriented Computing model as a solution to accomplish the desired Intelligent Distributed Computing system