1,428 research outputs found
A Critical Review Of Post-Secondary Education Writing During A 21st Century Education Revolution
Educational materials are effective instruments which provide information and report new discoveries uncovered by researchers in specific areas of academia. Higher education, like other education institutions, rely on instructional materials to inform its practice of educating adult learners. In post-secondary education, developmental English programs are tasked with meeting the needs of dynamic populations, thus there is a continuous need for research in this area to support its changing landscape. However, the majority of scholarly thought in this area centers on K-12 reading and writing. This paucity presents a phenomenon to the post-secondary community. This research study uses a qualitative content analysis to examine peer-reviewed journals from 2003-2017, developmental online websites, and a government issued document directed toward reforming post-secondary developmental education programs. These highly relevant sources aid educators in discovering informational support to apply best practices for student success. Developmental education serves the purpose of addressing literacy gaps for students transitioning to college-level work. The findings here illuminate the dearth of material offered to developmental educators. This study suggests the field of literacy research is fragmented and highlights an apparent blind spot in scholarly literature with regard to English writing instruction. This poses a quandary for post-secondary literacy researchers in the 21st century and establishes the necessity for the literacy research community to commit future scholarship toward equipping college educators teaching writing instruction to underprepared adult learners
Evaluating the sustainability and resiliency of local food systems
With an ever-rising global population and looming environmental challenges such as climate change and soil degradation, it is imperative to increase the sustainability of food production. The drastic rise in food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic has further shown a pressing need to increase the resiliency of food systems. One strategy to reduce the dependence on complex, vulnerable global supply chains is to strengthen local food systems, such as by producing more food in cities. This thesis uses an interdisciplinary, food systems approach to explore aspects of sustainability and resiliency within local food systems.
Lifecycle assessment (LCA) was used to evaluate how farm scale, distance to consumer, and management practices influence environmental impacts for different local agriculture models in two case study locations: Georgia, USA and England, UK. Farms were grouped based on urbanisation level and management practices, including: urban organic, peri-urban organic, rural organic, and rural conventional. A total of 25 farms and 40 crop lifecycles were evaluated, focusing on two crops (kale and tomatoes) and including impacts from seedling production through final distribution to the point of sale. Results were extremely sensitive to the allocation of composting burdens (decomposition emissions), with impact variation between organic farms driven mainly by levels of compost use. When composting burdens were attributed to compost inputs, the rural conventional category in the U.S. and the rural organic category in the UK had the lowest average impacts per kg sellable crop produced, including the lowest global warming potential (GWP). However, when subtracting avoided burdens from the municipal waste stream from compost inputs, trends reversed entirely, with urban or peri-urban farm categories having the lowest impacts (often negative) for GWP and marine eutrophication. Overall, farm management practices were the most important factor driving environmental impacts from local food supply chains.
A soil health assessment was then performed on a subset of the UK farms to provide insight to ecosystem services that are not captured within LCA frameworks. Better soil health was observed in organically-farmed and uncultivated soils compared to conventionally farmed soils, suggesting higher ecosystem service provisioning as related to improved soil structure, flood mitigation, erosion control, and carbon storage. However, relatively high heavy metal concentrations were seen on urban and peri-urban farms, as well as those located in areas with previous mining activity. This implies that there are important services and disservices on farms that are not captured by LCAs.
Zooming out from a focus on food production, a qualitative methodology was used to explore experiences of food insecurity and related health and social challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fourteen individuals receiving emergency food parcels from a community food project in Sheffield, UK were interviewed. Results showed that maintaining food security in times of crisis requires a diverse set of individual, household, social, and place-based resources, which were largely diminished or strained during the pandemic. Drawing upon social capital and community support was essential to cope with a multiplicity of hardship, highlighting a need to develop community food infrastructure that supports ideals of mutual aid and builds connections throughout the food supply chain. Overall, this thesis shows that a range of context-specific solutions are required to build sustainable and resilient food systems. This can be supported by increasing local control of food systems and designing strategies to meet specific community needs, whilst still acknowledging a shared global responsibility to protect ecosystem, human, and planetary health
Analytical validation of innovative magneto-inertial outcomes: a controlled environment study.
peer reviewe
30th European Congress on Obesity (ECO 2023)
This is the abstract book of 30th European Congress on Obesity (ECO 2023
Digital agriculture: research, development and innovation in production chains.
Digital transformation in the field towards sustainable and smart agriculture. Digital agriculture: definitions and technologies. Agroenvironmental modeling and the digital transformation of agriculture. Geotechnologies in digital agriculture. Scientific computing in agriculture. Computer vision applied to agriculture. Technologies developed in precision agriculture. Information engineering: contributions to digital agriculture. DIPN: a dictionary of the internal proteins nanoenvironments and their potential for transformation into agricultural assets. Applications of bioinformatics in agriculture. Genomics applied to climate change: biotechnology for digital agriculture. Innovation ecosystem in agriculture: Embrapa?s evolution and contributions. The law related to the digitization of agriculture. Innovating communication in the age of digital agriculture. Driving forces for Brazilian agriculture in the next decade: implications for digital agriculture. Challenges, trends and opportunities in digital agriculture in Brazil
Towards a Digital Capability Maturity Framework for Tertiary Institutions
Background: The Digital Capability (DC) of an Institution is the extent to which the institution's culture, policies, and infrastructure enable and support digital practices (Killen et al., 2017), and maturity is the continuous improvement of those capabilities. As technology continues to evolve, it is likely to give rise to constant changes in teaching and learning, potentially disrupting Tertiary Education Institutions (TEIs) and making existing organisational models less effective. An institution’s ability to adapt to continuously changing technology depends on the change in culture and leadership decisions within the individual institutions. Change without structure leads to inefficiencies, evident across the Nigerian TEI landscape. These inefficiencies can be attributed mainly to a lack of clarity and agreement on a development structure.
Objectives: This research aims to design a structure with a pathway to maturity, to support the continuous improvement of DC in TEIs in Nigeria and consequently improve the success of digital education programmes.
Methods: I started by conducting a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) investigating the body of knowledge on DC, its composition, the relationship between its elements and their respective impact on the Maturity of TEIs. Findings from the review led me to investigate further the key roles instrumental in developing Digital Capability Maturity in Tertiary Institutions (DCMiTI).
The results of these investigations formed the initial ideas and constructs upon which the proposed structure was built. I then explored a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to substantiate the initial constructs and gain a deeper understanding of the relationships between elements/sub-elements. Next, I used triangulation as a vehicle to expand the validity of the findings by replicating the methods in a case study of TEIs in Nigeria. Finally, after using the validated constructs and knowledge base to propose a structure based on CMMI concepts, I conducted an expert panel workshop to test the model’s validity.
Results: I consolidated the body of knowledge from the SLR into a universal classification of 10 elements, each comprising sub-elements. I also went on to propose a classification for DCMiTI. The elements/sub-elements in the classification indicate the success factors for digital maturity, which were also found to positively impact the ability to design, deploy and sustain digital education. These findings were confirmed in a UK University and triangulated in a case study of Northwest Nigeria. The case study confirmed the literature findings on the status of DCMiTI in Nigeria and provided sufficient evidence to suggest that a maturity structure would be a well-suited solution to supporting DCM in the region. I thus scoped, designed, and populated a domain-specific framework for DCMiTI, configured to support the educational landscape in Northwest Nigeria.
Conclusion: The proposed DCMiTI framework enables TEIs to assess their maturity level across the various capability elements and reports on DCM as a whole. It provides guidance on the criteria that must be satisfied to achieve higher levels of digital maturity. The framework received expert validation, as domain experts agreed that the proposed Framework was well applicable to developing DCMiTI and would be a valuable tool to support TEIs in delivering successful digital education. Recommendations were made to engage in further iterations of testing by deploying the proposed framework for use in TEI to confirm the extent of its generalisability and acceptability
Data ethics : building trust : how digital technologies can serve humanity
Data is the magic word of the 21st century. As oil in the 20th century and electricity in the 19th century:
For citizens, data means support in daily life in almost all activities, from watch to laptop, from kitchen to car,
from mobile phone to politics. For business and politics, data means power, dominance, winning the race. Data can be used for good and bad,
for services and hacking, for medicine and arms race. How can we build trust in this complex and ambiguous data world?
How can digital technologies serve humanity? The 45 articles in this book represent a broad range of ethical reflections and recommendations
in eight sections: a) Values, Trust and Law, b) AI, Robots and Humans, c) Health and Neuroscience, d) Religions for Digital Justice, e) Farming, Business, Finance, f) Security, War, Peace, g) Data Governance, Geopolitics, h) Media, Education, Communication.
The authors and institutions come from all continents.
The book serves as reading material for teachers, students, policy makers, politicians, business, hospitals, NGOs and religious organisations alike. It is an invitation for dialogue, debate and building trust!
The book is a continuation of the volume “Cyber Ethics 4.0” published in 2018 by the same editors
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