Fluid leadership in a multi-user virtual environment educational project with teenagers: Schome Park

This paper examines leadership practices in a virtual community, the Schome Park project. Schome Park, based at the Open University, UK, was the first European closed (i.e. protected) island in Teen Second Life, a multi-user 3D virtual environment. This fully realised, complex interactive 3D environment has no imposed narrative and offers significant engagement for educational projects. The Schome (‘not school not home’) third space community – i.e. not placed in the first space of home or second space of work/school (Oldenburg, 1989) - was set up with the explicit aim of challenging the instructional models and pedagogic practices of the formal, state educational system. In this disembodied environment identities, represented in the virtual world by personalised avatars, possess usefully ambivalent valences. Often adults will join ‘inworld’ educational events organised and delivered by the younger members of the community. Schome makes flexible use of a wiki (collaboratively designed website), asynchronous discussion fora and other communicative media to support learning processes and enhance the development of a physically distanced yet authentic learning community. The authors propose that the community design in these new spaces created an opportunity for leaders to emerge regardless of contextual hierarchy and to forge a developing culture. The paper makes use of evidence from varied datasets to examine manifestations of leadership in the community and issues arising. Young people have been engaged in proposing, planning, executing and reflecting on teaching and learning and governance without deference to adults. Our analysis contributes to understandings of the development of leadership within carefully designed educational online communities and some of the challenges involved for adults in facilitating an appropriately supportive environment for young people. While aware that this innovative experiment continues to face many challenges, we propose that the design of the project offers much to encourage an approach to education in which collaborative, situated engagement in learning and teaching is perceived as a more fruitful model for the twenty-first century than reproduction of traditional hierarchies of teachers and the taught of conventional classrooms

Music, performance, theatre: Christopher Fox's stage works

No abstract available

Los verbos de habla como recurso estilístico en la caracterización de personajes en textos literarios

Este artículo presenta un análisis de cómo los verbos informativos pueden contribuir a la creación de personalidades ficticias en textos literarios. El examen de los verbos se llevó a cabo utilizando la taxonomía de Caldas-Coulthard (1987), en la cual los verbos se clasifican en categorías autónomas de acuerdo con el nivel de mediación del reportero en las palabras glosadas. Los ejemplos bajo análisis fueron tomados de Nicholas Nickleby (1839) de Charles Dickens. En aras de la coherencia, me centré en un personaje, Ralph Nickleby, cuyas palabras se informan utilizando veintiseis verbos un total de 501 veces a lo largo de la historia. Como se mostrará, la elección de verbos de Dickens proyecta una forma específica de hablar que genera información sobre la personalidad del villano, contribuyendo así a dar forma a su conocido y malvado personaje. El análisis también ilustrará cómo los verbos informativos pueden influir en la forma en que los lectores crean una impresión de los personajes sobre la base de su forma de hablar durante el curso de una historia.This article presents an analysis of how reporting verbs can contribute to the creation of fictional personalities in literary texts. The examination of verbs was carried out using Caldas-Coulthard’s (1987) taxonomy, in which verbs are classified in self-contained categories according to the reporter’s level of mediation on the words glossed. The examples under analysis were all taken from Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby (1839). For the sake of consistency, I focused on one character, Ralph Nickleby, whose words are reported using twenty-six verbs a total of 501 times throughout the story. As will be shown, Dickens’s choice of verbs projects a specific way of speaking that triggers information about the villain’s personality, thereby contributing to shaping his well-known evil character. The analysis will also illustrate how reporting verbs can influence the way in which readers form an impression of characters on the basis of their ways of speaking during the course of a story.peerReviewe

Seeking the real : the special case of Peter Zumthor

Peter Zumthor writes about "developing an architecture which sets out from and returns to real things" referring to both his own design process and the qualities he wishes his architecture to convey. In an architecture culture long accustomed to media saturation and the image, the phrase 'real things' is provocative and potentially archaic. This paper examines what Zumthor means by that term by investigating how he establishes the core ideas or principles that come to inform design development; namely, by his approach to a brief, a site, and a context. The paper draws on his writings as well as our own experience of being in his buildings, particularly through a rare interview that we conducted with him in his new house and atelier in Haldenstein

Global coherence, narrative structure, and expectations of relevance

A topic for both literary studies and discourse analysis is the global structure of texts. Studies of global text structure have largely been focused on narrative structure, where a major strand of research has been devoted to the role which grounding (sometimes called information staging or foreground-background articulation) has for discourse structuring. It is often claimed that grounding is an important aspect of the notion of global coherence, that the overt realisation of grounding effects in texts depend on their genre and that this is generally reflected in the verbal system of natural languages (e.g. Caenepeel 1995; Hooper 1998; Hopper 1979; Fleischmann 1985; 1990; Longacre 1983; 1989). However, the notions of foreground and background are notoriously vague. In this paper I will argue for an alternative account of grounding effects based on the relevance-theoretic claim that the fine-tuning of the addressee's expectations of relevance is an essential part of the on-line processing of complex ostensive stimuli such as texts (Unger 2001). Linguistic and non-linguistic clues can be used to point the addressee to gradations in information grounding within a text in ways which far extend the coding resources of natural languages. This account may provide an explanatory account for Gumperz' (1992) "contextualization clues" and thus open up a new line of interdisciplinary interaction of relevance-theoretic pragmatics with some strands of research in ethnomethodology. It also suggests the idea that the emergence of literary form may be facilitated by the relevance-orientedness of cognition and communication which suggests that the more clues the communicator can give for fine-tuning the addressee's expectation of relevance in complex stimuli, the better chance of successful communication he has, which in turn motivates the use of communicative clues far beyond the coding resources of given natural languages as well as adherence to cultural conventions regarding the form of texts

Deferred imperatives across Indo-Aryan

Exploring the morphosyntax of deferred imperatives in three Indo-Aryan/IA languages: Hindi- Urdu, Punjabi and Bangla, this paper makes two claims. First, Bangla allows negation only in deferred imperatives but not immediate imperatives, and hence seems to pattern with ‘surrogate negative imperative’ languages. Crucially however, there is no alignment between morphological uniqueness of the directive’s verbal form and its negative (in)effability in the language. Secondly, since the morphology based true-surrogate divide is not instructive in determining the status of imperatives in IA, we employ two syntactic-semantic diagnostics: (a) performativity and (b) addressee-restriction on the subject, to claim that deferred commands in all IA languages are real imperatives on par with immediate imperatives. The paper also notes variation in the distribution of negated deferred imperatives, subject to factors like immediacy and plannability

Columbanus, charisma and the revolt of the monks of Bobbio

The account of the revolt of the monks of Bobbio against Columbanus’ successor Attala by Jonas of Bobbio gives only some clues as to why it took place, but suggests that Attala was lacking charisma. Jonas fails to mention the subsequent introduction of the Benedictine Rule to Bobbio and its combination with Columbanian traditions in the Rule of the master; he is also reticent about the deve lopment of cells, or submonasteries, partly as a result of the revolt. It is suggested here that the monastic rule currently known as the Rule of Eugippius was compiled for these cells and that the Rules of the fathers, currently dated to an earlier period, might also be associated with attempts to pacify the monks’ revolt