A distance ecological model for individual and collaborative-learning support

With the rapid development of information technology (IT) and the Internet spread, it is widely accepted that computer and information communication literacy has become extremely important, and will play a major part in everyone’s lives in the future. Under the umbrella of life-long education, many people from many parts of the social environment will need to be trained and learn about IT. We have started building a framework for such people, as a distance ecological model for self/ collaborative learning support. We call our system RAPSODY: Remote and AdaPtive educational System Offering a DYnamic communicative environment. To show the functionality of our general framework, we instantiated it in the form of a distance learning environment for teacher training. The purpose of this study direction is to propose and develop a distance educational model, as a school-based curriculum development and training-system. In this environment, a teacher can learn via an Internet-based self-training system about subject contents, modern teaching know-how, and students’ learning activities evaluation methods, about the new subject called "Information". This paper describes the structure, functions and mechanism of our distance educational model, in order to realize the above-mentioned goal, and then discuss the educational meaning of this model in consideration of the new learning ecology, which is based on multi-modality and new learning situations and forms, and we perform some tests and evaluation. Moreover, we show an extension of our RAPSODY framework, RAPSODY-EXT, which also embraces collaboration in remote learning environments

Objects as Curricula - learning with museum artefacts through art/archaeology practice

Short Abstract: The idea of objects as a curriculum has informed our work on Blackfoot items in UK museum contexts in which digital imaging was employed to aid in the revitalization of knowledge renewal for Blackfoot makers and has framed continued work in ethnographic collections both in the UK and in Sweden. Long Abstract: The Blackfoot Elder Frank Weasel Head observed that for members of the Blackfoot community the objects held in UK museums were a curriculum. This insight informed our work on Blackfoot items in UK museum contexts in which digital imaging methods were employed to aid in the revitalization of craft making practices and knowledge renewal for Blackfoot makers. This insight has also framed our continued work in ethnographic collections both in the UK at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford and in Sweden at the Ethnografiska Museet, Stockholm. The idea of objects as curricula was intended to underscore the importance of Blackfoot items held in distant museums for Blackfoot people, but over time the concept has gained a new momentum offering us a sense in which all museum items have the potential to teach. Coupled with this, our work on Blackfoot material adopted a series of innovative art/archaeology practices beginning with utilising digital imaging methods commonly used in archaeological fieldwork to developing remote-viewing sessions using these technologies informed by inclusive and open-ended art practice. In a dual sense then the museum archive collection was both a carceral container of of Indigenous teaching, and a site to be opened for innovation and learning: what was learnt very much depended on how we approached and intra-acted with the archive. This session will present a round table panel with a series of papers from members of the teams involved in a series of ongoing and interconnected projects

“We Got Next”: The Struggle to Make the WNBA

2021 marks the 25th season of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), making it easily the longest running women’s professional league in the United States and defying the predictions of those who doubted that a women’s basketball league could succeed. Though the WNBA constantly faces the pessimistic voices of those who view it as on the brink of collapse, it has matured into a stable, growing league, and the players’ prominent role within social justice movements has sparked a new wave of optimism about the WNBA’s future. Despite this, the WNBA still faces questions about how best to grow the league, and perhaps more broadly, what it means for women to play basketball in the professional yet beleaguered WNBA. This thesis examines the way in which WNBA players perceive themselves and the league, and consequently how their demands for change and respect have grown. It draws upon my ethnographic research with a WNBA team—pseudonymously called the Ravens—as well as my examination of a variety of sources, including news articles, advertising and commercials, and most prominently, the players own construction of their mediated self, particularly through the use of sporting autobiographies and other autobiographical texts. I examine the intersecting forces of race, gender, class, sexuality, and religion to demonstrate the way in which the WNBA’s initial marketing emphasis on heterosexual, respectable femininity was gradually challenged over time by players, who instead pushed for alternative models of female athleticism. I argue that these gendered discourses have constructed a way of playing basketball “like a girl,” which can serve to limit players’ embodied possibilities. Furthermore, I explore what it means to play in a professional league that lacks the resources of other, male sports leagues, and the way in which WNBA players have pushed higher pay and better conditions. Through this examination of WNBA players’ experiences, I argue that it is players’ dedication and commitment to ensuring a sustainable league that has enabled the WNBA to survive in spite of an American sporting landscape hostile to women

The Multiplicity of Being: John Clare and the Art of 'Is'

John Clare has sometime been regarded as a poet that demonstrates the characteristics of naïve poetry according to Schiller’s definition. This had led to ideas that Clare is resistant to philosophical readings and theories. Through careful consideration of the workings of his poetry, this thesis argues the reverse case. It asserts that Clare writes ontological poetry and poetry which ‘thinks.’ This thinking can be illuminated by the existential ontological concepts of Martin Heidegger, together with his later writings which interpret poetry as the language of Being. The chapters are organised to bring out the diverse and interconnected implications of these assertions. After the introduction which, among other things, defines key Heideggerian concepts, such as Dasein, Thrownness, Gelessenheit, The Open and ‘Thinging’, the initial chapter discusses Clare as a poet of Being according to Heidegger’s criteria and definitions. Clare is compared to Hölderlin, Heidegger’s ultimate philosophical poet. The chapter discusses Heidegger’s definition of essential poetry and subsequently emphasises its characteristics and traces them through Clare and Hölderlin. The next two chapters present Clare’s poetry as it conforms to Heidegger’s ideas of ‘pure poetry’ using the The Shepherd’s Calendar (1927) as exemplification. The first of these chapters uses the poems from ‘January’ to ‘June’ to reveal what Heidegger describes as the unconditionedness, or the unconditional and unconditioned intelligibility of Being’s essences. In chapter three the thesis demonstrates how Clare’s poetry, from ‘July’ to ‘December’, corresponds in its methods to the way in which Heidegger takes the noun ‘thing’ and transforms it into a verb. Chapter four addresses two treatments of Being within Clare’s nature poems. The first idea is that of nature as aletheia, a Greek word which Heidegger interprets as the disclosing of ‘truth.’ The second idea is that of Human Being. The ideas are linked in that nature as truth becomes a synonym for Clare’s own being. Chapter fives sees Clare as a poetic thinker, probing the existential significance of life. Chapter six discusses Clare’s writing about Being-in the world and Being-with others. The chapter highlights the irony of Clare as a poet of place who can find no sense of home. Clare uses poetry to alleviate his ontological homelessness. Clare’s later excursions into existential ontology lead to chapter seven and a discussion of the poet’s ontological shift to the Eternal. The final chapter compares Clare and Wordsworth as philosophical poets. An Appendix glosses key terms from Heidegger, in support of and cross-referenced to the expositions offered in the Introduction and elsewhere. Overall, the thesis explores and affirms the value of Clare’s work as an embodiment of ontology as a mode of thinking made possible by poetry

Rethinking mythology in Greek museums through contemporary culture

This thesis investigates the character with which Greek mythology, one of the most durable manifestations of ancient Greek heritage, survives in the perception of contemporary Greeks, and the role that Greek museums do and could play in this. The starting point for this investigation is the appraisal of Greek mythology as an ideological creation of ancient Greece that bears pan-human and diachronie intellectual and cultural potency and, as such, constitutes a significant interpretative tool for the contemporary Greek individual. More specifically, this thesis reconsiders the relationships between Greek mythology, Greek museums and Greek people, using as a bridge contemporary Greek art. It does so in three main chapters, which investigate and analyze different parameters of this nexus of relationships. Greek mythology’s adaptations by contemporary Greek society are also explored in an attempt to establish the dominant contemporary meanings of Greek mythology. Then, the relation of a specific cultural manifestation of contemporary Greek society, that of contemporary art, to Greek mythology is extensively analyzed through a series of interviews that were conducted exclusively for this thesis. In these interviews, contemporary Greek musicians, authors and visual artists speak of the position that Greek mythology possess (or does not possess) in their artistic expression, and discuss the intellectual and cultural significance that Greek myths retain for contemporary society and people. From these investigations, two antithetic poles emerge. On the one hand, there is the trivializing way in which Greek society deals with its myths through their exploitation, for example, for commercial or nationalist purposes. On the other hand, there is the sensitivity with which my interviewees pored over Greek myths, enabling them to emerge full of dynamism, and illuminating them as ever-active negotiators of life and human nature. Thus, contemporary art is identified as a powerful conveyor of mythology’s potency for the contemporary individual. Next, the position of Greek archaeological museums, as major official institutions that do, or could, represent and safeguard Greek mythology is explored and critically assessed. It emerges that Greek museums are rather unconcerned with Greek mythology’s representation and communication and thus, confirm that Greek mythology is a dead and irrelevant representative of a glorious, yet remote and strange, ancient civilization

Enduring Crisis, Ensuring Survival: Artistry, Economics, and the American Symphony Orchestra.

Long considered one of the western world’s cultural treasures, the symphony orchestra’s artistic significance belies an institutional history replete with unsolved paradoxes. Since at least 1900, the classical performing arts have struggled to reconcile artistic creation with economic and cultural sustainability. This tension is rooted in a variety of management models that employ distinct ownership structures, revenue streams, and artistic ideologies. Along with various other factors, these models have played a decisive though often ignored role in determining artistic practices and audience reception, especially in America. My dissertation argues that the organizational structure employed by orchestras since the late-nineteenth century is fundamental to understanding the challenges they face today. Drawing from the domains of historical musicology and organizational theory, this project uses the analytic lens of structure—including governance arrangements, financial systems, social hierarchies, institutional logics, and artistic initiatives—to explain the orchestra’s turbulent yet resilient history. Chapter 1 develops a framework to demonstrate how structure has influenced orchestral culture and performance practice. Several early operating models are introduced and compared to the corporate structure adopted by twentieth-century American orchestras. Chapter 2 explores the New York Philharmonic’s evolution from a musician-owned-and-managed cooperative to a board-governed nonprofit, a transition shaped by the ideals—and wallets—of a new philanthropic elite. Chapter 3 scrutinizes the Louisville Orchestra New Music Project (1948–58), which supported over one hundred world premieres and inspired a shift in how orchestras foster the creation of contemporary music. Chapter 4 examines the development of a global youth orchestra movement, El Sistema, whose recent transplantation to the U.S. highlights a conflict between traditional definitions of artistic excellence, commercial viability, and social change. The dissertation concludes by synthesizing these strains of evidence and positing some solutions for the orchestra’s contemporary challenges, connecting past and present to uncover new perspectives on high art music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Ph.D.Music: MusicologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91498/1/mauskapf_1.pd

Bound Flowers, Loose Leaves: Horticultural Form and Textual Practice in Early Modern English Print

The language of plants saturated the English print marketplace in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as printers turned out an extraordinary number of instructional manuals on gardening and husbandry, retailing useful knowledge to a growing class of literate landowners and pleasure gardeners. In those same decades, increasing numbers of miscellanies were issued under titles drawn from the world of plants: poetical gardens, devotional nosegays, forests and bowers of practical wisdom. Bound Flowers, Loose Leaves examines these parallel trends as part of a single phenomenon. Against the unknowns of a new and expanding market, the horticultural processes evoked by these diverse texts naturalize the anonymous futures of print publication, situating the new adventure of print within that most ancient discipline of risk management: agriculture. This dissertation argues that these vegetable discourses fundamentally shaped how English readers understood the printed book. With remarkable frequency, printed books turned to a botanical idiom to describe their prodigious capacity to scatter, gather, and multiply, especially in the small literary forms of couplets, posies, and sentences. Showing how plant life became fundamental to how the world was imagined and known in print, I argue that the portability of these handles of knowledge, in Philip Sidney\u27s phrase, drove the production of both figurative language and natural knowledge in early modern England. In readings of popular instruction manuals and miscellanies as well as works by Isabella Whitney, George Gascoigne, Francis Bacon, and William Shakespeare, I show how these practical instructions and poetic figures organize a fictive reading public, imagined as dispersed consumers of scattered textual copies

A reconsideration of some Jāhilī poetic paradigms

The J=ahil=i poets esteemed verity as opposed to verisimilitude as their principal aesthetic criterion. I have long been convinced of this. This thesis represents an attempt to enucleate several features of their verse by drawing on various spheres of knowledge, acquaintance with which is fundamental to a proper appreciation of the pre-Islamic qad s=idah as poetry. My concern has been with matters zoological, philological, literary and socio-historical. It is a critical shibboleth (both occidental and oriental) that the ancients Arabs were unlettered; yet writing looms large in their verse. It is a modern datum that J=ahil=i verse is oral poetry; yet this is not the only explantion for the recurrence of conventional phraseology and expression. Chapter One is a preliminary incursus into an investigation of writing among the early Arabs. It is also a study of the literary development of a nexus of topical comparisons, viz. the deserted encampment. A socio-historical interpretation of the shift in emphasis perceptible in these comparisons is offered, conjoined with the suggestion that the phenomenon of the `Bedouin' is an incremental paradigm, the presence of which is less distinct in early J=ahil=i verse than has been supposed. Extended similes in which a camel is compared with an oryx bull or doe or a wild ass have tended to be neglected by scholars, who rely on an, at times but poorly formed, subjective impression, referring to the stylized or mannered nature of the tableaux. I have tried to demonstrate that, although in their several features narrative consuetude is discernible, a proper understanding of the vignettes depends largely on the given poetic context. The ethology and ecology of the ass and the oryx have been studied in order to shed light on their poetical manifestations: verse has proved to be consistent with science. Chapter 4 sets forth a comparison of the parodical style of Arkhilokhos of Paros and al-N=abighah of the tribe of Dhuby=an, to which an instance of parody from the Middle English alliterative tradition has been appended