Using technologies of the self to stimulate students\u27 intelligences in English as a foreign language learning

The purpose of this curriculum project is to provide an approach to enrich the process of teaching and learning. This project uses psychological tools to stimulate students\u27 multiple intelligences and to encourage students to know how to manage their learning, so that learning English will no longer be boring; instead it will be creative and practical

Things and Places: The Meaning of the Physical Environment from an Environmental Psychology and Environmental Communication Perspective

According to environmental psychology, in the process of behaviour physical environment is man’s companion, equal partner, which, together with the internal psychological processes and in interaction (transaction) with these, partakes in the behavioural process. This standpoint makes it possible to raise quite a few questions, psychological in nature, about humans acting in a built/physical and natural environment, starting from this psychologically unusual set-off. These questions can (or for the most part can) be answered with psychological tools – “only” the man-environment transaction must be taken seriously, both from theoretical and practical perspective

Personalised Learning: Developing a Vygotskian Framework for E-learning

Personalisation has emerged as a central feature of recent educational strategies in the UK and abroad. At the heart of this is a vision to empower learners to take more ownership of their learning and develop autonomy. While the introduction of digital technologies is not enough to effect this change, embedding the affordances of new technologies is expected to offer new routes for creating personalised learning environments. The approach is not unique to education, with consumer technologies offering a 'personalised' relationship which is both engaging and dynamic, however the challenge remains for learning providers to capture and transpose this to educational contexts. As learners begin to utilise a range of tools to pursue communicative and collaborative actions, the first part of this paper will use analysis of activity logs to uncover interesting trends for maturing e-learning platforms across over 100 UK learning providers. While personalisation appeals to marketing theories this paper will argue that if learning is to become personalised one must ask what the optimal instruction for any particular learner is? For Vygotsky this is based in the zone of proximal development, a way of understanding the causal-dynamics of development that allow appropriate pedagogical interventions. The second part of this paper will interpret personalised learning as the organising principle for a sense-making framework for e-learning. In this approach personalised learning provides the context for assessing the capabilities of e-learning using Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development as the framework for assessing learner potential and development

Rendering sustainable consumer behavior more sustainable : psychological tools for marketing pro-social commitment.

This dissertation deals with persuasive communication in the context of social marketing, which is a field devoted to the promotion of socially desirable behavior. We focused on the promotion of pro-environmental behavior. The decision whether or not to behave environmentally friendly confronts the individual with a social dilemma. This is a choice between an option that serves the collective interest and an option that serves his or her self-interest. Choosing the environmentally friendly option is in the interest of others (e.g., the community, society, even future generations) but is often associated with a cost to the individual, like money, time, effort, or inconvenience. Therefore, convincing an individual to behave environmentally friendly implies persuading him or her to pursue the interest of others at the cost of his or her immediate self-interest. The social marketing approach traditionally relies on the assumption that successful behavioral change towards serving the collective interest, directly follows from having people think about the consequences of behavioral alternatives. Informational and educational campaigns based on this idea have indeed been very successful at generating awareness and concern about environmental issues, but, in contrast, disappointingly unsuccessful at making people change their behavior. We propose an complementary approach that consists of activating the right pro-environmental value in a more subtle way. We found, using laboratory games with a social dilemma structure, that decisions can be based on either an intuitive or a more rational system. People with pro-social values tend to behave more pro-socially than people with pro-self values when they followed their intuitive system. However, when thinking more rationally, pro-socials and pro-selfs behaved equally selfishly. Thinking seems to enable individuals to find justifications for behaving selfishly. Therefore we present two persuasion techniques, which do not motivate people to think, but which simply suggest or remind people that they hold pro-environmental values. Positive cueing reminds people of cases in which they behaved pro-environmentally in the past, and social labeling describes a person as being concerned with the environment. Both tools were more successful at producing more environmentally friendly behavior than educational campaigns.

Citizenship education, truth and learning : some thoughts on professional deliberation

Through consideration of a classroom context observed as part of a PGCE student teacher’s professional development, reading as a learning activity is considered. It is proposed that ‘learning to read’ engages pupils in a critical social-cultural-political project. Through further analysis of a pupil response identified as ‘wrong’, learning in citizenship education is considered through the prism of realist and constructivist perspectives. Finally, current educational ‘good practice’ is identified as offering more than just ‘things to do in the classroom’; aspects are shown to be concordant with elements of constructivist thinking, thinking which potentially offers professionals a prism through which to examine practise. In short, this paper does not propose that teachers ‘become’ constructivist in orientation; rather it offers, as an example, how adopting various theoretical positions from which to deconstruct education can and does provide for alternative perspectives both on educational policy and personal-professional viewpoints

Social Distance Evaluation in Human Parietal Cortex

Across cultures, social relationships are often thought of, described, and acted out in terms of physical space (e.g. “close friends” “high lord”). Does this cognitive mapping of social concepts arise from shared brain resources for processing social and physical relationships? Using fMRI, we found that the tasks of evaluating social compatibility and of evaluating physical distances engage a common brain substrate in the parietal cortex. The present study shows the possibility of an analytic brain mechanism to process and represent complex networks of social relationships. Given parietal cortex's known role in constructing egocentric maps of physical space, our present findings may help to explain the linguistic, psychological and behavioural links between social and physical space

Virtual reality service to Alleviate Performance Anxiety and Stage Fright – SpeakerVR, Case Study

Utilizing Virtual Reality in alleviating performance anxiety contains significant possibilities and has been discovered to be a powerful tool and this kind of techniques and service may revolutionize treatment of alleviating performance anxiety and stage fright. This study examines techniques of alleviating Performance Anxiety and Stage Fright by Virtual Reality simulation. The study is conducted by tests and interviews. The study contains a design process to build the presented VR simulation and evaluation process, which contains interviews and pre-tests to develop the VR-simulation and the test-runs. This study has been driven by desire to understand the nature and possibilities of XR services and simulations in alleviating stress and anxiety. More accurately, in this study’s case, Stage Fright and Performance Anxiety and Stress related to public performance/speaking, are observed in the light of researching possibilities of alleviating the user by utilizing human technology interaction in conscious and possibly non-conscious levels by stimuli, which are supposed to have an effect through affecting users emotional state and through shorter time lasting emotions. The study presents design and development process of Virtual Reality (VR) Simulation, called SpeakerVR, which is a VR-service and simulation to alleviate/diminish users Stage Fright and Performance Anxiety and as well to help the user in the performing in front of an audience and evaluate and discuss about this kind of VR- simulation’s possibilities. Also, it discusses whether this kind of VR-simulation could become a powerful scientific research apparatus. In the study is presented a testing simulation which is based on SpeakerVR, VR-simulation. For the study, the SpeakerVR is built only with parts which are relevant for the study as the VR-simulations commercial version contains much more actions but is not scientifically observable as it has much happening at the same time and therefore, it’s not possible to understand which of actions triggered something measurable. The design process is multidisciplinary and to reach the goals set for the design and the study, the design and study processes are selected to contain elements from Psychology, Game and Internet studies, Human Computer Interaction, Game Design, Industrial Design, Human Cantered Design, Gamification and Psychiatry and their methodologies. Therefore, further in this study/document several techniques and phenomena are explained by utilizing multidisciplinary sources whenever suitable solution is found from any disciplinary but staying inside the delimitation of the study and design process

Transformative Anti-Ableist Pedagogy for Social Justice: Charting a Critical Agenda for Inclusive Education

Higher education institutions are legally bound to provide equal educational opportunities for diverse learners, traditionally materialized as individualized accommodations. This paper contends that despite the growing interest and scholarship in implementing more inclusive pedagogy enabling access to education for all students (e.g. Universal Design for Learning), those efforts still fall short of systematically addressing intersecting, oppressive, and anti-ableist practices in the classrooms. I argue, that in order to develop a truly inclusive, equitable, socially just and transformative pedagogy and teaching practices, we need a theory that posits disability in the context of learning and development, the theory that integrates disability into human development in a manner that overcomes dichotomized and reductionist perspectives of disability and individualistic notions of learning. Drawing on my research on teaching and institutional practices for a student diagnosed with autism, analyzed through the lens of Critical Disability Studies in conjunction with Vygotsky’s theory of defectology and recent advances in cultural-historical activity theory, especially the Transformative Activist Stance (Stetsenko, 2016), this paper offers steps toward integrating these approaches into a transformative pedagogy framework for inclusive, equitable, and anti-ableist pedagogy for all learners