28 research outputs found

    What is the Avatar? Fiction and Embodiment in Avatar-Based Singleplayer Computer Games: Revised and Commented Edition

    Get PDF
    What are the characteristic features of avatar-based singleplayer videogames, from Super Mario Bros. to Grand Theft Auto? The author examines this question with a particular focus on issues of fictionality and realism, and their relation to cinema and Virtual Reality. Through close-up analysis and philosophical discussion, the author argues that avatar-based gaming is a distinctive and dominant form of virtual self-embodiment in digital culture. This book is a revised edition of Rune Klevjer's pioneering work from 2007, featuring a new introduction by the author and afterword by Stephan GĂŒnzel, Jörg Sternagel, and Dieter Mersch

    Undergraduate nursing students’ team communication skills within a simulated emergency setting : a grounded theory study

    Get PDF
    Recognising and managing clinical deterioration is considered a high priority in health care with ineffective communication being a significant contributing factor to poor clinical outcomes for patients. Nurses are in a unique position to make a difference in influencing improvements in team communication. In Australia, nurse education has become more complicated and demanding with nursing students focus on behaviour skills, such as communication, becoming more difficult in a saturated curriculum. Simulation-based education has provided an experiential way to learn these complex skills. Although there has been much work in the healthcare literature on clinical teamwork, including communication and its intersection with patient safety, there is still a gap in explaining how individuals within the team contribute to communication. The purpose of this study was to explore and explain how nursing students communicate in simulated emergency settings and how factors, such as culture, language, gender, age and power, affect nursing students’ team communication. This study investigated how transitioning nursing students are prepared with the necessary skills to achieve effective team communication at the point of transition to clinical practice as registered nurses. In order to address the aims of the study, a constructivist grounded theory methodology, informed by Kathy Charmaz (2006), was employed. Using purposive sampling, third year nursing students were recruited from one Australian university, to undertake a structured team simulation experience. Participants worked in teams of three or four to experience the team communication whilst working together to care for a deteriorating patient in the form of a mannequin. Simulations were video recorded after which individual, in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 21 participants. In line with a grounded theory approach, data collection and analysis were conducted concurrently until theoretical saturation was achieved. In response to the central problem of how nursing students communicate in simulated emergency settings, a core process was established that explained the factors that affect team communication. This problem is conceptualised as Navigating uncertainty: Explaining communication of nursing students within an emergency setting. This theoretical construct helps to explain nursing students’ actions and insights into factors that influence their communication within emergency teams. The core process is represented in three transitional stages of the theory comprising: Finding a place in the team, Understanding and working out differences and Looking to the future: Developing strategies to improve communication. This process was mediated by contextual conditions of the student, the simulation and the team. The phases are reinforced by the three main categories of Having a place in the team, Knowing yourself, and Transitioning from student to registered nurse. These categories represent the key activities that nursing students were engaged with that led to the development of the core category and process. The generated findings and theory offer valuable insights into factors that influence team communication skills within emergency settings. The theory raises awareness of social processes undertaken by nursing students during team communication, and highlights obstacles that can assist educators and academics to structure team communication education to better meet the needs of nursing students transitioning to practice settings.Doctor of Philosoph

    Knowledge Modelling and Learning through Cognitive Networks

    Get PDF
    One of the most promising developments in modelling knowledge is cognitive network science, which aims to investigate cognitive phenomena driven by the networked, associative organization of knowledge. For example, investigating the structure of semantic memory via semantic networks has illuminated how memory recall patterns influence phenomena such as creativity, memory search, learning, and more generally, knowledge acquisition, exploration, and exploitation. In parallel, neural network models for artificial intelligence (AI) are also becoming more widespread as inferential models for understanding which features drive language-related phenomena such as meaning reconstruction, stance detection, and emotional profiling. Whereas cognitive networks map explicitly which entities engage in associative relationships, neural networks perform an implicit mapping of correlations in cognitive data as weights, obtained after training over labelled data and whose interpretation is not immediately evident to the experimenter. This book aims to bring together quantitative, innovative research that focuses on modelling knowledge through cognitive and neural networks to gain insight into mechanisms driving cognitive processes related to knowledge structuring, exploration, and learning. The book comprises a variety of publication types, including reviews and theoretical papers, empirical research, computational modelling, and big data analysis. All papers here share a commonality: they demonstrate how the application of network science and AI can extend and broaden cognitive science in ways that traditional approaches cannot

    Complex systems simulations to develop agency and citizenship skills through science education

    Get PDF
    In the era of big data, the progressively more widespread use of computational and data-intensive approaches is leading to changes in the ways of doing science and conducting research. The new methodologies and techniques are routine for researchers and professionals who make everyday use of big data analytics or simulations tools but are mainly unknown to ordinary people. Nevertheless, the impact of computational and data-intensive approaches has gone far beyond the scientific community, reaching the entire society. Indeed, the applications of machine learning and big data analytics, as well as the results and methods of computational simulations have reached people’s life and behaviour and, even more importantly, are at the methodological core of studies on urgent issues like the climate change or the pandemic, on which policymakers and citizens have to make decisions. Hence, the educational community cannot ignore the ongoing transformation of all people’s lives, behaviors, and culture. Within the research field of education to data science and computation, this dissertation addresses the issue of introducing in teaching-learning activities one of the methods of the on-going data science revolution: the computational simulations. Addressing the conceptual, methodological, and epistemological novelty of these objects, we will show how they embed, in a very specific, disciplinary-grounded way, the paradigm shift and cultural revolution of the data science age. We do that using lenses that come from the science of complexity, with its key-ideas that, originated from the physical modelling, can be applied to the analysis of a range of different phenomena. In the dissertation, we will guide the readers to recognize how dealing with simulations not only requires technical competences of coding, but a change of mindset and ways to think about the problems and the scientific method to address them

    The 4IR and teacher education in South Africa:

    Get PDF
    The 4IR has become an overarching framework within which education systems, including teacher education, are operating. Contingent upon the ideology of neo-liberalism, the 4IR seeks to transform societies in ways which respond to the relentless developments in technology, the Internet and digital capacities which, by design and intent, are purposed at increasing both productivity and the associated quality while at the same time reducing human intervention in the same processes. In teacher education, how we teach and train student teachers will be substantially influenced by the imperatives of the 4IR. There are multiple unresolved questions as the 4IR takes centre stage. For example, what will it mean for teaching and learning in schools that have severe technological and digital deficits; for teachers and students who have minimal technological literacies; for delivering high-quality teaching and learning; for transforming both the content and pedagogies of teacher education and, above all, for delivering socially just educational experiences for all our learners, regardless of class, race, and privilege. The discourse of the 4IR is contemporary and requires multiple perspectives to explore what it means in different contexts and settings, the understandings it engenders in people, what it implies across a wide range of educational decision-making levels, and that its fundamental assumptions cohere with national and societal assumptions about equality, equity and social justice. Multiple methodological approaches were utilised in the interrogation of the idea of the 4IR in teacher education in South Africa, including theoretical, empirical, and small-scale case studies, amongst others. The data these approaches provide are equally valued based on the purposes for which they have been derived

    Introducing Computational Thinking in K-12 Education: Historical, Epistemological, Pedagogical, Cognitive, and Affective Aspects

    Get PDF
    Introduction of scientific and cultural aspects of Computer Science (CS) (called "Computational Thinking" - CT) in K-12 education is fundamental. We focus on three crucial areas. 1. Historical, philosophical, and pedagogical aspects. What are the big ideas of CS we must teach? What are the historical and pedagogical contexts in which CT emerged, and why are relevant? What is the relationship between learning theories (e.g., constructivism) and teaching approaches (e.g., plugged and unplugged)? 2. Cognitive aspects. What is the sentiment of generalist teachers not trained to teach CS? What misconceptions do they hold about concepts like CT and "coding"? 3. Affective and motivational aspects. What is the impact of personal beliefs about intelligence (mindset) and about CS ability? What the role of teaching approaches? This research has been conducted both through historical and philosophical argumentation, and through quantitative and qualitative studies (both on nationwide samples and small significant ones), in particular through the lens of (often exaggerated) claims about transfer from CS to other skills. Four important claims are substantiated. 1. CS should be introduced in K-12 as a tool to understand and act in our digital world, and to use the power of computation for meaningful learning. CT is the conceptual sediment of that learning. We designed a curriculum proposal in this direction. 2. The expressions CT (useful to distantiate from digital literacy) and "coding" can cause misconceptions among teachers, who focus mainly on transfer to general thinking skills. Both disciplinary and pedagogical teacher training is hence needed. 3. Some plugged and unplugged teaching tools have intrinsic constructivist characteristics that can facilitate CS learning, as shown with proposed activities. 4. Growth mindset is not automatically fostered by CS, while not studying CS can foster fixed beliefs. Growth mindset can be fostered by creative computing, leveraging on its constructivist aspects

    Modes of knowing in simulated human pedagogies: The uncanny double of performance in nursing education

    Get PDF
    Computerised simulated human technologies are often considered to be the gold standard in clinical education, but calls to critically enhance the theoretical and philosophical foundation of this pedagogy have largely been left unanswered. The simulation learning literature is vast, but it is concerned mostly with measuring student outcomes and learning satisfaction, and little is known about how these technologies influence the practices of clinical educators or how professional practice learning is embodied in this complex, contentious, and uncanny space. This thesis explores the ways in which nurse educators enrol computerised simulated human patients into the assemblages within their pedagogical practices. Guided by the sensibilities of actor-network theory (ANT), and Mol’s (2002) notion of praxiography, ethnographic observations were undertaken with nurse educators at two nursing schools. The educators wore digital videoglasses to record their teaching practices from their own visual perspective during the observations. In-depth elicitation interviews were held to further explore these practices. The ANT sensibilities of allegory, translation, and multiple worlds guided a posthuman analysis of the assembled materials. The analysis revealed an understanding of the practices of simulation education as being doubly performative. The hybrid assemblages of simulation and educator tell stories that act on multiple levels; simultaneously specific and allegorical, theatrical and practice-focused. These multiple layers of the uncanny are integral to the allegorical practices that must contend with the tension of teaching students to pretend to be nurses while they are learning to become nurses. While professing to enact ‘scientific’ and evidence-based approaches to teaching, the nurse educators’ practices are inextricably bound with storytelling, indicating that the scientific and folkloric are not in binary opposition. Further, the thesis has refined the use of allegory in and beyond ANT-inspired approaches to conceptualise research in education and practice settings

    Computer Simulations in Science and Engineering. Concept, Practices, Perspectives

    Get PDF
    This book addresses key conceptual issues relating to the modern scientific and engineering use of computer simulations. It analyses a broad set of questions, from the nature of computer simulations to their epistemological power, including the many scientific, social and ethics implications of using computer simulations. The book is written in an easily accessible narrative, one that weaves together philosophical questions and scientific technicalities. It will thus appeal equally to all academic scientists, engineers, and researchers in industry interested in questions related to the general practice of computer simulations
    corecore