Designing the Library of the Future

The University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) has embarked on a major redevelopment of its City Campus. A key element of this redevelopment is the planned construction of a new University Library at the centre of the redeveloped campus on the current site of Building 2, adjoining the UTS Tower, Building 1. This Library of the Future, which is planned to open for academic year 2015, will be a new kind of academic library which will aim to set a standard for the future. The focus of this report is on envisaging a Library of the Future, what it might be when it opens and how it might develop to retain its novelty so that it will continue to surprise and excite. To endeavour to imagine and create a Library of the Future is a daring and humbling enterprise: it must be designed to foster an effective academic community in the long term at UTS through its role as the knowledge hub of the University

ICS Materials. Towards a re-Interpretation of material qualities through interactive, connected, and smart materials.

The domain of materials for design is changing under the influence of an increased technological advancement, miniaturization and democratization. Materials are becoming connected, augmented, computational, interactive, active, responsive, and dynamic. These are ICS Materials, an acronym that stands for Interactive, Connected and Smart. While labs around the world are experimenting with these new materials, there is the need to reflect on their potentials and impact on design. This paper is a first step in this direction: to interpret and describe the qualities of ICS materials, considering their experiential pattern, their expressive sensorial dimension, and their aesthetic of interaction. Through case studies, we analyse and classify these emerging ICS Materials and identified common characteristics, and challenges, e.g. the ability to change over time or their programmability by the designers and users. On that basis, we argue there is the need to reframe and redesign existing models to describe ICS materials, making their qualities emerge

The University-Commune

In this new book we return to the challenge of deepening the task to the point of imagining the university formed by commoner university students. It is a turn, a new place from which to name and reconsider community management and action from a sense of co-responsibility for the commons that we must guarantee so that the common project prevails and achieves long-term self-sustainability.This is what the seven articles in this book are about, which calls into question what it means for the university to be and act according to economic principles and logics (giving, receiving, undertaking), social (distribution of roles and benefits) and policies (agreements, consensus, participation and assignment of responsibilities) of the commune. The institutional dimension is important but the vitality, the sense of belonging and the profound strength of the Salesian university project depend much more on the commons logic. Feeling of the commons is not a possibility among many others. We are convinced that, in order to take on this project, it is necessary to transcend institutional, business logic and state regulations. Therefore, the university-commune is the way and, perhaps, the only one possible. University and Common Goods Research Group Universidad Politécnica Salesian

A critical study of international higher education development: capital, capability, and a dialogical proposal for academic freedom as a responsibility

This thesis sets out to critically examine the field of higher education development, as one which is focused on socio-economic inequality and welfare, and determines educational purpose in poorer, or ‘developing’, countries accordingly. My question is whether mainstream development approaches to higher education are really contributing to the provision of more equal education services, or whether they risk reintroducing inequality by treating the priorities of poorer countries differently. To investigate whether there are educational values or purposes common to universities globally irrespective of socio-economic imperatives, I begin the study with a historiographical look at their growth in terms of both ideas of its purpose, and how purpose is realised in actuality. I then trace the emergence of the discourse of international development, and the role that higher education has come to play within it, showing how the field of international higher education development has simplified the notion of university purpose for its own devices. The thesis then looks at underlying assumptions about human nature, defined as the problem of humanism, common to both transcendent ideas of university purpose as well as the development discourse. To avoid the limitations of these assumptions, I argue that a theoretical approach is required that can engage with questions of hybridity and multiplicity in both the history and future of universities, without reducing those questions to abstract ideas. The approach I propose draws upon the dialogism of Mikhail Bakhtin, whose multi-layered understanding of language prevents any one understanding of another person, or of human nature more generally, being considered final. The educational implications for such an approach are finally explored in the concept of academic freedom, which is traditionally conceived of as a right, but is here reconceptualised also as a responsibility

Who cares about ethics? : selected essays from Globethics.net

This book is dedicated to Ursula and Walter Linsi and to the U. W. Linsi Foundation that they established, with gratitude for their advice, accompaniment and moral support, for their wisdom and commitment to the power and importance of ethical living and for the principles* and resources that have contributed so much to forming Globethics.net as an organisation and to transforming the lives of those we work with for the better.Ethics is a universal concern for all people around the world, and this book explores how and why ethics is still relevant today. Who Cares About Ethics? is made up of selected essays from participants in the Globethics.net Network, capitalising on their diverse knowledge and life experiences. Topics range from ethics in the cyberworld, the role of religious ethics in advocating for the environment, explorations of ethics in health and well-being to redefining the concept of homesickness

Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If students’ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in student’s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality

Learning Environment Design and Use

Amid burgeoning international interest in the built environment of education, this SI examines the research, policy, and practice that lies behind the global trends in architecture and pedagogy. It contributes to the developing interdisciplinary understanding of the processes and products of school design at all stages, from ‘visioning’ and brief, through habitation and use, to post-occupancy evaluation. The intention is to build knowledge relating to successful design, educational affordances and outcomes, change management, and the alignment of physical resources with teaching and learning needs. The papers explore the multiprofessional landscape of educational spaces as they are planned, built, and used. Reflecting the diversity of the area, the SI features empirical work using a range of methodologies, transdisciplinary work and novel theoretical framings. It includes co-authored papers whose authorship bridges academic disciplines, research and practice, or research and policy. The over-arching aim was to capture the diversity of research related to learning environments

Difficulties Encountered by Libyan University Students of English as a Foreign Language in the Use of Lexical Collocations

The main goal of this research is to investigate the difficulties Libyan undergraduate university English major students have in the use of verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations by looking at their performance in free production.Twelve verbs and twelve adjectives were investigated in depth with the aim of determining their collocational patterns when used by Libyan learners. Having done this, I also investigate whether there is a significant difference between native speaker ratings of English language learner collocations in academic as opposed to non–academic contexts. To achieve the main aim, a 250-word academic writing task was used to collect data from 186 fourth-year university students (90 males and 96 females) at Tripoli University (the Department of English, Faculty of Arts). The data was analysed using AntConc 3.2.1w (Anthony, 2007). After extracting the learners‟ collocations, four sources were used to determine and judge their acceptability in terms of conforming to native-like use. They are: (1) the Oxford Collocations Dictionary (2009), (2) the online British National Corpus (BNC), (3) consultations with two native speakers, and (4) a survey to triangulate the above three methods. Gass and Selinker's (2008) error analysis framework is adopted as the basis for analyzing the learners' collocational violations. In addition, quantitative and qualitative methods were used to analyse the data. For example, the writing task data was analysed quantitatively in order to identify the frequency of learners' acceptable collocations, erroneous collocations and collocational errors, and qualitatively to identify various types of collocational errors and to determine the sources of learners' difficulty in producing collocations. In addition, a two-version acceptability survey (i.e. academic rating and non-academic rating) was administered to 100 native speakers of English in order to achieve the secondary aim. Furthermore, a student questionnaire and a lecturer questionnaire were used as a supportive method to explore collocation as a linguistic phenomenon from the learning and teaching perspectives. The participants were 155 students and 12 university lecturers. The results from the questionnaires are useful as they potentially suggest reasons why Libyan students have difficulty with collocations. In addition, they contribute to our understanding of how lecturers and students think collocations are taught and learned in the Libyan educational system. Findings from the academic writing data reveal that: (1) verb-noun collocations were more difficult for the participants than adjective-noun collocations; (2) independent samples t-test results showed that the participants' use of the twelve adjectives in the adjective-noun collocations showed significantly more accuracy level compared to their use of the twelve verbs in the verb-noun collocations. Therefore, the statistical investigations confirm that verb-noun collocations posed more difficulties for the participants than adjective-noun collocations.; (3) three broad categories of errors were identified in the erroneously produced verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations in the Libyan Learner Corpus (LLC): (i) grammatical errors, (ii) lexical errors and (iii) errors related to usage; and (4) eight main types of sources of difficulties are suggested, such as L1 interference – the negative influence of the mother tongue - and the use of synonymy. The results of the survey data reveal that there were significant differences in the native speakers‟ judgments in the academic rating survey and the non-academic rating survey. Finally, on the basis of these results, several recommendations are made in order to improve the teaching of collocations in EFL classes in the light of the obtained results