Lyceum: internet voice groupware for distance learning

This paper describes the design, implementation and deployment of Lyceum, a groupware system providing students and tutors with real time voice conferencing and visual workspace tools, over the standard internet. Lyceum uses a Java client/server architecture to tackle a formidable set of networking requirements: multi-way voice communication with synchronous shared displays, scalable to hundreds of simultaneous users, running over normal modem connections via unknown internet service providers, on home PCs. Additionally, the design had to support multiple courses with different requirements. We describe the interdisciplinary requirements analysis, and iterative design process, by which an academic course team was able to specify and evaluate prototypes. We present the systemís architecture, describe the technical successes and failures from Lyceumís first large scale deployment, and summarise its affordances for interaction and learning

Review: New York City Public Schools from Brownsville to Bloomberg

Review of Heather Lewis\u27s 2015 book, New York City Public Schools from Brownsville to Bloomberg, which explores the historical and educational policy context of the struggle for community control of the New York City public schools from the 1960s to 2000, the year Mayor Michael Bloomberg assumed control over the city\u27s public school system

The effect of the relief plate shoulder angle on flexographic dot gain

The mechanism of image-formation in photopolymer flexographic relief printing plates is reviewed. In addition to the identified factors, it was hypothesized that the level of exposure could influence the plate shoulder angle. It was further hypothesized that an optimization of shoulder angle with respect to halftone dot area may reduce the dot gain of the printing process. An experiment was conducted using a novel method of plate exposure. Continuous-tone masks were placed in contact with the plate back and the halftone negative used on the plate face. The resulting shoulder angles were measured and analyzed for significant fit to a linear mathematical model. For many dot sizes the face exposure level was significant in determining shoulder angle. The plates were printed on a flexographic press, and prints were analyzed to identify any benefits in dot gain reduction. Regression analysis showed very inconsistent correlations between shoulder angle and dot gain for individual dot sizes printed at an optimized level of impression

Where’s the Pedagogy? The Role of Teaching and Learning in the Digital Humanities

The Digital Humanities (DH) has focused narrowly on digital research methods and projects and digital publication efforts. Yet DH has also had a significant, if under recognized, impact on classroom pedagogy. This chapter evaluates the ways DH practices, embodied in a series of pedagogy projects at the City University of York (CUNY), have been used to reshape teaching and learning in college classrooms

History, Interactive Technology and Pedagogy: Past Successes and Future Directions

Based on a keynote presentation at the 2012 Canadian Historical Association conference, this paper surveys the state of digital technology and its impact on academic publication and teaching in the contemporary university. Focusing on the dramatic rise of the Digital Humanities in the last few years, the paper examines alternative forms of peer review, academic scholarship and publication, and classroom teaching as they have been reshaped by the adoption of a variety of digital technologies and formats, including open-access, online peer reviewing, use of data- bases and visualization techniques in humanities work, online journal publication, and the use of blogs and wikis as teaching tools. Examining the digital production and education work of the American Social History Project at CUNY, which he co-founded, and the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy doctoral certificate program that he heads at the CUNY Graduate Center, the author discusses a range of digital projects and approaches designed to improve the quality of teaching and learning in college classrooms

The Paradigm of Peircean Biosemiotics

The failure of modern science to create a common scientific framework for nature and consciousness makes it necessary to look for broader foundations in a new philosophy. Although controversial for modern science, the Peircean semiotic, evolutionary, pragmatic and triadic philosophy has been the only modern conceptual framework that can support that transdisciplinary change in our view of knowing that bridges the two cultures and transgresses Cartesian dualism. It therefore seems ideal to build on it for modern biosemiotics and can, in combination with Luhmann’s theory of communication, encompass modern information theory, complexity science and thermodynamics. It allows focus on the connection between the concept of codes and signs in living systems, and makes it possible to re-conceptualize both internal and external processes of the human body, mind and communication in models that fit into one framework

The Ideological and Organizational Origins of the United Federation of Teachers\u27 Opposition to the Community Control Movement in the New York City Public Schools, 1960-1968

This article explores the origins and ideological practice of public school teacher unionism as it was articulated and revealed in New York City before and during the epochal strike against an experiment in community control of neighborhood schools undertaken by the United Federation of Teachers in the fall of 1968 that closed down the city’s massive public school system for weeks and put almost 1 million school children in the street. How and why did unionized New York City public school teachers support the particular kind of trade unionism that the UFT and its president, Albert Shanker, embodied and practiced in the 1960s? This article examines the ways that a particular form of labor organization and trade union ideology led the UFT and its members to bitterly oppose the community control experiment, an initiative that the union had once supported

Cybersemiotics: A New Foundation for Transdisciplinary Theory of Information, Cognition, Meaning, Communication and Consciousness

We need to realize that a paradigm based on the view of the universe that makes irreversible time and evolution fundamental, forces us to view man as a product of evolution and therefore an observer from inside the universe. This changes the way we conceptualize the problem and role of consciousness in nature compared to what Descartes did with his dualistic paradigm. The theory of evolution forces us theoretically to conceive the natural and social sciences as well as the humanities together in one framework of unrestricted or absolute naturalism, where consciousness is part of nature. This has influenced the exact sciences to produce theories of information and self-organization in order to explain the origin of life and sense experiences, encouraged biological thinking to go into psychology and social science in the form of theories of selfish genes, socio-biology and evolutionary psychology. But these approaches have still not satisfactorily led to an understanding of why and how certain systems have the ability to produce sense experiences, awareness and meaningful communication. The theories of the phenomenological life world and the hermeneutics of communication and understanding seem to defy classical scientific explanations. The humanities therefore send another insight the opposite way down the evolutionary ladder, with questions like: What is the role of consciousness, signs and meaning in evolution? These are matters that the exact sciences are not constructed to answer in their present state. Phenomenology and hermeneutics point out to the sciences that they have prerequisite conditions in embodied living conscious being imbued with meaningful language and a culture. One can see the world view that emerges from the work of the sciences as a reconstruction back into time of our present ecological and evolutionary self-understanding as semiotic intersubjective conscious cultural historical creatures, but unable to handle the aspects of meaning and conscious awareness. How can we integrate these two directions of explanatory efforts? The problem is that the scientific one is without concepts of qualia and meaning, and the phenomenological-hermeneutic “sciences of meaning” do not have a foundation of material evolution. A modern interpretation of C.S. Peirce’s pragmaticistic evolutionary and phaneroscopic semiosis in the form of a biosemiotics is used and integrated with N. Luhmann’s evolutionary autopoietic system theory of social communication. This framework, which integrates cybernetics and semiotics, is called Cybersemiotics

Ficta: remixing generalized symbolic media in the new scientific novel

This article analyzes the use of fictionalization in popular science communication as an answer to changing demands for science communication in the mass media. It concludes that a new genre—Ficta—arose especially with the work of Michael Crichton. The Ficta novel is a fiction novel based on a real scientific problem, often one that can have or already does have serious consequences for our culture or civilization. The Ficta novel is a new way for the entertainment society to reflect on scientific theories, their consequences and meaning. Jurassic Park is chosen for an in-depth analysis in order to bring out the essential characteristics of Ficta, showing how its reflections on complexity, fractals, self-reference, non-linearity and unpredictability in science transform our view of scientific knowledge as being the tool for deterministic control into a second order reflection on complexity and the limits of control and predictability