Review of periodical articles

[First Paragraph] There is only one true city, wrote St Augustine, and it is not of this world. The pessimistic Christian response to the fall of Rome in AD 410, epitomized in Augustine's City of God, affected the development of the later medieval city to a degree which has yet, even now, to be fully appreciated. In the Christian city of the Middle Ages the divinity was normally confined to the sanctuaries of his churches, whose topographical prominence and harmonious proportions made manifest an otherwise hidden spiritual order. Outside the cloister gates, disorder reigned: a general lack of planning revealed the meaninglessness of the outward, secular life. This dichotomy between an inner world of spirit and a public world of transient matter was embodied in the recurrent tensions between spiritual and secular space which ran as a motif throughout the history of medieval towns. Modern studies which have emphasized (not, of course, without reason) the secular political and economic power of ecclesiastical institutions in the medieval city have perhaps distracted attention unduly from the real differences of ethos which, within the town, distinguished religious space from that of the surrounding lay world

Review of periodical articles

One of the attractions of medieval urban history is the fact that major conceptual problems in the field continue to be debated. In a stimulating review article by J.H. Mundy, ’Philip Jones and the medieval Italian city-state‘, J. of European Economic History, 28 (1999), 185–200, one distinguished scholar is taxed for holding views now dismissed by some, but of which he is by no means a unique surviving representative. One of these views assumes a clear distinction between the antique city, supposedly a bureaucratic centre with limited economic functions, and the medieval city, as the home of industrious artisans and nascent capitalism. The image of the non-profit-making ancient town may be overly indebted to the nature of the literary sources and to the prevalent interests of classicists; but, although many would now agree that both the elements in the above equation need qualifying, a more focused comparison is presently lacking, and a fine book is still waiting to be written on the transition from the ancient world to the middle ages in urban history

Reflections on the Ecolab and the Zone of Proximal Development

In 1999 we reported a study that explored the way that Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development could be used to inform the design of an Interactive Learning Environment called the Ecolab. Two aspects of this work have subsequently been used for further research. Firstly, there is the interpretation of the ZPD and its associated theory that was used to operationalize the ZPD so that it could be implemented in software. This interpretation has informed further research about how one can model context and its impact on learning, which has produced a design framework that has been successfully applied across a range of educational settings. Secondly, there is the Ecolab software itself. The software has been adapted into a variety of versions that have supported explorations into how to scaffold learners’ metacognition, how to scaffold learners’ motivation and the implications of a learner’s goal orientation upon their use of the software. The findings from these studies have informed our understanding of learner scaffolding and have produced consistent results to demonstrate the importance of providing learners with appropriately challenging tasks and flexible support. Vygotsky’s work is as relevant now as it was in 1999: it still has an important role to play in the development of educational software

Understanding teenagers' personal contexts to design technology that supports learning about energy consumption

© 2013 Taylor & Francis. Energy sustainability is prevalent in political and popular rhetoric and yet energy consumption is rising. Teenagers are an important category of future energy consumers, but little is known of their conceptions about energy and energy saving. We report on empirical research with two groups of teenagers. This is part of ongoing work to design learning technologies that support teenagers learn about personal energy consumption. In this paper we describe our analysis and methodology, which are shaped by the Ecology of Resources (EoR) design framework [Luckin, R. (2010). Re-designing learning contexts: Technology-rich, learner-centred ecologies. London and New York, NY: Routledge]. Our findings informed the development of an EoR model of the participants' personal context, which includes their world resources (people, tools, knowledge, skills, and environment) and their personal resources (conceptions, motivations and concerns around energy consumption). We discuss the range of methods we employed to understand learners' personal contexts. These findings contribute to our understanding of how to explore teenagers' personal contexts and have implications for the design of technology to support learning about personal energy consumption

Making it real: exploring the potential of Augmented Reality for teaching primary school science

The use of Augmented Reality (AR) in formal education could prove a key component in future learning environments that are richly populated with a blend of hardware and software applications. However, relatively little is known about the potential of this technology to support teaching and learning with groups of young children in the classroom. Analysis of teacher-child dialogue in a comparative study between use of an AR virtual mirror interface and more traditional science teaching methods for 10-year-old children, revealed that the children using AR were less engaged than those using traditional resources. We suggest four design requirements that need to be considered if AR is to be successfully adopted into classroom practice. These requirements are: flexible content that teachers can adapt to the needs of their children, guided exploration so learning opportunities can be maximised, in a limited time, and attention to the needs of institutional and curricular requirements

Machine and human observable differences in groups’ collaborative problem-solving behaviours

This paper contributes to our understanding of how to design learning analytics to capture and analyse collaborative problem-solving (CPS) in practice-based learning activities. Most research in learning analytics focuses on student interaction in digital learning environments, yet still most learning and teaching in schools occurs in physical environments. Investigation of student interaction in physical environments can be used to generate observable differences among students, which can then be used in the design and implementation of Learning Analytics. Here, we present several original methods for identifying such differences in groups CPS behaviours. Our data set is based on human observation, hand position (fiducial marker) and heads direction (face recognition) data from eighteen students working in six groups of three. The results show that the high competent CPS groups spend an equal distribution of time on their problem-solving and collaboration stages. Whereas, the low competent CPS groups spend most of their time in identifying knowledge and skill deficiencies only. Moreover, as machine observable data shows, high competent CPS groups present symmetrical contributions to the physical tasks and present high synchrony and individual accountability values. The findings have significant implications on the design and implementation of future learning analytics systems

Analyzing collaborative learning processes automatically

In this article we describe the emerging area of text classification research focused on the problem of collaborative learning process analysis both from a broad perspective and more specifically in terms of a publicly available tool set called TagHelper tools. Analyzing the variety of pedagogically valuable facets of learners’ interactions is a time consuming and effortful process. Improving automated analyses of such highly valued processes of collaborative learning by adapting and applying recent text classification technologies would make it a less arduous task to obtain insights from corpus data. This endeavor also holds the potential for enabling substantially improved on-line instruction both by providing teachers and facilitators with reports about the groups they are moderating and by triggering context sensitive collaborative learning support on an as-needed basis. In this article, we report on an interdisciplinary research project, which has been investigating the effectiveness of applying text classification technology to a large CSCL corpus that has been analyzed by human coders using a theory-based multidimensional coding scheme. We report promising results and include an in-depth discussion of important issues such as reliability, validity, and efficiency that should be considered when deciding on the appropriateness of adopting a new technology such as TagHelper tools. One major technical contribution of this work is a demonstration that an important piece of the work towards making text classification technology effective for this purpose is designing and building linguistic pattern detectors, otherwise known as features, that can be extracted reliably from texts and that have high predictive power for the categories of discourse actions that the CSCL community is interested in

Pylons in the back yard: local planning and perceived risks to health

Health fears arising from the presence of high-voltage power lines in residential areas have received recent attention in spatial planning. A study of stances taken by planning authorities in England and Wales shows their willingness to give expression to the concerns of local communities through precautionary measures, and the difficulties encountered in the face of official statements and industry opposition. These attempts to embody local feeling in patterns of development are illustrative of the increasing prevalence of a sense of risk in contemporary society. The spatial patterns of risk are also revealed, which owe much to the presence and distribution of industrial infrastructure in the landscape and to the associated contested use of land.</p

Burying the 'refuse revolution': the rise of controlled tipping in Britain 1920-1960

The definitive, peer-reviewed and edited version of this article is published in Environment and Planning A, 42, 5, 1033-1048, 2010, 10.1068/a42120.This paper investigates the emergence of ‘controlled tipping’ as the dominant method of municipal waste disposal in Britain between 1920 and 1960. The triumph of controlled tipping, despite the availability of alternative disposal technologies, needs to be understood in the context of the contested meanings of ‘waste’ and ‘wasteland’, which helped to determine attitudes and approaches to disposal. Following the conclusion of the First World War there was an urgent requirement for a cheap means of disposing of increasing amounts of urban municipal waste. The obvious choice was tipping. Before the war, however, refuse tipping had been rejected as insanitary by the emerging waste disposal profession. Public cleansing professionals therefore had to recuperate tipping as a medically and environmentally benign mode of disposal that was reconcilable with the needs of sanitary science and landscape preservation. Controlled tipping, with its combined claims to scientific progress and the revalorization of refuse, enabled dumping to be successfully re-produced as the dominant mode of municipal refuse disposal in Britain. However, tipping faced further challenges after 1945 from changing popular understandings of the value of ‘derelict’ landscapes and from the politics of amenity. The ‘refuse revolution’ was a work in progress