Creativity and class: Review essay

This essay offer a critical review of form of class analysis presented in the works of the economic geographer Richard Florida. In it we use the example of the sale of the New Zealand internet auction site Trade Me to the Australian media group Fairfax to illuminate some of the problematic features of Florida's work

Futures Thinking with Journalists:Resource Pack for Researchers and Innovators in the News Industry

An interactive workbook for news organisations to engage in futures thinking approaches to help them better understand, prepare for, and shape emerging technologies in responsible ways. It outlines why futures thinking is useful and how approaches such as speculative design and co-design with journalists can help identify and mitigate risk, prompt ethical reflection, and build collaborative editorial-technical relationships. The resource pack includes a set of exampledesign provocations based around generative AI and guidance about how to use them, alongside a corresponding set of templates that can be tailored to the user's needs and tips on how to design and deploy their own provocations

Just Jocking? An Exploration of how 10-12 year old Children Experience an Equine Assisted Learning Programme, in a DEIS School, in Limerick city.

Throughout Irish history, the horse has had many uses. In modern Ireland, some communities have harnessed the power of the horse to deliver a range of social interventions. However, at present, there is little published research about equine assisted programmes in Ireland. The main intention of this research project is to explore how 10-12 year old children, from a DEIS primary school in Limerick city, experience an Equine Assisted Learning (EAL) programme facilitated by the local Garda Youth Diversion Project (GYDP). The project aims to be child centred, emergent and participatory, in keeping with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), 1986. The research methods deemed most relevant for the participants were micro ethnographic observation and children‟s photography, followed by semi-structured interviews, where the children‟s photography was used as an elicitation technique. Although it is recognised that this study is on a small scale, and is not generalizable, the findings for this sample support EAL as a positive intervention which promotes learning, self-efficacy, relaxation, relationship-building, social support and self-awareness. In the same way, the programme offers children the opportunity to provide gender neutral care and develop empathy. Equally, EAL appears to give children a space to engage in culturally-significant activities in a safe environment. In sum, the findings suggest that EAL may be a successful programme for engaging young people with an interest, but not necessarily a background, in horses. These findings could be relevant to other DEIS schools and GYDP‟s in Ireland, especially in areas with strong ties to horses

Engaging first year lecturers with threshold learning outcomes and concepts in their disciplines

In this paper, we report on an investigation of what students need to learn in the first year in various discipline-based subjects to launch then on their way to meet specified discipline threshold learning outcomes (TLOs) by the time they graduate. We frame our investigation using both the threshold concepts that the students must master in first year in order to succeed in learning in the discipline and also the threshold learning outcomes that they need to achieve by third year. We describe and analyse workshops used to engage lecturers with the challenges of designing first year curriculum in their r discipline, suggest why threshold concepts are useful in focusing both lecturers and students on what is essential, and outline briefly some of the creative solutions the lecturers offered

Designing first-year sociology curricula and practice

Many countries are now specifying standards for graduates in different disciplines, including sociology. In Australia, the Australian Sociological Association (TASA) has developed Threshold Learning Outcomes (TLOs) for sociology to provide the learning outcomes that students graduating with a bachelor’s degree in sociology should achieve. These TLOs have encouraged universities to think explicitly about their sociology curriculum in a holistic way. This paper reports on a project that investigated the skills and concepts sociology students need to learn in first year to meet the TLOs by the time they graduate. The project identified the needs of students as they transition from school or work into the study of sociology in first year through a study of literature of first-year pedagogy and a student survey. A workshop was held for sociology that involved 37 academics from 14 universities. The workshop was used to promote a rethink of teaching of sociology in the light of the new TLOs as well as to collect ideas from the participants. The student surveys, workshop ideas and relevant literature were analyzed and synthesized for each TLO to determine what skills and concepts first-year students needed to learn, identify what they might find difficult and propose strategies for teaching. The paper also provides practical ideas for engaging academics with thinking holistically about the sociology curriculum and for teaching and learning sociology in the first year of an undergraduate degree

Renewing first year curricula for social sciences and humanities in the context of discipline threshold standards

[Extract] This project evolved out of the work of the Deans of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (DASSH) network for Associate Deans Learning and Teaching (ADLT). As ADLTs, we wanted to better support and advise our colleagues on how to design first year curriculum in their own discipline. Our contexts were determined by Threshold Learning Outcomes (TLOs) that were developed for the Humanities and Social Science disciplines initially through an Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) project (Hay, 2012). We wanted to identify, understand, refine and be able to advocate for teaching and assessment strategies that would set first year students on their way to achieving TLOs in their chosen discipline by the time they graduate. The original aims of the project were to: i. determine the discipline-specific skills and standards that are required to be developed at the first year in order for students to achieve the TLOs and AQF standards prescribed for graduates in the selected disciplines in the Social Sciences and Humanities; ii. engage first year staff with first year pedagogy and curriculum renewal in the light of threshold standards; and iii. provide a toolkit with examples of discipline-specific assessments and activities that develop those skills in first year students