Media Culture 2020: collaborative teaching and blended learning using social media and cloud-based technologies

The Media Culture 2020 project was considered to be a great success by all the partners, academics and especially the students who took part. It is a true example of an intercultural, multidisciplinary, blended learning experience in higher education that achieved it goals of breaking down classroom walls and bridging geographical distance and cultural barriers. The students with different skills, coming from different countries and cultures, interacting with other enlarges the possibilities of creativity, collaboration and quality work. The blend of both synchronous and asynchronous teaching methods fostered an open, blended learning environment, one that extended the traditional boundaries of the classroom in time and space. The interactive and decentralized nature of digital tools enabled staff and students to communicate and strengthen social ties, alongside participation in the production of new knowledge and media content. For students and lecturers, the implementation of social media and cloud platforms offered an innovative solution to both teaching and learning in a collaborative manner. By leveraging the interactive and decentralised capabilities of a range of technologies in an educational context, this model of digital scholarship facilitates an open and dynamic working environment. Blended teaching methods allow for expansive collaboration, whereby information and knowledge can be accessed and disseminated across a number of networked devices

Towards Assume-Guarantee Profiles for Autonomous Vehicles

Rules or specifications for autonomous vehicles are currently formulated on a case-by-case basis, and put together in a rather ad-hoc fashion. As a step towards eliminating this practice, we propose a systematic procedure for generating a set of supervisory specifications for self-driving cars that are 1) associated with a distributed assume-guarantee structure and 2) characterizable by the notion of consistency and completeness. Besides helping autonomous vehicles make better decisions on the road, the assume-guarantee contract structure also helps address the notion of blame when undesirable events occur. We give several game-theoretic examples to demonstrate applicability of our framework

The Relationship between Motivation for Learning Chinese as A Foreign Language and Chinese Achievement of Grade 9 Students at Ekamai International School in Bangkok, Thailand

The purpose of this study was to examine the level of motivational goal orientation, and the relationship between the motivational goal orientation and Chinese achievement of grade 9 students studying Chinese as a foreign language at Ekamai International School in Bangkok, Thailand. The study respondents were 74 students studying Chinese as a foreign language in grade 9 at Ekamai International School during the second semester of the academic year 2014-2015. This study followed a quantitative research methodology employing both a questionnaire and an unofficial version of the HSK III Chinese Proficiency test to address the level of motivational goal orientation and Chinese achievement. There were three main elements included in the study: the level of motivational goal orientation, the level of Chinese language achievement and the relationship between motivational goal orientation and Chinese achievement. In this study, the motivational goal orientation focused on intrinsic and extrinsic goal orientation, and self-efficacy for learning and performance. Chinese language achievement focused on listening, reading and writing achievement. There were three main findings: 1) the overall level of motivation for learning Chinese as a foreign language of grade 9 students was high; 2) Chinese language achievement of grade 9 students was high; 3) there was a significant relationship between motivation for learning and Chinese language achievement. The article concludes with recommendations for practice and for future research

Scale-up of cluster beam deposition to the gram scale with the matrix assembly cluster source for heterogeneous catalysis (propylene combustion)

Cluster beam deposition is a solvent-free method to prepare films of nanoparticles, one obvious application being heterogeneous catalysis. To address the problem of low cluster deposition rates, a novel cluster beam source, the “Matrix Assembly Cluster Source” was invented recently. Following the proof of principle studies, here, we demonstrate a further scale-up by 2 orders of magnitude, equivalent to reaching a production of ∼10 mg of clusters (Au100) per hour. This allows the preparation of cluster-decorated powder catalysts at the gram scale, comfortably sufficient for practical catalysis studies of novel materials at the research level, as demonstrated here by the catalytic combustion of propylene.We are thankful for financial support from the EPSRC (Grant Reference No. EP/K006061/2) and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program through the CritCat project under Grant Agreement No. 686053

Recorded panel discussion

書名: Higher Education Research: Challenges and Prospects. Report of RIHE’s 50th Anniversary International Symposium, 202