Sibling placement and contact in out-of-home care

Many children and young people do not live with all of their siblings in out-of-home care, and contact with the siblings who are not placed with them is not always regular or easily accessed, according to this report. Summary Children and young people in out-of-home care across Australia have told CREATE that living with their brothers and sisters in care is very important and that they are the people they most want to contact when they are not living together. Our latest research shows that many children and young people do not live with all of their siblings in out-of-home care, and contact with the siblings who are not placed with them is not always regular or easily accessed. This report sheds light on the experiences of children young people and caseworkers in each state and territory and what they think about this important issue

Ethical dimensions of user centric regulation

In this paper, we question the role of information technology (IT) designers in IT regulation. Through our concept of user centric regulation (UCR) we unpack what a closer alignment of IT design and regulation could mean. We also situate how they can respond to their ethical and legal duties to end users. Our concept asserts that human computer interaction (HCI) designers are now regulators and as designers are not traditionally involved in the practice of regulation hence the nature of their role is ill-defined. We believe designers need support in understanding what their new role entails, particularly managing ethical dimensions that go beyond law and compliance. We use conceptual analysis to consolidate perspectives from across Human Computer Interaction and Information Technology Law and Regulation, Computer Ethics, Philosophy of Technology, and beyond. We focus in this paper on the importance of mediation and responsibility and illustrate our argument by drawing on the emerging technological setting of smart cities

Reading from nowhere: assessed literary response, Practical Criticism and situated cultural literacy

School examinations of student responses to literature often present poetry blind or “unseen”, inviting decontextualised close reading consistent with the orientation-to-text associated with Practical Criticism (originating in the UK) and New Criticism (originating in the USA). The approach survives in the UK after curricular reforms and government have promulgated cultural literacy as foundational for learning. How is cultural literacy manifest in student responses to literature? To what extent can it be reconciled with Practical Criticism where the place of background knowledge in literary reading is negligible? This article explores their uneasy relationship in pedagogy, curricula and assessment for literary study, discussing classroom interactions in England and Northern Ireland where senior students (aged 16–17) of English Literature consider Yeats’ “culture-making” poem “Easter, 1916”. Using methods where teachers withhold contextual information as they elicit students’ responses, the divergent responses of each class appear to arise from differing access to background knowledge according to local though superficially congruent British cultures. The author proposes “situated cultural literacy” to advance the limited application of Practical Criticism in unseen tasks, acknowledge Richards’ original intent, and support the coherence of assessment with curricular arrangements invoking cultural literacy as a unifying principle

EUD-MARS: End-User Development of Model-Driven Adaptive Robotics Software Systems

Empowering end-users to program robots is becoming more significant. Introducing software engineering principles into end-user programming could improve the quality of the developed software applications. For example, model-driven development improves technology independence and adaptive systems act upon changes in their context of use. However, end-users need to apply such principles in a non-daunting manner and without incurring a steep learning curve. This paper presents EUD-MARS that aims to provide end-users with a simple approach for developing model-driven adaptive robotics software. End-users include people like hobbyists and students who are not professional programmers but are interested in programming robots. EUD-MARS supports robots like hobby drones and educational humanoids that are available for end-users. It offers a tool for software developers and another one for end-users. We evaluated EUD-MARS from three perspectives. First, we used EUD-MARS to program different types of robots and assessed its visual programming language against existing design principles. Second, we asked software developers to use EUD-MARS to configure robots and obtained their feedback on strengths and points for improvement. Third, we observed how end-users explain and develop EUD-MARS programs, and obtained their feedback mainly on understandability, ease of programming, and desirability. These evaluations yielded positive indications of EUD-MARS