Tackling transition:the value of peer mentoring

This paper is aimed at those interested in the promotion of student retention in higher education; particularly those with an interest in peer mentoring as a means of student support. It critically discusses the results of an exploratory study analysing the perceptions of peer mentors and mentees within five universities in the United Kingdom. The aim of the study was to analyse how student peer mentoring can aid transition into university by focusing specifically on how senior students can support their junior counterparts in their first year at university. The paper discusses the results of a survey which was completed by 329 student peer mentors and mentees. Focusing on the benefits and outcomes of participation in Mentoring Programmes, the survey was distinctive in that it asked mentors and mentees similar questions. From a theoretical perspective, the paper contributes to debates about peer support in higher education showing that participation in such programmes can have positive outcomes from both social and pedagogic perspectives. Practically speaking, the results have important implications for Higher Education Institutions as the research highlights the importance of putting into place formally structured Peer Mentoring Programmes which facilitate student support at a time when new students are most at risk of ‘dropping out’

Le Ali ritrovate dell’Hôtel de Galliffet. Il concorso di progettazione promosso dall’Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Parigi

Nel 2015 l’Istituto Italiano di Cultura a Parigi ha promosso un concorso di proget-tazione per l’ampliamento e la valorizzazione dell’edificio neoclassico dell’Hôtel de Galliffet, sede dell’Istituto e proprietà dello Stato italiano da oltre un secolo. Il bando prevedeva la ricostruzione delle due ali ‘perdute’ del complesso: l’ala sud, demolita negli anni sessanta perché a rischio di crolli, da destinare a produttori e promotori dell’eccellenze industriali, artigianali e culturali in visita a Parigi, e l’ala est, incom-piuta dagli anni cinquanta, per ospitare uffici e nuove aule per corsi di lingua. Il co-mitato scientifico ha invitato al concorso nove studi emergenti di architetti italiani, mentre l’Istituto ha affidato alla Scuola di restauro del Dipartimento di Architettu-ra di Roma Tre un progetto di ricostruzione filologica che privilegiasse, laddove possibile, la restituzione dei caratteri formali e materiali dell’architettura perduta. Il progetto della Scuola di restauro è stato esposto, insieme con gli altri nove, alla mostra Le Ali ritrovate dell’Hôtel de Galliffet (Parigi, 13 giugno-30 dicembre 2016), ed è stato presentato alla Biennale di Architettura di Venezia del 2016.In 2015, the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris promoted a design competition for the expansion and enhancement of its own headquarters, the Hôtel de Galliffet, a neoclassical building owned by the Italian government for over a century. The competition centered on the reconstruction of the two ‘lost’ wings of the building: the south wing, demolished in the sixties due to risk of collapse, intended to house producers and promoters of industrial, artisanal, and cultural excellence visiting Par-is; and the east wing, unfinished since the fifties, meant to host offices and language classrooms. The scientific committee invited nine emerging architecture firms in Italy to participate, while the Institute asked the Restoration School of Roma Tre University’s Department of Architecture to submit a philological design that would foster, wherever possible, the reconstruction of the style and features of the original architecture. The Restoration School’s work was shown, along with the other firms’, in the exhibition titled Le Ali ritrovate dell’Hôtel de Galliffet (Paris, June 13 - December 30, 2016) and subsequently at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennial

L’accesso principale al Parco Archeologico di Selinunte (1973-2021). Storia e destino del progetto di Minissi, Porcinai e Arena

In the 70s, Superintendent Tusa promoted the creation of the Selinunte Park and entrusted the assign- ment to Porcinai, Minissi and Arena. A sophisticated access system was designed, through a combination of landscape and architectural elements, to gradually introduce the archeological tour experience and to manage the delicate relationship with the unauthorized buildings in the surrounding area. The approved project underwent significant changes some of which were in response to the controversy with the local community. In the following years what had survived of the original project was betrayed by further transformations. Forty years on from the start of the construction works and after new attempts to alter the Park, the cur- rent Management has decided to promote the enhancement of the project and to look for ways to pre- serve this contemporary garden. Our research aims to provide a guideline for the planned restorations and the partial rehabilitation of the original project

ReAD | Representation of Architectural Data. Enhancement of architectural heritage through the application of artificial intelligence

ReAD is an interdisciplinary research project financed by a Lazio Innova’s €150.000 grant and carried on by the Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione of Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (ISTC-CNR), the Department of Architecture of Roma Tre University (DArc-RM3) and the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione of the Italian Ministry of Culture (ICCD-MiC). The multidisciplinary team includes computer scientists, preservation architects, ontology engineers, economists, anthropologists. ReAD works in the field of architectural heritage and aims to improve its knowledge by using artificial intelligence (AI) – i.e., machine learning and knowledge representation technologies – in the data collection processes. The overall objective is to automate the acquisition of information related to architecture and to link it to data from other sources, increasing the knowledge about immovable heritage thanks to semantic Web. Specifically, ReAD is working on the development of a computational technology that enables the automatic extraction of structured data from unstructured sources relating to the domain of architectural heritage and including natural language text corpora and images. Therefore, this tool will be able to read (as the project acronym says), analyze and process iconographic and textual sources, which will be enhanced, exploited and used in a new way. The images used include pictures and historical drawings and are part of the ICCD’s prestigious collections, i.e., the Catalogo generale dei Beni culturali and the Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale. The project's aim and methodology are extremely innovative: there are some studies which have applied computer vision to architectural images, but they have mostly worked on pictures and digital CAD drawings. The image recognition applied to historical hand-drawing is a very experimental field of research. In the following steps, this information will be made accessible within the semantic Web, thanks to knowledge graphs and Linked Open Data (LOD). The team is working on modeling open-source ontologies, which will organize the extracted data in a coherent and semantically structured system, able to effectively describe and represent the knowledge of the architectural heritage domain. These ontologies will enrich ArCo, the ontology network of the Italian cultural heritage, which has been developed by ICCD-MiC and ISTC-CNR, in collaboration with University of Bologna and DArc-RM3 (as far as the architectural heritage domain is concerned). The expected outputs (the image recognition tool, the ontologies, the LODs, the architecture dataset) will be released open source and will be available for further developments for the companies and start-ups

The Challenges of Collaborative Knowledge Creation in Open Innovation Teams

In open innovation teams, people from different organizations work together to develop new products, services, or markets. This organizational diversity can positively influence collaborative knowledge creation but can frustrate and obstruct the process as well. To increase the success rates of open innovation, it is vital to learn how individuals create knowledge in open innovation teams and the problems they face. However, HRD research on this topic is still lacking. This article reviews the literature in HRD, organizational, and learning sciences, describing how individuals interact when creating knowledge collaboratively, and gives an overview of the challenges with collaborative knowledge creation in open innovation teams. The article ends with a discussion and conclusion, and implications for further research