End user preference of customisable features within a course management system

Customisation is the means by which people alter and change various elements of their environment with the purpose of making it more suited to their immediate needs. This aids in creating a more personalised experience. People are extremely diverse in terms of age, gender, nationality, and with the dominant presence of technology people also have various levels of computer skills and experience. In the context of computer environments, customisation provides the ability to cater for a diverse user group, providing tools and options that assist with specific tasks, improve accessibility and achieve greater user satisfaction. Carter, MacLean, Lovstard & Moran (1990) claim that allowing a user to customise their system to match their personal work practices proves to be a useful technique. Various educational institutions are employing course management systems (CMS) to streamline and help carry out tasks involved in managing a large course. Students are also required to utilise the CMS in order to carry out various tasks associated with the study demands of their course. There is a variety of literature that discusses the types of customisable features that could be employed in a CMS; however there is no recommendation as to which of these features should be implemented. An analysis of end user preference toward customisable features offered a deeper understanding of the diversity of end user needs and the discovery of specific customisable features that are preferred by the student end user population

Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America

Latin American theatre is among the most innovative in the world today. The period 1965–1970 was one of intense theatrical production in the region. Dozens of major playwrights and collective theaters produced hundreds of highly original plays. This was also a period of profound ideological and sociopolitical transformation. Hopes for Latin American self-definition and self-determination after centuries of colonization and foreign exploitation began to crumble, while the right-wing backlash produced a politics of terror. In this dynamic study, Diana Taylor proposes that, for all the diversity of peoples, languages, and cultural images in Latin America, the effects of crisis on the region’s theatre are surprisingly uniform. As a cultural subsystem, theatre is both a product of and a commentary on the making and dismantling of society at large. Theatre of Crisis is an important source of information for Latin Americanists as well as theatre specialists and literary critics interested in this virtually unexplored field. Diana Taylor is associate professor of Spanish and comparative literature at Dartmouth College.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_latin_american_literature/1005/thumbnail.jp

Save As... Knowledge and Transmission in the Age of Digital Technologies

Diana Taylor, university professor and professor of Performance Studies and Spanish, New York University, provides a rich entry point into complex questions about digital media and its implications for scholarly practice. Drawing on her experience with the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, a multinational collaboration of artists and scholars grounded in an on-line archive of performance work across the Americas, Taylor insists that we need to imagine communities that are not only local or national and publics that are not exclusive to the present. Attending to the ways in which digital innovations inflect earlier technologies for creating and transmitting knowledge, she invites us to reconsider our practices of public scholarship as they move through the epistemes of embodied performance, archival preservation, and digital circulation. Taylor’s essay is an inquiry into the intersections of existing and emerging media technologies, the linkages between practices of public and digital scholarship, and the temporal and spatial scales through which we understand the communities we engage through our research, teaching, and activism. This Foreseeable Future was drawn on the 2010 conference keynote

Affordances for learning in a non-linear narrative medium

A multimedia CD makes an impressive resource for the scholar-researcher, but students unfamiliar with the subject-matter may not always work so effectively with such a resource. Without any narrative structure, how does the novice cope? The paper describes how we are investigating the design features that 'afford' activities that generate learning: What are the design features that encourage students to practise the role of the scholar? What encourages them to explore, but also to reflect on their analysis of the data they find? What kind of learning takes place when students are allowed to explore at will? The paper goes on to compare the learning experiences of students using commercial CDs with those using material with contrasting designs, in an attempt to identify the design features that afford constructive learning activities. It concludes with an interpretation of the findings, comparing them with work in related educational media, and situating the findings in the context of a conversational framework for learning