From despair to somewhere: activating students in a distance learning environment

Student engagement in part-time and distance learning is critical in terms of retention and progression. But ideas about engagement often focus on academic priorities and on students who collude with the concept of being “active” learners. To establish a virtual community called Student Connections the faculty of Social Sciences at The Open University held a one week online conference where students and academics presented their ideas. Supported by two audio downloads, a drama “This Student Life” and a news magazine “The Podmag”, students were encouraged to attend online ‘Activate sessions’ where they became part of a community and worked on collaborative extracurricular projects that were presented at the Student Connections conference. In reviewing the process of engagement it is proposed that there were four levels; ‘super-engaged’ ‘critically-engaged’, ‘passively-engaged’ and ‘none-engaged’. This paper includes a discussion about the importance of these groups in establishing a community and makes suggestions for further research into student engagement

Herbivory Changes Soil Microbial Communities and Greenhouse Gas Fluxes in High-Latitude Wetlands

Herbivory by migratory animals in high-latitude ecosystems is known to impact greenhouse gas emissions from soils. However, few studies quantify the relationships between changes herbivores make to plant communities and soil conditions, and the biological interactions soil organisms have with their environment that result in changes to greenhouse gas emissions. These relationships are important to understand because they capture important carbon-climate feedbacks that may have implications for climate change policy and land management decisions, especially since high-latitude systems are experiencing unprecedented changes in climate. In the Yukon-Kuskokwim (Y-K) Delta in western Alaska, herbivory by migratory geese affects the magnitude of greenhouse gas emissions coming from soils, but the mechanisms driving these relationships are poorly understood. To determine these mechanisms, variation in soil environments between adjacent grazed and un-grazed sites were compared to variation in soil environments across a landscape-scale gradient of plant communities to better understand the magnitude of differences in soil environments created by grazing. Soil environment characteristics measured included soil pH, moisture, total organic carbon and nutrients, and microbial community structure and dynamics. We also performed an incubation experiment on soils from grazed and un-grazed sites to assess the mechanistic drivers of changes in greenhouse gas emissions by manipulating soil environment characteristics that change with herbivory in the field: soil moisture, temperature, and nutrient content. We found that soil environments between adjacent grazed and un-grazed sites had nearly as much variation as soil environments across the landscape, including in microbial communities. From the incubation experiment, greenhouse gas emissions increased with temperature and nutrient content, but there was no synergistic effect of moisture. Moreover, the effects of temperature and nutrients on greenhouse gases was increased in soils from grazed sites. The differences in the greenhouse gas emissions were not due to differences in absolute abundances of soil microbes. Instead, the results suggest that differences in relative abundances of soil microbial taxonomic groups with known differences in physiological traits or life-history strategies may account for the observed differences in greenhouse gas emissions. These results have major implications for high-latitude ecosystems because these ecosystems are warming twice as fast as lower-latitude ecosystems, suggesting that greenhouse gas emissions will increase in grazed sites and contribute to positive feedbacks in climate. These results also suggest that relationships among herbivores, soil microbial communities, and belowground carbon cycling are important to capture ecological relationships that impact global climate

"Is There Anybody There?": Engaging With Open University Distance Learners

The Open University (UK) Library supports its distance-learning students with interactive, real-time events on social media. In this chapter the authors take a case study approach and concentrate on the examples of Facebook and Livestream to illustrate how live engagement events on social media have helped to build communities of learners in spaces they already occupy, raise the visibility of the library's services and resources with staff and students, and foster collaboration with other departments, while also being effective mechanisms for instruction. The chapter concludes with the library's plans for the future and recommendations for other academic libraries wishing to run live engagement events on social media

Patrick Geddes as Social-ecologist: A century of mapping underused spaces in Dublin.

The emergent discourse on urban resilience can be considered a response to the rapid pace of change and severe challenges facing urban areas. Urban resilience is understood as the application of social-ecological systems thinking to urbanised areas, and to have evolved from the study of ecological systems in the 1970s. This paper reports on research that places the discourse in a broader legacy that relates back to the emergence of the town planning movement.The research is carried out as part of the inter- and trans-disciplinary EU FP7 TURAS project (Transitioning to Urban Resilience and Sustainability) (2011-2016), which seeks new approaches to urban planning and governance that can build urban resilience. This paper identifies the mapping of underused spaces as an example, exploring the practice through re-examination of a map showing vacant sites in Dublin from 1914 influenced by Patrick Geddes (1854-1932), and review of an experimental online civic engagement platform called ‘Re-Using Dublin’ that was developed by the TURAS Project in 2015.Patrick Geddes interpreted the world in terms of social-ecological systems and applied this intelligence to the city. Geddes was a key figure in the emergence of the town planning movement and has been a reference point for successive environmental planning discourses. This paper re-examines aspects of Geddesian theory and practice in the context of the contemporary discourse on urban resilience. Parallels are drawn between Geddesian thinking and social-ecological resilience thinking in relation to the humanity-nature relationship, city in transition, and community capital, before focusing in on Geddesian thinking in relation to the practice of surveying and vacant sites.Geddes recognized the potential of a multi-disciplinary, inclusive and interactive process of civic survey as a means to engage citizens with local issues, and by extension with global issues. Underused spaces were considered a resource for alternative uses and the 1914 Dublin map of vacant sites provided a management tool for change in response to a severe housing crisis. A century later, Geddesian thinking can be observed in contemporary ICT applications such as ‘Reusing Dublin’, which facilitates the mapping of underused spaces in a participatory civic survey process. Underused spaces are identified through student projects and online crowd-sourcing. Users can discover and share information on any identified underused space and connect with others in relation to any particular space. The website therefore aims to empower citizens to identify opportunities and self-organise, building adaptive capacity to change in an uncertain future. A network of underused spaces is revealed, providing a landscape of opportunities within which communities, municipalities, spatial practitioners and other stakeholders can precipitate social-ecological innovation through adaptive co-management and co-design.The paper therefore seeks to illustrate that Geddesian ideas on vacant sites and civic engagement through the practice of surveying are still very relevant and informing new experimental practices in Dublin, and that the mapping of underused spaces might be considered an example of what urban resilience means in practice

Scaffolding Extracurricular Online Events to Support Distance Learning University Students

Studies about effective practice in Higher Education (HE), student retention, progression and attainment suggest that student engagement is a major factor in success. A sense of belonging to a community of students and academics is seen as key to creating effective engagement. Such studies have identified interventions that have proved successful in traditional HE contexts; however, ideas of belonging and community are considered problematic in distance learning contexts. Preliminary work by the doctoral research author showed that many Open and Distance Learning (ODL) students were successful in their studies without identifying as a student or interacting socially with others, calling into question the extent to which belonging and community are relevant in part-time and distance learning settings. In 2014, The Open University developed a platform, the Student Hub Live (SHL), to facilitate academic community. This research focuses on the value of attending the live online interactive events at the SHL that support part-time distance learning students outside the curriculum, and relating to their studies. Using an ethnographic approach and grounded theory methods, chat logs of events were analysed and the emergent themes informed semi-structured interviews with six participants. The overall findings were that although the curriculum was often a primary focus for students, learning how to apply academic skills more generally and learning from other students is important in ODL. The findings are relevant to other distance and face-to-face HE providers that are keen to engage students in virtual extracurricular spaces to support learning

Engaging Distance Learners in an Academic Community: Student Hub Live

In higher education (HE), studies of effective practice relating to student retention, progression and attainment suggest that student engagement is a major factor in terms of success, and this involves a sense of belonging to a community. Studies have identified initiatives that have proved successful in traditional HE contexts, however ideas of belonging and community are problematic when translated to distance-learning contexts. Many distance-learning students, who are often mature and part-time learners, appear to be successful in their studies without identifying as a student or interacting socially with others, which calls into question the way in which belonging is conceptualised in distance-learning settings. The focus of this research was to identify the value of attending specific, live, online, interactive events at Student Hub Live (SHL) which were designed by the Open University to facilitate academic community and to provide a space outside of the curriculum for students to socialise and perform other aspects of student identity that require interaction with others. Using an ethnographic approach and grounded theory methods, chatlogs of four SHL events were analysed and the emergent themes informed semi-structured interviews which were carried out with six participants, all of whom had attended SHL events. Both sets of findings were combined and further analysed using thematic network maps. The finding was that communities of practice with shared repertoires enabled students to feel a sense of belonging through participating in discussions which created a conducive learning environment to develop skills, share experiences and feel validated. Community and belonging enabled students to deeply apply learning to their studies through sharing the experience and their experiences with others. In this sense, belonging and community matter to distance-learning students but for different reasons than for face-to-face students. The findings are relevant to other distance and face-to-face HE providers who are keen to engage students in virtual extracurricular spaces to support learning and facilitate community

Dynamics of the human structural connectome underlying working memory training

Brain region-specific changes have been demonstrated with a variety of cognitive training interventions. The effect of cognitive training on brain subnetworks in humans, however, remains largely unknown, with studies limited to functional networks. Here, we used a well-established working memory training program and state-of-the art neuroimaging methods in 40 healthy adults (21 females, mean age 26.5 years). Near and far-transfer training effects were assessed using computerized working memory and executive function tasks. Adaptive working memory training led to improvement on (non)trained working memory tasks and generalization to tasks of reasoning and inhibition. Graph theoretical analysis of the structural (white matter) network connectivity (“connectome”) revealed increased global integration within a frontoparietal attention network following adaptive working memory training compared with the nonadaptive group. Furthermore, the impact on the outcome of graph theoretical analyses of different white matter metrics to infer “connection strength” was evaluated. Increased efficiency of the frontoparietal network was best captured when using connection strengths derived from MR metrics that are thought to be more sensitive to differences in myelination (putatively indexed by the [quantitative] longitudinal relaxation rate, R1) than previously used diffusion MRI metrics (fractional anisotropy or fiber-tracking recovered streamlines). Our findings emphasize the critical role of specific microstructural markers in providing important hints toward the mechanisms underpinning training-induced plasticity that may drive working memory improvement in clinical populations

Longitudinal data on cortical thickness before and after working memory training

The data and supplementary information provided in this article relate to our research article “Task complexity and location specific changes of cortical thickness in executive and salience networks after working memory training.” [1]. We provide cortical thickness and subcortical volume data derived from parieto-frontal cortical regions and the basal ganglia with the FreeSurfer longitudinal analyses stream (http://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu [2]) before and after working memory training, “Cogmed and Cogmed Working Memory Training” [3]. This article also provides supplementary information to the research article, i.e., within-group comparisons between baseline and outcome cortical thickness and subcortical volume measures, between-group tests of performance changes in cognitive benchmark tests (www.cambridgebrainsciences.com[4]), correlation analyses between performance changes in benchmark tests and training-related structural changes, correlation analyses between the time spent training and structural changes, a scatterplot of the relationship between cortical thickness measures derived from the occipital lobe as control region and the chronological order of the MRI sessions to assess potential scanner drift effects and a post-hoc vertex-wise whole brain analysis with FreeSurfer Qdec (https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fswiki/Qdec [5])

Heritage, health and place:The legacies of local community-based heritage conservation on social wellbeing

Geographies of health challenge researchers to attend to the positive effects of occupying, creating and using all kinds of spaces, including 'green space' and more recently 'blue space'. Attention to the spaces of community-based heritage conservation has largely gone unexplored within the health geography literature. This paper examines the personal motivations and impacts associated with people's growing interest in local heritage groups. It draws on questionnaires and interviews from a recent study with such groups and a conceptual mapping of their routes and flows. The findings reveal a rich array of positive benefits on the participants' social wellbeing with/in the community. These include personal enrichment, social learning, satisfaction from sharing the heritage products with others, and less anxiety about the present. These positive effects were tempered by needing to face and overcome challenging effects associated with running the projects thus opening up an extension to health-enabling spaces debates