Karen Burmese Refugee Youth and Facebook: The Influence on Sense of Community and Belonging

There are currently over 42.5 million displaced persons worldwide, with 15.2 million identifying as refugees. The Karen Burmese are a persecuted ethnic group forced to flee to refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border. Australia plays host to 22170 Burmese, with 80% identifying as Karen. For the Karen and other refugees, involuntary migration is a difficult experience. Refugees face many challenges when resettling into a new community, and refugee youth experience additional challenges. It is important for psychosocial wellbeing to have a sense of community (SOC) and belonging (SOB), but this may be disrupted for refugee youth. One way that young people have shown to connect is through social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook (with 955 million members and growing). The current study, through the use of two focus groups, aimed to explore how Karen youth (N = 11) from refugee backgrounds in Perth, Western Australia use Facebook and what influence their use has on their SOC and SOB. A phenomenological approach was taken and interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) was used. Preliminary analysis identified several themes such as interaction, barriers to interaction, offline overlap, privacy, communication functions, and the importance of Facebook

AN ENACTIVE APPROACH TO TECHNOLOGICALLY MEDIATED LEARNING THROUGH PLAY

This thesis investigated the application of enactive principles to the design of classroom technolo- gies for young children’s learning through play. This study identified the attributes of an enactive pedagogy, in order to develop a design framework to accommodate enactive learning processes. From an enactive perspective, the learner is defined as an autonomous agent, capable of adapta- tion via the recursive consumption of self generated meaning within the constraints of a social and material world. Adaptation is the parallel development of mind and body that occurs through inter- action, which renders knowledge contingent on the environment from which it emerged. Parallel development means that action and perception in learning are as critical as thinking. An enactive approach to design therefore aspires to make the physical and social interaction with technology meaningful to the learning objective, rather than an aside to cognitive tasks. The design framework considered in detail the necessary affordances in terms of interaction, activity and context. In a further interpretation of enactive principles, this thesis recognised play and pretence as vehicles for designing and evaluating enactive learning and the embodied use of technology. In answering the research question, the interpreted framework was applied as a novel approach to designing and analysing children’s engagement with technology for learning, and worked towards a paradigm where interaction is part of the learning experience. The aspiration for the framework was to inform the design of interaction modalities to allow users’ to exercise the inherent mechanisms they have for making sense of the world. However, before making the claim to support enactive learning processes, there was a question as to whether technologically mediated realities were suitable environments to apply this framework. Given the emphasis on the physical world and action, it was the intention of the research and design activities to explore whether digital artefacts and spaces were an impoverished reality for enactive learning; or if digital objects and spaces could afford sufficient ’reality’ to be referents in social play behaviours. The project embedded in this research was tasked with creating deployable technologies that could be used in the classroom. Consequently, this framework was applied in practice, whereby the design practice and deployed technologies served as pragmatic tools to investigate the potential for interactive technologies in children’s physical, social and cognitive learning. To understand the context, underpin the design framework, and evaluate the impact of any techno- logical interventions in school life, the design practice was informed by ethnographic methodologies. The design process responded to cascading findings from phased research activities. The initial fieldwork located meaning making activities within the classroom, with a view to to re-appropriating situated and familiar practices. In the next stage of the design practice, this formative analysis determined the objectives of the participatory sessions, which in turn contributed to the creation of technologies suitable for an inquiry of enactive learning. The final technologies used standard school equipment with bespoke software, enabling children to engage with real time compositing and tracking applications installed in the classrooms’ role play spaces. The evaluation of the play space technologies in the wild revealed under certain conditions, there was evidence of embodied presence in the children’s social, physical and affective behaviour - illustrating how mediated realities can extend physical spaces. These findings suggest that the attention to meaningful interaction, a presence in the environment as a result of an active role, and a social presence - as outlined in the design framework - can lead to the emergence of observable enactive learning processes. As the design framework was applied, these principles could be examined and revised. Two notable examples of revisions to the design framework, in light of the applied practice, related to: (1) a key affordance for meaningful action to emerge required opportunities for direct and immediate engagement; and (2) a situated awareness of the self and other inhabitants in the mediated space required support across the spectrum of social interaction. The application of the design framework enabled this investigation to move beyond a theoretical discourse

Reducing energy consumption through voltage optimisation: Conservation voltage reduction in household appliances

With growth in demand for electricity within Australian homes since 1980, the necessity to conserve and reduce overall energy consumption has become evident. Conservation Voltage Reduction is a heavily researched and tested technique, implemented to reduce peak demand and energy consumption in order to counter the growing costs to the consumer and minimize the pollution produced from generating the electricity itself. By reducing the supply voltage within the lower region of regulatory limits, some common household appliances are able to continue operating as the manufacturer designed, whilst consuming less energy. Through physical testing, utilizing a power meter and variable transformer, it was discovered that constant resistive devices, such as the kettle, provided the greatest reduction in energy consumption, followed by constant current devices such as Microwaves and LED lights. Constant power and energy devices did not provide any increase in efficiency or reduction in energy consumption, due to the nature of the device and feedback control mechanisms. By implementing Conservation Voltage Reduction, constant resistance and current devices are able to consume less energy, and when adopted on a large scale by thousands of homes, a quantifiable reduction in energy; hence a reduced consumption of fossil fuels can be obtained

Diverse N-heterocyclic ring systems via aza-Heck cyclizations of <i>N</i>-(pentafluorobenzoyloxy)sulfonamides

Aza-Heck cyclizations initiated by oxidative addition of Pd(0)-catalysts into the N-O bond of N-(pentafluoro-benzoyloxy)sulfonamides are described. These studies, which encompass only the second class of aza-Heck reaction developed to date, provide direct access to diverse N-heterocyclic ring systems

The effect of pre-weaning rearing environment and post-weaning provision of zinc oxide on the gastrointestinal tract health and microbiome in pigs

The use of pharmacological levels of zinc oxide in pig diets for 14 days post-weaning has been common practice for many farmers across the EU. High dietary zinc oxide frequently improves growth performance and reduces the incidence of diarrhoea immediately after weaning, thereby reducing mortality and in turn improving profitability for farmers. However, environmental concerns and reports of contribution to the spread of antibiotic resistance genes in pathogenic bacteria, have resulted in the upcoming ban of pharmacological levels of zinc oxide in weaner pig diets across the EU in 2022. Alternative strategies to improve pig performance and health after weaning are continuously being sought, with the potential for rearing piglets outdoors before weaning, showing such benefits. Therefore, the research presented in this thesis aimed to investigate whether pre-weaning rearing environment and post-weaning supplementation of zinc oxide improved pig performance from farrow to finish and whether there are components of the gastrointestinal tract microbiome that showed similarities between rearing environment and dietary treatment. It was found that pigs reared outdoors showed lifetime performance benefits; enabling the majority of pigs reared outdoors to be sent to slaughter sooner than those reared indoors, whilst zinc oxide supplementation improved performance of pigs during the first two weeks after weaning but did not provide lifetime advantages, in support of previous findings. Remarkably, similar shifts in the composition of some bacteria of the small intestine were detected when comparing indoor pigs without zinc oxide supplementation to all outdoor pigs as well as indoor pigs receiving zinc oxide supplementation. Both outdoor rearing and the supplementation of zinc oxide in the diets of indoor-reared pigs, improved performance during the period of treatment after weaning, with added lifetime performance improvements of outdoor-reared pigs. This suggests that outdoor rearing and zinc oxide supplementation might cause similar changes in the microbiota that could be associated with improved pig performance immediately after weaning. The significance of these findings are discussed with a focus on continuing the work to investigate associations between the microbiota and pig performance