Student-faculty Co-inquiry Into Student Reading: Recognising SoTL as Pedagogic Practice

This paper reports the evaluation of a student-faculty collaborative study investigating international students’ perceptions of the role of reading in higher education. The study examined the academic reading and source-use practices of ten undergraduate students in a range of disciplines in one UK university. In previous research on student literacy practices, students are often positioned as research “objects” rather than as active participants with an investment in enhancing the student experience through engagement in pedagogic research. In this paper we present a case study of student faculty collaboration in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). Drawing on the analysis of student and lecturer accounts of the collaborative research experience, we identify the benefits and challenges of student-faculty partnership approaches. We conclude by arguing that conceptualising SOTL as pedagogy may facilitate the engagement of students as co-researchers and expose to scrutiny a “hidden curriculum” of current approaches to SoTL

Novel methods of fabrication and metrology of superconducting nanostructures

As metrology extends toward the nanoscale, a number of potential applications and new challenges arise. By combining photolithography with focused ion beam and/or electron beam methods, superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) with loop dimensions down to 200 nm and superconducting bridge dimensions of the order 80 nm have been produced. These SQUIDs have a range of potential applications. As an illustration, we describe a method for characterizing the effective area and the magnetic penetration depth of a structured superconducting thin film in the extreme limit, where the superconducting penetration depth $lambda$ is much greater than the film thickness and is comparable with the lateral dimensions of the device

Geographically weighted temporally correlated logistic regression model.

Detecting the temporally and spatially varying correlations is important to understand the biological and disease systems. Here we proposed a geographically weighted temporally correlated logistic regression (GWTCLR) model to identify such dynamic correlation of predictors on binomial outcome data, by incorporating spatial and temporal information for joint inference. The local likelihood method is adopted to estimate the spatial relationship, while the smoothing method is employed to estimate the temporal variation. We present the construction and implementation of GWTCLR and the study of the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimator. Simulation studies were conducted to evaluate the robustness of the proposed model. GWTCLR was applied on real epidemiologic data to study the climatic determinants of human seasonal influenza epidemics. Our method obtained results largely consistent with previous studies but also revealed certain spatial and temporal varying patterns that were unobservable by previous models and methods

Sustainable development with geomatics

Learning for service is the main objective in service learning, students in the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) are encouraged to apply their learning outcomes to serve the community for rather long term benefits. This paper will discuss how PolyU students with Geomatics knowledge committed a service learning project with local social enterprises-Hosteling International. Together with students from both Peking University and Yunnan University with different disciplines, a group of students from PolyU joined a service learning project in Yunnan. These students applied their knowledge in mapping and other professional skills to serve the community at Yuan Jie Township by enhancing guest reception capabilities of a local Youth Hostel. They crossed over between learning and serving. They learnt the difficulties in local community development with SWOT analysis approach to their collected local information and identified focus of their service through the inter-disciplines dialogues in this student group. They aware that people can use all forms of tools, like web maps to obtain geographical information about the surrounding areas in the well-developed cities, but as the infrastructure was not as well-developed in local as their living community in city. Local community and travelers had no such access in Tuan Jie Township, making the locals difficult to identify the natural resources and assets surrounding them and travelers not able to navigate around during their visits. By using Global Positioning System (GPS) and GeoIT technique, students collected important geographical information, survey the map and painted it on the wall of youth hostel. This helped to empower the local community development in recognizing and promoting their rural assets to visitors and in long-run revitalize the local community for future local cultural conservation and youth development. They also arranged the map application workshop to teach local kids map reading and applications so that they could ascertain the local youth identity and introduce this special community to visitors