Sustainable urban development: an integrated framework for urban planning and development

Sustainable development has long been promoted as the best answer to the world’s environmental problems. This term has generated mass appeal as it implies that both the development of the built environment and its associated resource consumption can be achieved without jeopardising the natural environment. In the urban context, sustainability issues have been reflected in the promotion of sustainable urban development, which emphasises the sensible exploitation of scarce natural resources for urbanisation in a manner that allows future generations to repeat the process. This chapter highlights attempts to promote sustainable urban development through an integration of three important considerations: planning, development and the ecosystem. It highlights the fact that spatial planning processes were traditionally driven by economic and social objectives, and rarely involved promoting the sustainability agenda to achieve a sustainable urban future. As a result, rapid urbanisation has created a variety of pressures on the ecosystem upon which we rely. It is believed that the integration of the urban planning and development processes within the limitations of the ecosystem, monitored by a sustainability assessment mechanism, would offer a better approach to maintaining sustainable resource use without compromising urban development

Activating Assessment for Learning: Are We On the Way With WEB 2.0?

This chapter examines the role Web 2.0 tools can play in promoting the Assessment for Learning Agenda. It presents a number of cases of peer, self and computer assessments that display a range of characteristics proposed by Elliott (2008) for the next generation of assessment tasks. The discussion of the cases revealed a missing characteristic which is a form of feedback to the students that will take their learning forward which I have called 'Advice for Action'. In order for assessment tasks and tools to become more effective they need to be embedded within a pedagogical framework, which in turn, requires a supportive infrastructure as proposed by the 4Ts pyramid. The major components of the pyramid consist of (a) Tool Development, (b) Staff Training, (c) Rethinking the Assessment Tasks and (d) Learning from the Assessment Tasks

Testing Strategies to Enhance Online Student Collaboration in a Problem-Based Learning Activity

Most units of learning are being offered flexibly, either using distance education or online facilities, and often with asynchronous computer-mediated communication or online discussions. The use of asynchronous computer-mediated communication is believed to offer students the opportunity to communicate independently of time and place, and to ask questions, state opinions and offer advice when transferring interactive learning activities to an online environment. This chapter uses an action research framework to examine the quantity and nature of student engagement in a problem-based learning activity as a consequence of placing face-to-face instruction on and practice in problem-based learning prior to using asynchronous computer-mediated communication. The effectiveness of early placement of a 4-day residential component to improve student collaboration in the online problem-based learning activity was tested against six years (2001-2006) of electronically-archived online discussions in a 13-week, under- or post-graduate tertiary-level natural science unit