Connectivity and free-surface effects in polymer glasses.

The glass transition is one of the few unsolved problems in condensed matter physics: agreement on the cause of the slowing down of structural relaxation in glass-forming liquids is lacking. Glasses are amorphous solids, which do not possess the long-range crystalline order, yet display arrested dynamics and the shear elastic modulus characteristic of equilibrium elasticity. It has been suggested that due to the influence of intramolecular interactions and chain connectivity, the nature of the glass transition in polymers and in standard glass-formers is fundamentally different. Here, we discuss the role of connectivity in polymer glasses, demonstrating that although covalent bonding promotes glass formation, bonding sequentiality that defines a polymer chain is not critical in the bulk: glassy dynamics is purely a result of the number of connections per particle, independently of how these connections are formed, agreeing with the classical Phillips-Thorpe topological constraint theory. We show that bonding sequentiality does play an important role in the surface effects of the glass, highlighting a major difference between polymeric and colloidal glasses. Further, we identify the heterogenous dynamics of model coarse-grained polymer chains both in 'bulk' and near the free surface, and demonstrate characteristic domain patterns in local displacement and connectivity.Queens' College Los Alamos National Laboratory, US

Digital ethics, political economy and the curriculum: this changes everything

This chapter makes the case for a refocusing of teaching and learning across the curriculum on foundational questions about ethics in digital culture – and, hence, for reframing classroom practice around critical digital literacies. Our view is that a central aim of schooling now should be the interrogation of the forms and contents, practices and consequences of digital communications, and that the curriculum should engage developmentally and systematically with the current issues regarding everyday actions and their consequences, corporate and state surveillance, privacy and transparency, political and economic control and ownershi

Til forsvar for kritisk medie-literacy og digital etik

Wikileaks og falske nyheder; et amerikansk præsidentembede der varetages via twitter; Charlie Hebdo; (...

Til forsvar for kritisk medieliteracy og digital etik (In defense of critical media literacy and digital ethics)

This is a revised piece to appear translated in a Danish education journal. Our view is that critical media literacy, muliteracies and digital arts can be a staging ground for that new civic space – where critique and technical mastery can led to ‘transformed’ and, in instances, ‘conserved’ practices. The curriculum challenge is about setting the grounds for rebuilding of community relations of work, exchange and trust – while at the same time giving young people renewed and powerful tools for weighing, analyzing and engaging with truths and lies, representations and misrepresentations, narratives and fictions, residual and emergent traditions, competing cultural epistemologies and world views

Digital ethics, political economy, and the curriculum: This changes everything

This chapter makes the case for a refocusing of teaching and learning across the curriculum on foundational questions about ethics in digital culture – and, hence, for reframing classroom practice around critical digital literacies. Our view is that a central aim of schooling now should be the interrogation of the forms and contents, practices and consequences of digital communications, and that the curriculum should engage developmentally and systematically with the current issues regarding everyday actions and their consequences, corporate and state surveillance, privacy and transparency, political and economic control and ownership

The multi-modal redesign of school texts

Multiliteracies-related research is just emerging from the formal discourse of pedagogical theorising and how it may look in practice needs further exploration. This research, initiated under that warrant, presents practitioner research and the enactment of a multiliteracies curriculum with Year 8 students in New York City's Chinatown. The study describes a collaborative digital literacies project with a local contemporary arts museum where students engaged in the multi-modal redesign of school texts. First, the article outlines a move of multiliteracies theory into curriculum practice where students explored questions of Chinese-American and immigrant identities through a discourse analysis of history texts. Then, drawing on a digital gothic and hip-hop cartoon Web project, it outlines how students challenged ways their ethnic identities were positioned by drawing political satire cartoons about immigration to the United States. The project concluded with a virtual exhibition of students' artwork where they inserted their cartoons within existing educational websites using HTML and Flash. It argues that the redesigned websites are a new set of multi-modal literacy practices that allow youth to disrupt racist and exclusionary discourses they encounter in school texts and their lived experiences