The impact of place-based pedagogy on teachers' professional identities, instructional decisions, and collaborations

This design study uses a design-based, formative approach to consider teachers' understanding and use of place-based pedagogical practices. The study focuses on teachers' awareness, understanding and use of place as they implemented classroom instruction and built a professional development experience for colleagues. The research spans three months as the team of six teachers (colleagues at a local district) planned, implemented, and reflected on place-based pedagogical shifts. At the heart of the research is the question of how a place-based instructional perspective impacts teaching and professional growth. Ultimately, findings suggest that this group, both collectively and individually, has come to value place as it affects meaningful understanding. Not satisfied with strictly textbook-driven instruction, this team has developed ways to expand school walls, create meaningful experiences for educational colleagues and secure community partnerships valuable to all aspects of this professional growth. These teachers believe that understandings of the importance of place will transcend course titles and school boundaries in order to actively engage learners.Includes bibliographical reference

Gambling on high streets in Britain: the government should take action to protect customers from what may be the predatory targeting of the disenfranchised

Barry Sheerman MP examines the proliferation of betting machines in the UK and the social consequences of this. Compounding this, it seems that the industry is targeting the most vulnerable, with betting shops disproportionately present in areas of high unemployment. The onus is on the betting shops to prove that their products are not damaging the lives of British citizens and in doing this they have fallen short

rem • press twenty one years on

A dialogue between Karlien Van-Den-Beukel and Lucy Sheerman on the work and impact of rem press (Rempress), a Cambridge small press specialising in experimental women's poetry

COVID-19 and the secret virtual assistants: the social weapons for a state of emergency

Technologies are ubiquitous in modern Britain, gradually infiltrating many areas of our working and personal lives. But what role can technology play in the current COVID-19 pandemic? At a time when our usual face to face social interactions are temporarily suspended, many of us have reached out to technology (e.g. Skype, WhatsApp, Facebook, Zoom) to help maintain a sense of closeness and connection to friends, family and vital services. One largely unsung technology is the virtual assistant (VA), a cost-efficient technology enabling users to access the Internet of Things using little more than voice. Deploying an ecological framework, in the context of smart age-friendly cities, this paper explores how VA technology can function as an emergency response system, providing citizens with systems to connect with friends, family, vital services and offering assistance in the diagnosis of COVID-19. We provide an illustration of the potentials and challenges VAs present, concluding stricter regulation and controls should be implemented before VAs can be safely integrated into smart age-friendly cities across the globe

Feature selection of facial displays for detection of non verbal communication in natural conversation

Recognition of human communication has previously focused on deliberately acted emotions or in structured or artificial social contexts. This makes the result hard to apply to realistic social situations. This paper describes the recording of spontaneous human communication in a specific and common social situation: conversation between two people. The clips are then annotated by multiple observers to reduce individual variations in interpretation of social signals. Temporal and static features are generated from tracking using heuristic and algorithmic methods. Optimal features for classifying examples of spontaneous communication signals are then extracted by AdaBoost. The performance of the boosted classifier is comparable to human performance for some communication signals, even on this challenging and realistic data set

What role can videogames play in the COVID-19 pandemic?

Video games are often thought of as trite activities for younger generations. However, research in game studies over the last few decades have revealed that games can be valuable tools for growth and connection, particularly among older generations. Exploring the ways digital games can be used as tools for connection has gained increased attention in recent months with global quarantines as a result of COVID-19. This article reviews the research that has examined the utility of digital games for older adults, focusing specifically on the ways in which games can be tools for social connectedness and psychological healing for older adults and intergenerationally. Special focus will be placed on the role games can play for post-traumatic stress among first responders