Policing With the Community, Dream or Reality: Perspectives of the Police Service of Northern Ireland in West Belfast

This report is a culmination of three weeks of intensive primary research on community policing methods suggested in the Patten Report and the perspectives concerning police and policing in west Belfast held by Police officers as well as members of the community. My research question was; is the PSNI policing with the community as the Patten Report suggested in 1999? I set out to find if the active partnerships between the Police Service of Northern Ireland and the community were actually being realized. Data was collected through interviews with both the Police Service of Northern Ireland officers from the Woodbourne Station in west Belfast, and also community representatives and activists who work and live within Woodbourne’s jurisdiction. The community representatives spoke for The Falls Community Council/West Belfast Community Safety Forum, Community Restorative Justice Ireland, Suffolk Lenadoon Interface Group, Lenadoon Community Council, and Eirigi. An understanding of the culture of west Belfast through informal observation, was also used by exploring the area and collecting data in informal settings such as pubs, shops, taxis, and even as simply as walking through the area to gauge the PSNI’s presence. Informal interviews and discussions were also conducted with Professors from Queens University Belfast and University of Ulster Jordanstown. The findings of this research show that the historical background of the largely Republican area of west Belfast creates issues of trust, respect, and disconnect between the community and those who police it. The Police Service of Northern Ireland feels unwanted and therefore is sometimes unwilling to extend their hand, and the community has found it hard to reconcile their past history with the former Royal Ulster Constabulary, and the hurt that was caused to their community. There are also those issues still alive today such as parades, stop and search, and composition of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, that are present and living in the minds of both the community and police officers, making it difficult for either side to engage. The findings show that there are bridges being built between the State and the community, but there is vast room for improvement. It became apparent during the research that perceptions within both the PSNI as well as the Republican community in west Belfast are extremely diverse and dynamic. Therefore, this report attempts to portray the perceptions of each organization and individual, as to illustrate this dynamic conflict

Scaling up a learning technology strategy: Supporting student/faculty teams in learner‐centred design

Many post‐secondary institutions are experiencing the challenge of scaling up their learning technology initiatives without a matching increase in staff resources. This mismatch is particularly acute at the design stage of projects, where both domain knowledge and instructional design expertise are needed. To address this, we are developing structures and tools for a small cadre of instructional design experts to support a growing number of learning technology projects developed by student/faculty teams. One of these tools, the Learner‐Centred Design Idea Kit, is an interactive WWW‐based resource now in a fourth iteration of use in an undergraduate course, Designing Learning Activities with Interactive Multimedia. The course and the LCD Idea Kit which supports it are part of a larger institutional strategy to introduce technology‐enabled change in the learning process, working ‘bottom‐up’ with individual faculty and using the LCD Idea Kit to scale up the course across multiple university departments. In this paper, we describe the course and the Kit in detail and provide and overview of our current status and lessons learned

An Engagement Levels Framework To Foster Interactions Across SOTL Collaboratories

Regional SoTL collaboratories can provide a natural fit with political boundaries and funding opportunities; interconnections across regions can provide critical mass to sustain ongoing community interactions. It is unrealistic to expect these facilities to use a common technical platform or to adopt common social organizations, so a Framework for interconnection would be valuable. Our prototype Engagement Levels Framework includes four levels of faculty involvement, each with differing facilities to support research and knowledge mobilization: Cooperative Research Projects: Faculty who engage with a Teaching Research Collaboratory through specific short-term supported projects, as individuals and as teams, primarily focused on enhancing the learning experience and student success in their own courses and with some secondary focus on enhancing teaching practice for their colleagues at the institutional or provincial levels (and beyond). This secondary focus requires some effort to distinguish localized versus generalizable factors contributing to the success or limitations of an intervention in teaching. Practitioner/Researcher Core Communities: Faculty with an ongoing mutual engagement as a community, functioning both as an inquiry community to enhance the learning experience and student success in their own courses and as the core of a larger community of practitioner/researchers in research-led teaching, including developing and sustaining knowledge mobilization resources to enhance research-led teaching practices and knowledge by their faculty colleagues. Knowledge Exchange Networks: Faculty who participate periodically in knowledge mobilization for their own research-led teaching and become regular contributors to a knowledge mobilization network, motivated by a spirit of scholarly reciprocity and by explicit engagement initiatives led by the core Practitioner/Researcher community members described above. Collections of Research-Informed Resources for Teaching: To achieve a true ‘network effect’ in application of the knowledge and resources for research-led teaching, facilities must be provided to engage many more faculty in occasional access. These faculty seek to improve the learning experience and student success in their own courses, but do not regularly contribute from their own expertise to extend those resources. The key ideas underlying this framework include the following: • Modularity in the framework allows multiple platform options at each level • Embedding of research results into adaptable artifacts – curriculum plans, learning activity designs, open educational resources, etc. – promotes knowledge mobilization; • Early involvement of resource creators with colleagues promotes reusability and adaptability of such resources, and optimizes institutional investment in faculty innovation and scholarship; • Ongoing knowledge exchange is fostered by a focus on object-centered conversations to extend knowledge, adapt resources and share insights; • Collection management enables occasional users to find the resources they seek and to encounter related teaching knowledge along with those resources; • Explicit efforts by the collaboratory community will support enriched levels of engagement by colleagues, to insure a sustainable and dynamic community. Of course, such facilities can only enable and support widespread adaptation of research-informed resources and mobilization of the underlying knowledge about teaching and learning. We must in parallel work with partners in our regions and disciplines to provide stronger rationale and motivation for mobilizing SoTL as research-led teaching

Path-Specific Objectives for Safer Agent Incentives

We present a general framework for training safe agents whose naive incentives are unsafe. As an example, manipulative or deceptive behaviour can improve rewards but should be avoided. Most approaches fail here: agents maximize expected return by any means necessary. We formally describe settings with 'delicate' parts of the state which should not be used as a means to an end. We then train agents to maximize the causal effect of actions on the expected return which is not mediated by the delicate parts of state, using Causal Influence Diagram analysis. The resulting agents have no incentive to control the delicate state. We further show how our framework unifies and generalizes existing proposals.Comment: Presented at AAAI 202

Commentary on: Koper, R. (2004). Use of the Semantic Web to Solve Some Basic Problems in Education

Abstract: The approach outlined in Koper's paper is a good way to address the many ambiguities surrounding the notion of the Educational Semantic Web: work bottom up on some specific problem targets and determine how the addition of explicit semantic representations can enhance the efficiency or effectiveness of the learning process. Since the paper presents a clear argument about the potential advantages that such explicit semantic representations could bring, I will focus only on a few places where the argument did not convince me. Paper: Koper, R. (2004). Use of the Semantic Web to Solve Some Basic Problems in Education. Editors: Terry Anderson and Denise Whitelock

Active Gaming and Energy Expenditure in Healthy Adults

poster abstractThe rise in sedentary behavior in US society, along with the associated health risks, makes it necessary to find effective solutions to increase physical activity at all levels. Studies on active gaming have shown promising results in the use of active gaming as a viable exercise tool that combines physical activity with entertainment. However, the research is still mixed on whether active games can elicit similar responses as traditional cardiovascular exercise, such as jogging on a treadmill. This study examined whether participants playing active games could reach a moderate intensity level as defined by the American College of Sports Medicine as 3.0 METs while playing with and without specific instructions designed to maximize physical activity. Twenty young adult participants completed one training session and four experimental sessions. During each session, participants played two 15-minute periods of either Kinect tennis, Kinect boxing, Wii tennis, and Wii boxing. In period one, participants played at a self-selected intensity. During period two, participants were given specific instructions on how to play which were designed to maximize movement during play and down time. During game play, participants wore a portable gas (VO2/VCO2) analyzer to measure energy expenditure. Metabolic equivalents (METS) were analyzed with a repeated measures ANOVA. During period 1, Kinect boxing was able to elicit the highest METs, 3.097±0.3, from the participants. METS during period 2 was significantly greater than during period 1 across all games (p<.001). Participants were able to reach higher than 3.0 METs while playing each of the games during period 2. Regardless of the period, Kinect boxing elicited greater METS than Wii boxing and Wii Tennis (P<.001). This shows evidence that active gaming not only can elicit a moderate intensity level of physical activity, but that specialized instructions can enhance the effects of the active games

Peer Review of Teaching Project - CASTL: Expanding the SOTL Commons Cluster Final Report

In 2006, the Peer Review of Teaching Project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was selected to join the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) Institutional Leadership Program. Our participation in this national leadership program (“Expanding the Teaching Commons: A social and technical infrastructure to promote and support effective learning & student success, through teacher community collaborations to develop, adapt, share and mobilize pedagogical content knowledge, exemplary practices, and shared resources.”) allowed us to engage a broad audience to help define, develop, refine, and share the models and approaches of our project. The combined group effort for the schools in our program has been the development of a prototype online archive of SOTL research work for which we have shared exemplars of UNL’s campus work. The project concluded in October 2009 at the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) conference in Bloomington, Indiana. This report is our cluster\u27s final report summarizing our activities