Enhancing the Digital Backchannel Backstage on the Basis of a Formative User Study

Contemporary higher education with its large audiences suffers from passivity of students. Enhancing the classroom with a digital backchannel can contribute to establishing and fostering active participation of and collaboration among students in the lecture. Therefore, we conceived the digital backchannel Backstage specifically tailored for the use in large classes. At an early phase of development we tested its core functionalities in a small-scale user study. The aim of the study was to gain first impressions of its adoption, and also to form a basis for further steps in the conception of Backstage. Regarding adoption we particularly focused on how Backstage influences the participants' questioning behavior, a salient aspect in learning. We observed that during the study much more questions were uttered on Backstage than being asked without backchannel support. Regarding the further development of Backstage we capitalized on the participants' usability feedback. The key of the refinement is the integration of presentation slides in Backstage, which leads to an interesting reconsideration of the user interactions of Backstage

Digging for sanctuary:The garden as a contact sphere

The European ideal of connectivity across national borders is haunted by a dissolving of boundaries and categories. Public crises are carried into private spaces, generating an almost omnipresent anxiety exacerbated by various media. Almost omnipresent? Yes: for one space, the garden, tenaciously resists the maelstrom of late modernity, or appears to do so in reassuring ways. This article analyses how the multiple European crises are addressed in and by recent mediatisations of gardening. Drawing on selected Anglophone gardening programmes, I argue that the mediascape of gardening represents a relational ‘contact sphere’ where Otherness is negotiated. Focusing on regaining a sense of control and autarky, infotainment programmes on gardening have grown into interactive platforms which disseminate images and practices which contribute to a sustainable vision of Europe, while addressing seemingly uncontrollable problems of change, identity and emotion, threats to human health, and non-transparent food production

Entangled Gardens:Heterotopian Relationality in Romesh Gunesekera’s The Prisoner of Paradise (2012)

This essay proposes a relational conception of utopian entanglements that frames utopia in material environmental terms and focuses on gardens as exemplary sites where materialism and other discourses in culture and literature come together. It contextualises a piece of historical metafiction in a framework informed by heterotopia and recent theorisations of relationality in the face of an ongoing crisis of connection that encompasses human relations with the environment. The Prisoner of Paradise (2012) by Sri Lankan-British writer Romesh Gunesekera is a historical narrative set in 1825 on the island of Mauritius, which serves a diasporic microcosm that not only showcases transnational relations between Asia, Africa and Europe but includes the natural environment in a perspective that invited readers to approach connection as a challenge for the imagination. Gunesekera deconstructs western images of paradise, using gardens to problematize the human exploitation of the environment, other creatures, place, memory and representation. In Gunesekera’s temporally displaced setting, gardens serve as spaces of escape in which human beings experience nature as an agent which ultimately cannot be appropriated. By metatextually criticising the misuse of utopian images, the novel reveals present-day crises of connection as the outcome of a failure to activate the transformative potential of the imagination

Providing guidance on Backstage, a novel digital backchannel for large class teaching

Many articles in the last couple of years argued that it is necessary to promote the active participation of students in lectures with large audiences. One approach to make students actively participate in a lecture is to use a digital backchannel, i.e. a computer-mediated communication platform that allows students to exchange ideas and opinions, without disrupting the lecturer’s discourse. Though, a digital backchannel, in order to be most helpful for learning, have to address the need for guidance of the users interacting. The article presents Backstage, a digital backchannel for large class lectures, and shows how it provides guidance for its users, i.e. the students but also the lecturer. Structural guidance is provided by aligning the usually incoherent backchannel discourse with the presentation slides that are integrated in the backchannel’s user interface. The alignment is thereby asserted by carefully designed backchannel workflows. The article also discusses the guidance of a student’s substantial involvement in both the frontchannel and the backchannel by means of scripts. Through the interactions of guided individuals a social guidance may emerge, leading to a collectively regulated backchannel

Inorganic nitrogen metabolism and phytoplankton primary productivity in a subarctic lake

Thesis (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 196

Fractal bodies invisible in 2 and 3 directions

We study the problem of invisibility for bodies with a mirror surface in the framework of geometrical optics. We show that for any two given directions it is possible to construct a two-dimensional fractal body invisible in these directions. Moreover, there exists a three-dimensional fractal body invisible in three orthogonal directions. The work continues the previous study in [1, 12], where two-dimensional bodies invisible in one direction and three dimensional bodies invisible in one and two orthogonal directions were constructed