The impact of digital technology on design students; the changing learning journey and the emergence of a learner interface

The session reflects on the research conducted in the investigation of fashion design students’ learner journey and the pedagogical impact of digital technologies on their research behaviour. The internet has dramatically changed teaching environments and it is inconceivable to expect students to operate without it. Our observations in controlled experiments with and without internet access identify that fashion design student research pathways rely heavily on digital information and digitising physical experiences thus compromising tacit knowledge and experiential learning through the integration of multiple senses. They use digital information to validate research enquiries appearing to give secondary digitised information importance over original material. The session presents the digital interface that has been developed as a direct consequence of the learner journey research conducted. The aim of the interface is to facilitate an enhanced integration of the digital and physical learning opportunities, thus encouraging physical object research enquiries, collaboration and engagement in a familiar supportive digital environment. The interface is in its first phase having been presented to a panel of students, teaching staff and technicians with encouraging feedback and welcome suggestions for content. The VLE has emerged from the research and evaluation of the changing needs of fashion design students. Fashion design teaching is very much a practice-based discipline. Fabrics, technology and silhouettes may alter, but the key skills that are imparted on practical fashion courses remain constant and require an integrated approach. Research is fundamental to the fashion design process however digital information through the internet has opened up new alternative routes for discovery and shifted the balance of their learning practice in particular their engagement with physical properties. The use of the internet by students, when conducting such research is therefore a central issue for practice based educators

From consumerism to citizenship: a journey of involvement

The level of interest in sustainability, amongst the general public and within the media, is growing week by week, giving rise to initiatives from numerous stakeholders, public and private, to inform, educate and facilitate behaviour change at the level of individual households – customers and final consumers. In this paper we argue that in order to achieve this behavioural change, the ‘sustainable shopper’ must be targeted in a meaningful and relevant manner and their motivations for purchasing more or less sustainable foods be thoroughly understood in order to maintain the momentum that govt and industry have created in shifting the balance in our lifestyles from consumerism to citizenship. Different groups of shoppers behave in different ways and for different reasons, which has important implications for policy makers, NGOs, food manufacturers and retailers seeking to stimulate a change in purchasing behaviour towards more sustainable foods. In exploring the journey which the sustainable shopper makes, from consumer to citizen, we highlight the importance of ‘involvement’ - of the individual and in the product – in shaping the marketing, merchandising and communication strategies to speed up the journey and ensure more people arrive at the desired destination

\u27For a few days we would be residents in Africa : Jessie Redmon Fausct\u27s Dark Algiers the White\u27\u27

American scholarship on the Harlem Renaissance has, until recently, been strongly U.S.-centric, but the work of many of the important writers of the New Negro-era has an international dimension, as writers attempted to place the African American struggle for political and civil rights and cultural authority in larger, often global, contexts. Recent scholarship has revealed that the term, Harlem Renaissance, used as a rubric to characterize the flowering of black culture-building and political activism in the first years of the 20th century is something of a misnomer

The Failure of Drinking Age Laws

The Minimum Legal Drinking Age was set at 21 after the passing of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act (NMDAA) of 1984. The NMDAA “required all states to raise their purchase and public possession of alcohol age to 21, or risk losing federal highway funds under the Federal Highway Aid Act” (Drinking 2002: 2). By 1987, all 50 states were on board and the MLDA was established. Since then, there are many reasons and statistics that pro-MLDA advocates point to as evidence that drinking age laws are successful, useful, and beneficial to society. However, for each point supporters make, there is just as much, if not more, evidence on the contrary. As with any argument, it is easy to point out only facts that support your position, but this paper aims to address both aspects of the MLDA and refute many of the claims made by pro-MLDA advocates

Crafting the Community

Purpose – Crafting the Community is a volunteering project run by the Textiles Department at the University of Huddersfield to promote and deliver textile craft activities to the wider community. The purpose of this paper is to explore how volunteering can be a powerful tool for enriching peoples’lives while deepening students’ textile-related competencies through placing their learning in social and communal settings. Design/methodology/approach – Initially the paper will articulate how the project has been developed to bring innovation to the forefront of the curriculum, equipping students with tools for playing a meaningful and constructive role in society. Subsequently the paper will investigate how volunteering can be used to affect real-life changes in homelessness, archival threats and rural transport. Findings – The paper uses a case study approach to realise the vision of Crafting the Community that enables students to put into practice their learning while capturing the imagination of local communities. Social implications – As active players in society, staff, students and external partners create an engaged and interrelated learning experience as an evolving process, mimicking the repetitiveness and structure of the warp and weft of cloth itself. Originality/value – In response to emerging debates concerning the value, relevance and impact of cloth on societies today the project’s aim is to share the course’s own unique philosophy and insight into the importance of a practical and creative engagement with materials and processes in the wider community. This paper would be suitable for academics that who are interested in textile culture and emergent textile volunteering and socially engaged practices in the public realm

\u27Go Grrrl!\u27 : constructions of femininity in the textual practices of elite girls\u27 schooling

In this paper I consider the utility of discourses of &lsquo;girl power&rsquo; for understanding, and complicating, the way youthful femininities are produced in schooling. The paper is concerned with expanding the possibilities for how queer theoretical resources might be utilized within studies of girls and schooling. Existing studies have drawn upon Judith Butler&rsquo;s notion of a &lsquo;heterosexual matrix&rsquo; for understanding, and attending to, the way normative discourses of heterosexuality underpin the school-based production of youthful femininities. The term &lsquo;heterofemininities&rsquo; has been used in order to label these school-produced intersections of sex/gender/sexuality. Drawing on discourses of &lsquo;girl power&rsquo; that gather around &lsquo;voice&rsquo; and responsibility, I propose that the production of &lsquo;hetero-femininities&rsquo; within educational contexts might be further explored, and thus complicated, when the significance of discourses of &lsquo;girl power&rsquo; is considered. I analyse young women&rsquo;s discussions of key &lsquo;girl power&rsquo; icons in popular culture, generated through fieldwork in an elite girls&rsquo; school in Australia. In this analysis I explore the intersections of gender/sexuality/girl power that are produced in the young women&rsquo;s textual practices.<br /

Green's canonical syzygy conjecture for generic curves of odd genus

We prove the Green conjecture for generic curves of odd genus. That is we prove the vanishing $K_{k,1}(X,K_X)=0$ for $X$ generic of genus $2k+1$. The curves we consider are smooth curves $X$ on a K3 surface whose Picard group has rank 2. This completes our previous work, where the Green conjecture for generic curves of genus $g$ with fixed gonality $d$ was proved in the range $d\geq g/3$, with the possible exception of the generic curves of odd genus.Comment: Final version to appear in Compositio Mathematic

A generalization of the Kuga-Satake construction

The Kuga-Satake construction associates to a K3 type polarized weight 2 Hodge structure H an abelian variety A such that H is a quotient Hodge structure of H^2(A). The first step is to consider the Clifford algebra of H. It turns out that it is endowed with a weight 2 Hodge structure compatible with the algebra structure. We show more generally that a weight 2 polarized Hodge structure which carries a compatible (unitary, associative) algebra structure is a quotient of the H^2 of an abelian variety