AI Agents, Humans and Untangling the Marketing of Artificial Intelligence in Learning Environments

This exploratory study identifies the tangling of proposed relationships between human and non-human agents by providing an analysis on how AI technologies are marketed for learning subjects through a critical discourse analysis of corporate advertisements. We ask: Amid these emerging technologies, how are humans and AI technologies framed as agents with agency? How are learners framed by corporate advertising as part of this blurring? We used a public, open-access cultural analytics database and repository, Fabric of Digital Life (‘Fabric’, https://fabricofdigitallife.com/), to identify a set of artifacts as a dataset for such analysis. Results indicate that advertising promotes corporate products while also promoting idealized social practices for human-computer interaction and human-robot interaction in learning contexts. Using AI to automate relationships between students and teachers frames AI systems as authorities in both robot and non-robot platforms, blurring and minimizing student and instructor agency in learning environments

Intercultural Connectivism and Personal Learning Networks in Course Redesign

As the call for proposals to this special issue states, “the need to share our pedagogical knowledge is paramount.” We agree that “the assumptions underlying much of contemporary communication pedagogy are oversimplified and fraught with groundless stereotypes” and that pedagogical change amid the increasingly globalized and networked classroom has been too slow. Participants need multiple means to understand and increase their capacity for working interculturally and in global virtual teams. One such means is through the pedagogical deployment of personal learning networks

Intercultural Connectivism: Introducing Personal Learning Networks

Global connectivity makes intercultural communication an increasingly common experience. Providing students with insight and practice in intercultural communication is increasingly imperative. As Thatcher (2010) stated in the inaugural issue of this journal: We have a large task ahead of us: to develop and operationalize models of intercultural rhetoric and professional communication in the context of globalization (p. 14)... We need to especially pay attention to how new communication and information technologies require different etic frames for common human thresholds of interaction… How do we assess communicative purpose and media selection in global contexts? How do we plan for audience-author relations, especially as mediated by new communication technologies? (p. 27). Growing in parallel with global communication networks, learning networks intensify the need for participants to reflect on communicative purpose and author-audience relations when contributing to intercultural learning environments. As our epigraph emphasizes, paths to shared information do not necessarily lead to shared meaning. The social life of information in intercultural networked environments is subject to conflicting meanings whose impacts are compounded by culturally grounded motives for learning—such as learning to serve the self versus learning in order to serve a social purpose in league with others (Parrish & Linder-VanBerschot, 2010, Table 1). Another key challenge in culturally diverse learning environments is that of facilitating learning in social contexts in which attitudes, dispositions, practices, and identities have few cultural origins in common

Redesigning TAPP for developing critical understanding for managing global virtual teams

Translators and technical communicators increasingly perform their work as part of global virtual teams (GVTs). To prepare students for developing critical understanding for such work, instructors can assign readings, asking students to reflect on the importance of building trust (Crisp & Jarvenpaa, 2013), cultural intelligence (Li, Rau, Li, & Maedche, 2017), and strategies for managing multicultural teams (Behfar, Kern, & Brett, 2006). More important for developing critical understanding, however, is the experience of managing a “real” Global Virtual Team (GVT). Research questions for this work include the following: How does attention to and work with international translators influence critical understanding for managing GVTs? and How does situatedness influence critical understanding of the many requirements and factors in a translation project? This article provides a brief theoretical background to the project and then details our redesign of the standard collaborative formats of the Trans-Atlantic & Pacific Project (TAPP) and associated assignments to focus on student development of critical understanding for managing GVTs. We include identification of themes from a subset of literature relevant to student practice in managing a translation team; description of the TAPP redesign in which University of Minnesota (UMN) students serve as project managers of teams of University of Trieste (UT) students practicing translation; and a brief summary of results from deployments of this model during 2019 and 2020. We conclude with emphasis on the need to redesign the TAPP format to meet evolving learning needs of students

“Scaffolding” revisited: How TAPP collaborations support learners and instructors from different disciplines and backgrounds

In social-constructivist approaches to learning, scaffolding is “the support offered by the teacher to assist learners in the collaborative construction of their mental models” (Kiraly 2000: 45). It is not “pre-determined support” and can take a variety of forms. It is like “the placing of helpful signposts on the path as the learners create it”. It does not break down a task into components so as not to prevent learners from extracting meaning from the whole learning situation. In a collaborative project, scaffolding might also be seen as including the support that instructors offer to each other, especially when they come from different disciplines. In this paper, we provide an overview of the iterations of an online collaborative project within the Trans-Atlantic & Pacific Project (TAPP) network. In particular, we describe how over a five-year span we collaborated to re-adjust and fine-tune the project so as to learn more about each other’s discipline and cater to the learning needs of two groups of students coming from programs with different educational focuses: one group (based at the University of Trieste, Italy) comprised students from a bachelor degree program on translation; the other group (based at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, U.S.A.) comprised (mainly graduate) students from a class on international professional communication. Based on our use of collaborative autoethnography, our overview discusses: 1) the ways in which we developed and re-adjusted our scaffolding strategies; and 2) the ways in which such scaffolding and online collaboration helped us, as instructors, make better sense of the cross-disciplinary nature of the students’, and our, collaboration

Making Sense of the Response to COVID-19 in Higher Education: A Case Study of Crisis Communication in Two Universities

The COVID-19 pandemic brought extreme challenges and disruption to higher education, resulting in hurried adoption of online teaching. From the point of view of crisis communication, the COVID-19 pandemic as experienced in HE institutions represents an interesting case, because crisis management and communication were primarily, if not exclusively, directed at internal stakeholders (essentially, students and staff ). We present a case study that compares and contrasts the COVID-related responses of two different universities: the University of Minnesota, in the U.S., and the University of Trieste, in Italy. In particular, we look at the sets of documents issued by the leadership of these universities over a period of 23 months between February 2020 (the start of the health crisis) and December 2021. The analysis of the documents revealed that unexpected spaces of freedom empowered instructors. We identify four discursive traits associated with these spaces: definitional change, code glossing, and the use of engagement markers and permissives. However, this empowerment changed over time, as universities became eager to go back to “normal” and reinstate restrictions from pre-pandemic times

Decreased TNF-α synthesis by macrophages restricts cutaneous immunosurveillance by memory CD4+ T cells during aging

Immunity declines during aging, however the mechanisms involved in this decline are not known. In this study, we show that cutaneous delayed type hypersensitivity (DTH) responses to recall antigens are significantly decreased in older individuals. However, this is not related to CC chemokine receptor 4, cutaneous lymphocyte-associated antigen, or CD11a expression by CD4+ T cells or their physical capacity for migration. Instead, there is defective activation of dermal blood vessels in older subject that results from decreased TNF-α secretion by macrophages. This prevents memory T cell entry into the skin after antigen challenge. However, isolated cutaneous macrophages from these subjects can be induced to secrete TNF-α after stimulation with Toll-like receptor (TLR) 1/2 or TLR 4 ligands in vitro, indicating that the defect is reversible. The decreased conditioning of tissue microenvironments by macrophage-derived cytokines may therefore lead to defective immunosurveillance by memory T cells. This may be a predisposing factor for the development of malignancy and infection in the skin during aging

Jimmy Swaggart's Secular Confession

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The published version is available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02773940902766748 .Following the exposure of televangelist Jimmy Swaggart’s illicit rendezvous with a New Orleans prostitute, the Assemblies of God simultaneously orchestrated a massive attempt to silence those who would discuss the tryst and arranged the most widely publicized confession in American history theretofore. The coincidence of a “silence campaign” with the vast distribution of a public confession invites us to reconsider the nature of the public confession. For what place has a public confession, the discourse of disclosure par excellence, in a silence campaign? This question is best answered, I argue, if we understand public confession not as a stable a-historical form, but as a practice that is informed by multiple, competing traditions. I argue that by situating Swaggart’s performance in a philosophically modern and secular tradition of public confession we can understand both its complicity in a silence campaign and, more generally, the political logic of the modern public confession

Nested inversion polymorphisms predispose chromosome 22q11.2 to meiotic rearrangements [RETRACTED]

Inversion polymorphisms between low-copy repeats (LCRs) might predispose chromosomes to meiotic non-allelic homologous recombination (NAHR) events and thus lead to genomic disorders. However, for the 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11.2DS), the most common genomic disorder, no such inversions have been uncovered as of yet. Using fiber-FISH, we demonstrate that parents transmitting the de novo 3 Mb LCR22A–D 22q11.2 deletion, the reciprocal duplication, and the smaller 1.5 Mb LCR22A–B 22q11.2 deletion carry inversions of LCR22B–D or LCR22C–D. Hence, the inversions predispose chromosome 22q11.2 to meiotic rearrangements and increase the individual risk for transmitting rearrangements. Interestingly, the inversions are nested or flanking rather than coinciding with the deletion or duplication sizes. This finding raises the possibility that inversions are a prerequisite not only for 22q11.2 rearrangements but also for all NAHR-mediated genomic disorders