Presence for professional development: students in the virtual world

This report describes virtual world activities for groups of students studying a course designed to support professional development especially following career breaks. The activity uses the virtual platform to augment the social aspect of belonging to a study cohort, exploiting the sense of presence and constructivist affordances of the 3-D environment

Journeying together towards goodness: participant understanding of practices and narratives in a University of the Nations Discipleship Training School

This study develops a new hybrid theoretical framework and uses it for an empirical moral inquiry. By investigating participants’ understandings of social practices and narratives in the University of the Nations (UofN) Discipleship Training School (DTS) using a multiple individual case study approach, this research infers how processes of moral development and identity formation may be working. Alasdair MacIntyre’s philosophical framework for the rationality of virtue formation in a particular tradition is deepened by inserting Vygotsky’s theories of genetic analysis and mediation in the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and Wertsch’s unit of analysis of mediated human action to research how students use cultural tools to negotiate the intermediate steps of becoming virtuous. Learning and identity formation are explored in an alternative model of higher education using Lave and Wenger’s social learning theory of Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP) in a Community of Practice (CoP). Resources in practical theology, such as works by Dykstra and Bass, ground this study in the Christian tradition. Particular attention is given to DTS participants’ pursuit of moral purpose, action in the world, and virtuous character as they learn to relate to those who are ‘other’. A composite summary of participants’ understanding of a good learning community may guide attempts to cultivate virtuous learning communities that nurture non-coercive rearrangements of desire and human freedom. Rising interest in the place of spirituality and religion in the post-secular academy, the global growth of educational institutions in the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement, and the under-researched expression of UofN education taking place in 112 countries in 55 languages indicate potential international impact. This study enables MacIntyre’s virtue ethics framework to be applied in empirical research using sociocultural and activity theories to investigate the processes of learning to become good persons together

Fluid leadership in a multi-user virtual environment educational project with teenagers: Schome Park

This paper examines leadership practices in a virtual community, the Schome Park project. Schome Park, based at the Open University, UK, was the first European closed (i.e. protected) island in Teen Second Life, a multi-user 3D virtual environment. This fully realised, complex interactive 3D environment has no imposed narrative and offers significant engagement for educational projects. The Schome (‘not school not home’) third space community – i.e. not placed in the first space of home or second space of work/school (Oldenburg, 1989) - was set up with the explicit aim of challenging the instructional models and pedagogic practices of the formal, state educational system. In this disembodied environment identities, represented in the virtual world by personalised avatars, possess usefully ambivalent valences. Often adults will join ‘inworld’ educational events organised and delivered by the younger members of the community. Schome makes flexible use of a wiki (collaboratively designed website), asynchronous discussion fora and other communicative media to support learning processes and enhance the development of a physically distanced yet authentic learning community. The authors propose that the community design in these new spaces created an opportunity for leaders to emerge regardless of contextual hierarchy and to forge a developing culture. The paper makes use of evidence from varied datasets to examine manifestations of leadership in the community and issues arising. Young people have been engaged in proposing, planning, executing and reflecting on teaching and learning and governance without deference to adults. Our analysis contributes to understandings of the development of leadership within carefully designed educational online communities and some of the challenges involved for adults in facilitating an appropriately supportive environment for young people. While aware that this innovative experiment continues to face many challenges, we propose that the design of the project offers much to encourage an approach to education in which collaborative, situated engagement in learning and teaching is perceived as a more fruitful model for the twenty-first century than reproduction of traditional hierarchies of teachers and the taught of conventional classrooms

Requirements analysis for decision-support system design: evidence from the automotive industry

The purpose of this paper is to outline the requirements analysis that was carried out to support the development of a system that allows engineers to view real-time data integrated from multiple silos such as Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Warranty systems, in a single and visual environment. The outcome of this study provides a clear understanding of how engineers working in different phases of the product-lifecycle could utilise such information to improve the decision making process and as a result design better products. This study uses data collected via in-depth semi-structured interviews and workshops that includes people working in various roles within the automotive sector. In order to demonstrate the applicability this approach, SysML diagrams are also provided

Suzuki-invariant codes from the Suzuki curve

In this paper we consider the Suzuki curve $y^q + y = x^{q_0}(x^q + x)$ over the field with $q = 2^{2m+1}$ elements. The automorphism group of this curve is known to be the Suzuki group $Sz(q)$ with $q^2(q-1)(q^2+1)$ elements. We construct AG codes over $\mathbb{F}_{q^4}$ from a $Sz(q)$-invariant divisor $D$, giving an explicit basis for the Riemann-Roch space $L(\ell D)$ for $0 < \ell \leq q^2-1$. These codes then have the full Suzuki group $Sz(q)$ as their automorphism group. These families of codes have very good parameters and are explicitly constructed with information rate close to one. The dual codes of these families are of the same kind if $2g-1 \leq \ell \leq q^2-1$