Spaces for knowledge generation. Final report

The Spaces for knowledge generation: a framework for designing student learning environments for the future project has been funded via an Australian Learning and Teaching Council Priority Projects Grant and aims to address the need to create learning spaces that are based on strong design principles, informed by student needs, with the aim of producing forward-looking, flexible and sustainable Learning Spaces. Integral to the process is fostering the adoption of teaching practices to support student-directed learning and knowledge production. Longer-term outcomes include strategic cultural change to university practices and physical changes to campuses to advance learning and teaching

How are Australian higher education institutions contributing to change through innovative teaching and learning in virtual worlds?

Over the past decade, teaching and learning in virtual worlds has been at the forefront of many higher education institutions around the world. The DEHub Virtual Worlds Working Group (VWWG) consisting of Australian and New Zealand higher education academics was formed in 2009. These educators are investigating the role that virtual worlds play in the future of education and actively changing the direction of their own teaching practice and curricula. 47 academics reporting on 28 Australian higher education institutions present an overview of how they have changed directions through the effective use of virtual worlds for diverse teaching and learning activities such as business scenarios and virtual excursions, role-play simulations, experimentation and language development. The case studies offer insights into the ways in which institutions are continuing to change directions in their teaching to meet changing demands for innovative teaching, learning and research in virtual worlds. This paper highlights the ways in which the authors are using virtual worlds to create opportunities for rich, immersive and authentic activities that would be difficult or not possible to achieve through more traditional approaches

Evaluation of appendicitis risk prediction models in adults with suspected appendicitis

Background Appendicitis is the most common general surgical emergency worldwide, but its diagnosis remains challenging. The aim of this study was to determine whether existing risk prediction models can reliably identify patients presenting to hospital in the UK with acute right iliac fossa (RIF) pain who are at low risk of appendicitis. Methods A systematic search was completed to identify all existing appendicitis risk prediction models. Models were validated using UK data from an international prospective cohort study that captured consecutive patients aged 16–45 years presenting to hospital with acute RIF in March to June 2017. The main outcome was best achievable model specificity (proportion of patients who did not have appendicitis correctly classified as low risk) whilst maintaining a failure rate below 5 per cent (proportion of patients identified as low risk who actually had appendicitis). Results Some 5345 patients across 154 UK hospitals were identified, of which two‐thirds (3613 of 5345, 67·6 per cent) were women. Women were more than twice as likely to undergo surgery with removal of a histologically normal appendix (272 of 964, 28·2 per cent) than men (120 of 993, 12·1 per cent) (relative risk 2·33, 95 per cent c.i. 1·92 to 2·84; P < 0·001). Of 15 validated risk prediction models, the Adult Appendicitis Score performed best (cut‐off score 8 or less, specificity 63·1 per cent, failure rate 3·7 per cent). The Appendicitis Inflammatory Response Score performed best for men (cut‐off score 2 or less, specificity 24·7 per cent, failure rate 2·4 per cent). Conclusion Women in the UK had a disproportionate risk of admission without surgical intervention and had high rates of normal appendicectomy. Risk prediction models to support shared decision‐making by identifying adults in the UK at low risk of appendicitis were identified

Death and learning: A twenty-first century perspective

The twenty-first century university was recently characterised as "a thousand year old industry on the cusp of profound change" (Bokor, 2012). This is not a matter of individual universities needing to change, as they may well do, but of the whole sector being reshaped. There is death in the air at many universities as they try to manage multiple, and apparently endless, catastrophic changes. In this paper, my methodology is literary, cultural, and psychoanalytic. I discuss the twenty-first century university in the shadow of multiple wars and change. Through the writings of W. R. Bion and several literary works, including Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, and Herta Müller, I consider the way the violence of the social works through the individual and the organisation. I finish with a consideration of some aspects of the indigenous Australian management of catastrophic change: a combination of flexibility, courage under fire, and a sense of the absurd, where the tragic and the comic can come together

Mothering siblings: Diaspora, desire and identity in American born confused Desi

In this essay we consider the construction of cultural identity, motherhood and the family in ABCD, a film of the Indian diaspora that had its world premiere at the 2001 London Film Festival. This film reads family, apparently within familiar narrative structures such as the U.S.-immigrant story, as portrayed in films like Goodbye, Columbus and My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and the &quot;leaving home&quot; story, as classically portrayed in Pride and Prejudice, where a young person needs to escape from her clueless family. The irritating presence of the mother in the film, and the quickness with which her two children appear to make life-determining decisions following her death, seem to invite discussions of plot and character organized around ideas of individual development, self-improvement and understanding. This is the territory of the desire plot, an account of family history captured for the twentieth century by Freudian-Lacanian readings which position sexual desire within the unconscious history of familial fantasies, understood as vertical and Oedipal. In this territory, mothers and old ladies become, as Mary Jacobus memorably phrased it, little more than &quot;the waste products&quot; of a system in which marriageable women are objects of exchange between men (142) and a mother\u27s death would be expected to grease the wheels of narrative. Identity and narrative are inextricably linked here: a certain understanding of narrative as developmental and teleological paves the way for an understanding of identity as either/or. There are problems, however, in trying to read ABCD as a bild&uuml;ngsroman structured by what Susan Freidman calls &quot;the temporal plots of the family romance, its repetitions and discontents&quot; (137), rendering the &quot;Indian&quot; characteristics of the plot unreadable, and the apparently self-defeating nature of the characters\u27 choices and behavior, rather pointless. A central [End Page 16] difficulty is that the film both responds to and resists readings based on the Oedipal model of the bild&uuml;ngsroman with its focus on linear development through time

Beckett and Bion: The (Im)patient voice in psychotherapy and literature

This book focuses on Samuel Beckett&rsquo;s psychoanalytic psychotherapy with W. R. Bion as a central aspect both of Beckett&rsquo;s and Bion&rsquo;s radical transformations of literature and psychoanalysis. The recent publication of Beckett&rsquo;s correspondence during the period of his psychotherapy with Bion provides a starting place for an imaginative reconstruction of this psychotherapy, culminating with Bion&rsquo;s famous invitation to his patient to dinner and a lecture by C.G. Jung. Following from the course of this psychotherapy, Miller and Souter trace the development of Beckett&rsquo;s radical use of clinical psychoanalytic method in his writing, suggesting the development within his characters of a literary-analytic working through of transference to an idealized auditor known by various names, apparently based on Bion. Miller and Souter link this pursuit to Beckett&rsquo;s breakthrough from prose to drama, as the psychology of projective identification is transformed to physical enactment. They also locate Bion&rsquo;s memory and re-working of his clinical contact with Beckett, who figures as the \u27patient zero\u27 of Bion&rsquo;s pioneering postmodern psychoanalytic clinical theories