What a performance! Developing nurse teachers’ lecturing persona and identity: a performing arts perspective

This conference paper abstract outlines the findings from a mixed method study, investigating the use of performing arts skills in the delivery of lectures in nurse education

The invention of nature: human and environmental futures in a biotechnological age

This thesis considers the potential consequences for social and biological diversity, arising from the introduction of genetically modified crops in developing countries. It argues that the production of agricultural biodiversity is an ongoing social process, involving countless temporally and spatially located works in progress. These localised applications of knowledge about diversity, find their expression in performances which do not simply unfold in time and space but construct them, (re)producing and structuring, territorialising and stratifying. The thesis argues that the social, is a heterogeneous amalgam of unknowably complex relationships; suggesting also that the introduction of GM technologies involves simultaneous processes of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation, substituting a heterotopian reality for the premise of a utopian fantasy - a singular, genetically deterministic world, which denies its own partiality. The thesis examines how, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Biosafety Protocol, the TRIPs agreement and other WTO agreements, extend particular ordering stories through time and space, arguing that the deployment of biotechnologies can only succeed through the enrolment of humans and non­humans into these polymorphic networks. It argues that the mechanisms and ordering narratives of the CBD and TRIPs conflict with the socio-cultural practices that produce biodiversity; suggesting, that IPRs provide a means for disciplining farmers, while maintaining the materiality of GM seeds through time- space. These technologies cannot be deployed without corresponding bodies of knowledge; they are, assemblages, active presences, permitting the exercise of power through the embodiment of particular “modes of ordering.” Finally, the thesis argues that the development of community intellectual rights, and traditional resource rights offer little hope for either maintaining the social practices necessary for the maintenance of agricultural biodiversity, or for increasing the substantial freedoms of communities in the two thirds world, without the recognition of the heterogeneous nature of social existence and the regeneration of people’s spaces

What a performance! recognising performing arts skills in the delivery of lectures in higher education

This thesis has investigated the notion that lecturing has similarities to acting and in doing so has empirically tested the work of Tauber and Mester (1994). Their model proposes that if teachers use the elements of acting, animated voice and body, space, humour, suspense and surprise, props and role play, within a class, they will promote student interest, attention and positive attitudes towards learning. This study aims to investigate this model against the backdrop of higher education in one School of Health and Social Care in the United Kingdom, as opposed to the North American education system in which it was developed. Results from this two-phase mixed method study with 81 lecturers and 62 students, suggested that students in a lecture could identify if the lecturer was enthusiastic, confident or not confident via the verbal and non-verbal cues he/she presented. It was also clear that lecturers were not seen to be credible unless they were able to appear knowledgeable about their subject area and had the skills to communicate that knowledge when delivering a lecture. Both lecturers and students showed high levels of agreement with Tauber and Mester's (1994) model suggesting that elements of acting do enhance both the lecturer's ability to deliver a lecture in a confident manner and the effectiveness of the lecturer. Conclusions indicated that these lecturers assumed a persona when lecturing, which was different from that displayed in other parts of their professional life. This occurred, particularly, but not exclusively, when they were nervous. The data concluded that these lecturers went through a process of assuming and maintaining this persona before and during a lecture using the elements of acting proposed by Tauber and Mester (1994). This thesis offers a development of Tauber and Mester's (1994) work that integrates this process of persona adoption into the model's elements of acting. This study demonstrates the value of utilising acting skills to increase the ability of new or under-confident lecturers to deliver lectures to large groups of students. In the current climate of consumerisation in education when the performance of lecturers is not only measured by pass rates but also by student evaluations, the findings of this study have significance for both lecturers and universities

Robotic Astronomy with the Faulkes Telescopes and Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope

We present results from ongoing science projects conducted by members of the Faulkes Telescope (FT) team and Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope (LCOGT). Many of these projects incorporate observations carried out and analysed by FT users, comprising amateur astronomers and schools. We also discuss plans for the further development of the LCOGT network.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, conference proceedings from "Workshop on Robotic Autonomous Observatories", held at Malaga, Spain from 18-21 May 2009, acccepted for publication in Advances in Astronom

The Silicon Valley Novel

In this article we propose that one of the emergent, but under-charted, and as-yet un-named thematic strands in recent American fiction and that contributes to a recent literary history is that of the “Silicon Valley novel”. The trend can be seen in the literary fiction of Tony Tulathimutte, Jarett Kobek, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Dave Eggers, to name but a few, but also in the trilogy of novels by Ann Bridges dubbed, “The Silicon Valley Trilogy”. Silicon Valley novels are concerned with the emergent technological industry in the Bay Area but they are also of a specific periodising moment. Hence, while named for the geography, we here situate the Silicon Valley novel as more tied to time in the early twenty-first century

Monads with arities and their associated theories

After a review of the concept of "monad with arities" we show that the category of algebras for such a monad has a canonical dense generator. This is used to extend the correspondence between finitary monads on sets and Lawvere's algebraic theories to a general correspondence between monads and theories for a given category with arities. As application we determine arities for the free groupoid monad on involutive graphs and recover the symmetric simplicial nerve characterisation of groupoids.Comment: New introduction; Section 1 shortened and redispatched with Section 2; Subsections on symmetric operads (3.14) and symmetric simplicial sets (4.17) added; Bibliography complete