Researching scholarship in the age of the internet

In this paper I review current debates about the nature of scholarship in higher education (following Boyer 1990) and the impact of digital communication practices on its role in research and teaching (e.g. Borgman 2007, Pearce et al 2010), and discuss a methodological framework for researching these issues, drawing on work in Literacies for Learning (Ivani? et al 2007) and Socio-technical Interaction (Kling et al 2003)

Literacy in the Digital University – developing a research agenda

This paper summarises outcomes from an ESRC-funded seminar series, held between October 2009 and April 2011, which brought together researchers and practitioners involved in four research projects focused, in different ways, on literacy, tertiary education, and digital communication. Apart from disseminating the research of the four projects involved, the seminars also set out to develop an agenda for new research, exploring current and predicted developments in practices around literacy and digital communication in higher and further education. The paper gives some background on the four projects involved and summarises the different approaches to researching literacy that they brought to the seminars. Broad research themes emerging from the seminars are presented and discussed

SINVAD: Search-based Image Space Navigation for DNN Image Classifier Test Input Generation

The testing of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has become increasingly important as DNNs are widely adopted by safety critical systems. While many test adequacy criteria have been suggested, automated test input generation for many types of DNNs remains a challenge because the raw input space is too large to randomly sample or to navigate and search for plausible inputs. Consequently, current testing techniques for DNNs depend on small local perturbations to existing inputs, based on the metamorphic testing principle. We propose new ways to search not over the entire image space, but rather over a plausible input space that resembles the true training distribution. This space is constructed using Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), and navigated through their latent vector space. We show that this space helps efficiently produce test inputs that can reveal information about the robustness of DNNs when dealing with realistic tests, opening the field to meaningful exploration through the space of highly structured images

Academic literacies in the digital university

Academic Literacies is an international field of study concerned with literacies and learning in tertiary education. Some recent work in this field has focused on online and elearning environments. In our book of 2007 (Goodfellow & Lea 2007) we used an academic literacies perspective to critique what we see as the focus in much elearning practice on the 'management of learning' at the expense of disciplinary pedagogies. We argued for attention to be paid to the centrality of texts, however mediated, in the construction of knowledge and the practices of learning. Our current focus on the 'digital' extends this critique to engage with three major discourses of technology currently constructing the 'digital age' in relation to education. The first is the metaphor of the 'digital native' or 'net generation'. The second is the discourse of 'Learning 2.0, the third is the trope of the 'unbundled university'. We conclude that we need to pay much more attention to textual practice around learning and scholarship,and that, as researchers and scholars, we need to work for the reconciliation of new discourses of the digital with the continuing development of critical pedagogical and social practice in the academy and the public sphere

Compelling Intimacies: Domesticity, Sexuality, and Agency

This introduction highlights what we call Compelling Intimacies —the multiple desires, affects, and affinities that arise at the intersection of institutions, actors, technologies, and ethical discourses to exert persuasive pressures on subjects. Each article animates different facets of the intensities born of intimacy as they operate across social and relational fields. The authors separate agency from intention in their efforts to identify the vitality of human and non-human relations. Together, the articles demonstrate how domesticities arise through diverse sets of circumstances, emerging in multiple incarnations—often in the same household—in such a way as to generate a wide range of affects and affinities. Finally, each author turns attention to the so-called small events that come to affirm or deny life as given form in everyday household arrangements, kin relations, friendships, and institutional settings, thereby suggesting the political stakes evoked by differing forms of care