scholarly journals 5. Multidisciplinary Collaboration Through Learning Communities: Navigating Anxiety

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin DeLathouwer ◽  
Wendy Roy ◽  
Ann Martin ◽  
Jasmine Liska

A problem common to university faculty and students is an implicit sense of inadequacy regarding institutional hierarchies and disciplinary boundaries. Through a focus on multidisciplinarity, learning communities enable members to navigate multiple points of view within, between, and beyond apparent institutional boundaries. After having led a workshop that placed participants in the positions of both students and faculty members negotiating multidisciplinarity through learning communities, we conclude that learning communities’ methodological leveling of traditional hierarchies implicit in higher education leads to a sense of belonging that enables students and faculty to take risks essential for authentic learning. Anxiety over participation in academic discussions both inside and outside the classroom, and from within and beyond one’s disciplinary expertise, thus becomes productive rather than debilitating.

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Singer ◽  
Georgina Montgomery ◽  
Shannon Schmoll

Abstract Background STEM identity has been shown to have a powerful role in an individual’s success in educational environments, as well as on their career goals and trajectories. Historically, however, STEM identity formation for underrepresented students has been hampered by the lack of representation of in STEM fields, which predominantly consist of white males. One educational challenge is diversifying STEM classrooms, both in terms of the students themselves and also in terms of the science and scientists they learn about. Methods We piloted a 4-credit History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science course at Michigan State University. Students were tasked with creating exhibits focused on themes of diversity and inclusion in science for a real client. Using a STEM identity survey, we assessed students’ attitudes towards the sciences, issues of diversity in science, and their sense of belonging to their educational communities. We also had the students respond to various short-answer questions throughout the semester to better understand their experiences working on a collaborative authentic learning task. Results Our results suggest that authentic learning experiences based around ideas of diversity and inclusion can help students develop sense of belonging and positive STEM identities. Students demonstrated shifts in their self-identities as scientists, focusing more on the intersection between their gender, ethnicity, and self-perception as a scientist. Through qualitative analysis of short-answer questions, we were able to ascertain that working in groups in an authentic learning environment helped the students improve their communication and collaboration skills. Conclusions Students’ increased focus on gender and ethnicity suggests that they are thinking critically about how their personal identities intersect with their scientific identities. Additional research would help us better understand if the coupling of authentic learning and inclusive teaching practices have significant impacts on the formation of students’ STEM identities.


Author(s):  
V.V. Kotelevskaya

The article explores the typological principles and genesis of narrative thinking of Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989). It reveals the paradoxical nature of his writing, which combines, on the one hand, archetypal structures, implied ‘genre memory’, and on the other hand, a unique, innovative style. Bernhard’s constructive principle is repetition, which allows the embodiment of the idea of «eternal return» (Eliade) throughout the poetical structure, whether it is a sacred event of a myth or an «obsessive repetition» (Freud) of the traumatic memories of the protagonist or the narrator. The fragmented world is under constant reorganizing with the help of Bernhard’s polyphonic writing, which finds itself mostly in the imitation of the non-figurative, purely expressive, self-referential «art of fugue» (Bach), oriented to the cyclic, rather than linear-historical concept of time. In contrast to the literary interpretation of the «polyphonic novel» (Bakhtin) with its coexistence of multiple points of view, our attention is shifted to the musicological interpretation of the fugue’s polyphony as the embodied idea of the continuity of time, the closeness and infinity of the divine universe.


2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (6) ◽  
pp. 680-685
Author(s):  
Allan R. Cohen

This essay claims too much and too little for Critical Language Discourse, an interesting subject, but in my view not necessary as a separate topic from Needed Communications Skills Education. Those skills are best learned in context, working on specific challenges with specific audiences where there are particular communications problems to be overcome, then discussed from multiple points of view, including numerous relevant theories and concepts. Frequent iterations between challenges tackled, what works under which circumstances, what does not, and so on, builds a deeper understanding of oral and written communications, without necessarily learning theoretical names for the one form of theory.


Author(s):  
Paul D. Witman

This chapter provides a set of guidelines to assist information assurance and security researchers in creating, negotiating, and reviewing non-disclosure agreements, in consultation with appropriate legal counsel. It also reviews the use of non-disclosure agreements in academic research environments from multiple points of view. Active academic researchers, industry practitioners, and corporate legal counsel all provided input into the compiled guidelines. An annotated bibliography and links are provided for further review.


Author(s):  
Paul D. Witman

This chapter provides a set of guidelines to assist information systems researchers in creating, negotiating, and reviewing nondisclosure agreements, in consultation with appropriate legal counsel. It also reviews the use of nondisclosure agreements in academic research environments from multiple points of view, including the perspectives of both public and private sectors. Active academic researchers, industry practitioners, and corporate legal counsel all provided input into the compiled guidelines. An annotated bibliography and links are provided for further review.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hicham Hajj-Hassan ◽  
Anne Laurent ◽  
Arnaud Martin

Environmental data are currently gaining more and more interest as they are required to understand global changes. In this context, sensor data are collected and stored in dedicated databases. Frameworks have been developed for this purpose and rely on standards, as for instance the Sensor Observation Service (SOS) provided by the Open GeoSpatial Consortium (OGC), where all measurements are bound to a so-called Feature of Interest (FoI). These databases are used to validate and test scientific hypotheses often formulated as correlations and causality between variables, as for instance the study of the correlations between environmental factors and chlorophyll levels in the global ocean. However, the hypotheses of the correlations to be tested are often difficult to formulate as the number of variables that the user can navigate through can be huge. Moreover, it is often the case that the data are stored in such a manner that they prevent scientists from crossing them in order to retrieve relevant correlations. Indeed, the FoI can be a spatial location (e.g., city), but can also be any other object (e.g., animal species). The same data can thus be represented in several manners, depending on the point of view. The FoI varies from one representation to the other one, while the data remain unchanged. In this article, we propose a novel methodology including a crucial step to define multiple mappings from the data sources to these models that can then be crossed, thus offering multiple possibilities that could be hidden from the end-user if using the initial and single data model. These possibilities are provided through a catalog embedding the multiple points of view and allowing the user to navigate through these points of view through innovative OLAP-like operations. It should be noted that the main contribution of this work lies in the use of multiple points of view, as many other works have been proposed for manipulating, aggregating visualizing and navigating through geospatial information. Our proposal has been tested on data from an existing environmental observatory from Lebanon. It allows scientists to realize how biased the representations of their data are and how crucial it is to consider multiple points of view to study the links between the phenomena.


2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaxiao Cui

The presentation of consciousness in Mrs Dalloway has long been a focus of study, and many scholars have investigated Woolf’s narrative techniques in this regard, especially her use of Free Indirect Style. However, most of the existing studies mainly concentrate on the consciousness presentation of individual characters. Few studies have provided adequate accounts concerning the arrangement of the shifting narrative viewpoints and the linguistic mechanism that facilitates the ‘multipersonal representation of consciousness’ in this novel (Auerbach, 2003 [1953]: 536). This article attempts to fill this research gap by examining the use of parentheticals in Mrs Dalloway. The syntactic independence of a parenthetical gives it a degree of freedom to digress from its host, which makes this construction a convenient device to bring in new sources of consciousness and thus shift the narrative viewpoint from one character to another. The frequent viewpoint shifts subvert the convention of adhering to a single coherent narrative point of view. Meanwhile, using parentheticals allows Woolf to present multiple points of view within a short stretch of text, even within a single sentence. In this way, a sense of simultaneity is created. Distinct sources of consciousness are brought closer to each other; the very boundaries between individual minds seem to be blurred.


Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (6) ◽  
pp. 1365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gianluca Di Flumeri ◽  
Pietro Aricò ◽  
Gianluca Borghini ◽  
Nicolina Sciaraffa ◽  
Antonello Di Florio ◽  
...  

One century after the first recording of human electroencephalographic (EEG) signals, EEG has become one of the most used neuroimaging techniques. The medical devices industry is now able to produce small and reliable EEG systems, enabling a wide variety of applications also with no-clinical aims, providing a powerful tool to neuroscientific research. However, these systems still suffer from a critical limitation, consisting in the use of wet electrodes, that are uncomfortable and require expertise to install and time from the user. In this context, dozens of different concepts of EEG dry electrodes have been recently developed, and there is the common opinion that they are reaching traditional wet electrodes quality standards. However, although many papers have tried to validate them in terms of signal quality and usability, a comprehensive comparison of different dry electrode types from multiple points of view is still missing. The present work proposes a comparison of three different dry electrode types, selected among the main solutions at present, against wet electrodes, taking into account several aspects, both in terms of signal quality and usability. In particular, the three types consisted in gold-coated single pin, multiple pins and solid-gel electrodes. The results confirmed the great standards achieved by dry electrode industry, since it was possible to obtain results comparable to wet electrodes in terms of signals spectra and mental states classification, but at the same time drastically reducing the time of montage and enhancing the comfort. In particular, multiple-pins and solid-gel electrodes overcome gold-coated single-pin-based ones in terms of comfort.


2020 ◽  
pp. 019769312096344
Author(s):  
James M Adovasio

The year 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of my first publication on prehistoric basketry. Over the past five decades, the field of perishable artifact analysis has evolved dramatically. Though this evolution has not resulted in a geometric increase in the number of practitioners of this still arcane specialty, it has witnessed numerous transformations and enhancements of focus. After a half century and literally hundreds of publications, papers, and other perishable platitudes, my fundamental “message” continues to follow Weltfish’s original observation that basketry is valuable as a medium for comparative study from multiple points of view because as noted by Weltfish decades ago “the mechanical factors involved in the technical process objectify themselves in the product and are not lost in the process of making.” This contribution summarizes some of the major developments in the arena of basketry studies and, more broadly, in the field of perishable artifact analysis at large.


1981 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-179
Author(s):  
Charles Rich

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