Building back better from COVID-19: Knowledge, emergence and social contracts

COVID-19 recovery is an opportunity to enhance life chances by Building Back Better, an objective promoted by the UN and deployed politically at national level. To help understand emergent and intentional opportunities to Build Back Better, we propose a research agenda drawing from geographical thinking on social contracts, assemblage theory and the politics of knowledge. This points research towards the ways in which everyday and professional knowledge cocreation constrains vision and action. Whose knowledge is legitimate, how legitimacy is ascribed and the place of science, the media and government in these processes become sites for progressive Building Back Better.

The impact of embodied simulation in vocabulary learning

The aim of the present study was to demonstrate the multisensory nature of vocabulary knowledge by using learning designed to encourage the simulation of sensorimotor experiences. Forty participants were instructed to learn pseudowords together with arbitrary definitions, either by mentally experiencing (sensorimotor simulation) the definitions, or by mentally repeating them. A test phase consisting of three tasks was then administered: in a recognition task, participants had to recognize learned pseudowords among distractors. In a categorization task, they had to categorize pseudowords as representing either living or non-living items. Finally, in a sentence completion task, participants had to decide whether pseudowords were congruent with context sentences. As expected, the sensorimotor simulation condition induced better performances only in the categorization task and the sentence completion task. The results converge with data from the literature in demonstrating that knowledge emergence implies sensorimotor simulation and showing that vocabulary learning can benefit from encoding that encourages the simulation of sensorimotor experiences.

Optimizing Temporal Business Opportunities

The objective of this paper is to detail preliminary work revolving around modeling. It provides understanding and underpinning implementation procedures of dynamics of large-scale events with Hajj examples, where a large population of people is contained for a significantly long but limited period within certain areas. It is essential to note further that the motivation behind this subject’s discussion could also be fueled by sales, inquiries, or security concerns. However, knowledge emergence on service point procedures implementation suggests that service points implementing data are extinct, and this is obliged to implement the next feature. As such, there is a critical need to reform a process and how to analyze the work. Developing this literature report requires extensive use of factual data for accuracy; as such, data mining and simulation techniques will be essential in explaining what services are needed. The simulation techniques used herein incorporate several databases targeting to exploit the advantage of proficiency in predicting distribution demand for population points based on available current estimates. Henceforth, data mining, in this case, is used to inform intelligent decision making on investing in services points as pushed for by customers’ demand.

Losing Touch: An Embodiment Perspective on Coordination in Robotic Surgery

Because new technologies allow new performances, mediations, representations, and information flows, they are often associated with changes in how coordination is achieved. Current coordination research emphasizes its situated and emergent nature, but seldom accounts for the role of embodied action. Building on a 25-month field study of the da Vinci robot, an endoscopic system for minimally invasive surgery, we bring to the fore the role of the body in how coordination was reconfigured in response to a change in technological mediation. Using the robot, surgeons experienced both an augmentation and a reduction of what they can do with their bodies in terms of haptic, visual, and auditory perception and manipulative dexterity. These bodily augmentations and reductions affected joint task performance and led to coordinative adaptations (e.g., spatial relocating, redistributing tasks, accommodating novel perceptual dependencies, and mounting novel responses) that, over time, resulted in reconfiguration of roles, including expanded occupational knowledge, emergence of new specializations, and shifts in status and boundaries. By emphasizing the importance of the body in coordination, this paper suggests that an embodiment perspective is important for explaining how and why coordination evolves following the introduction of a new technology.

Digital Exam and Assessments

Although it is widely recognized that exam and assessments are ways to explore and query knowledge, emergence of the internet, digitalization, and the deployment of artificial intelligence in teaching and learning extends the concept to digital exam and assessment. Some lines of research suggest that digital exam and assessments are costly and unfortunate, whereas others suggest that it is beneficial and adaptive. However, there are little theoretical underpinnings probing these arguments. To fill the void, this chapter probe existing teaching and learning literature, and concepts of digital exam and assessments relative to faculty development. To this end, this chapter theorize that these concepts are contingents on generational cohorts, arguments that advances and reorients research on digital exam and assessment, and generational difference are highlighted. The chapter concludes with pros and cons associated with digital assessments.