A Critical Review of Secondary Educational Shifts to Online Learning Modalities in the COVID-19 Pandemic

The widespread impact of the COVID-19 pandemic affected K12 schools globally. This unprecedented disruption to education transformed teaching and learning experiences for children, teachers, administrators, and parents in many ways. The challenge of shifting traditional classroom teaching to online and distance modalities were met with various responses by school leaders and communities across the globe. This critical review highlights recent responses to continuing education for K12 students through collaborative efforts as the delivery of instruction as redefined and redesigned to meet the needs of children. Despite the lack of preparedness for this sudden shift to online learning, K12 district leaders and other stakeholders demonstrated their commitment to navigate through this crisis head-on. While disparities and unequal access became more evident during this unforeseen time, the future of online learning can be strengthened by this experience. This awareness can lead to further improvements in K12 education to serve all children with equity despite the circumstances.

Desdobramentos de uma arquitetura do Data Center

Resumo Este trabalho investiga os impactos ambientais, sociais, urbanos e paisagísticos decorrentes da infraestrutura da internet, a partir do estudo de caso da grande ressonância arquitetônica desse sistema: o Data Center, um tipo de edifício em ampla multiplicação que evidencia a fisicalidade de um sistema que se apresenta como nebuloso, onipotente e ubíquo. A partir de exemplos elegidos, instiga-se a desenvolver análises dessas arquiteturas hipertecnológicas, discutindo seus aspectos formais e sócio-ambientais. A centralidade vital da infraestrutura da internet em uma sociedade cada vez mais conectada reverbera desafios existentes, mas cada vez mais complexos, como processos de urbanização, acesso desigual à comunicação e alto impacto ambiental, integrando o debate dos possíveis caminhos do campo da arquitetura nos desdobramentos da era digital. Palavras-chave: Data Center; Infraestrutura; Arquitetura da Internet; Fisicalidade da Internet. Abstract This work investigates the environmental, social, urban, and landscape impacts resulting from the internet infrastructure, focusing on the case study of the great architectural resonance of this system: The Data Center — a type of building in wide multiplication that highlights the physicality of a system that presents itself as cloudy, omnipotent, and ubiquitous. Based on selected examples, it analyzes these hyper-technological architectures, discussing their formal and socio-environmental aspects. The vital centrality of internet infrastructure in an increasingly connected society reverberates existing but increasingly complex challenges, such as urbanization processes, unequal access to communication, and high environmental impact, integrating the debate on possible paths in the field of architecture in the developments of the digital age. Keywords: Data Center; Infrastructure; Internet Architecture; Internet’s physicality.

COVID-19 vaccination in rural India: a battle to be won!

As of 22nd July 2021, 13.3% of world’s population are fully vaccinated and 26.8% of world’s population have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine. COVID-19 vaccination drive was launched in India on 16th January 2021 with two government approved vaccines Covishield® and Covaxin®. About 65.53% of India’s population resides in rural areas. As vaccination is progressing, a gap (of number of vaccines administered) between urban and rural vaccination centers is clearly becoming evident. By mid-May, 30.3% of India’s urban population had received at least one dose of the vaccine compared to 19.2% in semi-urban areas, 15.1% in semi-rural areas and just 12.7% in rural areas. Vaccine roll out in rural areas is adversely affected probably because of unequal access in rural area, vaccine hesitancy due to misinformation and myths being circulated through social media and low educational status of rural population as compared to the urban peers. A successful COVID-19 vaccination drive depends on maximum possible coverage. Through this manuscript we aim to draw attention to objective and feasible strategies in order to bridge the existing urban-rural vaccination gap.

Arts Learning Across a City: How Ecosystem Thinking Helps Shape Understanding of Black-Centered and Eurocentric Arts Programming

Given historical patterns of unequal access to arts education, we used an ecosystem perspective to investigate Black Centered Arts and Eurocentric Arts in a mid-sized U.S. city, with a focus on youth programs, museums, and other youth arts organizations. We found that practitioner-leaders valued arts quality, equitable access, community embeddedness, and cultural preservation. Programs that provided access to Eurocentric arts tended to be older, larger, and better funded, and network analysis revealed a subnetwork made up largely of Black Centered Arts organizations. Results will inform an ongoing research-practice-philanthropy partnership structured to develop a more equitable city-wide arts ecosystem.

Systems methodologies for handling problem complexity

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how holistic thinking and the use of systems methodologies can help organisations handle increased problem complexity. The paper provides a critical discussion of the development of applied systems thinking and examines how its main strands can deal with problem complexity, multiple perceptions of reality and the unequal access to power resources in organisations. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses social theory and a systems meta-theoretical framework to examine the different ontological and epistemological assumptions that each strand of applied systems thinking makes about the nature of problems and the way in which an intervention will be made. Findings Complex problems require joined-up thinking and the use of systems ideas. Viewing the problem situation from a holistic perspective and applying appropriate systems methodologies and tools can help managers handle the complexities that their organisations face. Originality/value The paper makes a clear link between systems approaches and social theory and emphasises the need to understand the different assumptions that theories, methodologies or people make when they intervene in complex problem situations.

The Case of India

A segmented healthcare system evolved in India by 1990s, whereby the rich population depended on private hospitals while the people at the bottom of the economic pyramid went to the poor-quality public hospitals. In a democracy of equals, unequal access to services became political when COVID-19 began to put pressure on the health system. Corruption that was normalized in a segmented healthcare system could no longer be ignored. To advance the framework of social quality, we examine the corruption that unfolded during the pandemic in India from the perspective of moral foundation theory. We study the issues raised by political parties during the pandemic and court directives responding to citizen grievances. The evidence shows there was inequality of access and that courts had to intervene to try to rectify the situation. In the absence of effective governmental intervention during the pandemic, moral norms become a useful explanatory factor for social quality.

Early-career international academics' learning and teaching experiences during COVID-19 in Australia: A collaborative autoethnography

Scholarly articles on international academics mainly focuses on personal and professional challenges endured by international academics’ during conventional times. This includes adjustments to new roles and living in a foreign country, pedagogical differences stemming from intercultural differences, language barriers and unequal access to resources (funding, exploitation). This paper explores experiences of two international early-career academics in Australia highlighting their teaching-related challenges, strategies and opportunities during COVID-19, using a collaborative autoethnography qualitative approach. At this Australian university, teaching was paused for a week in March 2020 to cope with the learning and teaching ‘shock’ – to reorientate teaching from face-to-face to completely offer courses remotely to ensure that students were not disadvantaged in their learning and provide space for academic staff to reorientate their learning and teaching materials to suit online delivery. Personalised reflections encapsulate some bizarre teaching related experiences of these international academics in the online learning and teaching space, underpinned by their cultural differences. There were four major challenges identified: transition to online learning and teaching, learning and teaching online practices, relationship issues between students and academic staff, and language-related issues. Specific strategies to overcome these challenges are also identified that led to overall teaching success endured by these international early-career academics in Australia.

Gendered infrastructure and liminal space in Delhi’s unauthorized colonies

This paper takes an embodied approach to the lived experiences and everyday politics of liminal neighborhoods and infrastructures in Delhi’s unauthorized colonies, which lack official entitlements to networked infrastructures such as water and sewerage. Bringing a feminist political ecology lens to critical infrastructure studies, I show how gendered social relations, subjectivities, and the unequal experience of urban liminality are tied to accessing water and its fragmented infrastructures beyond the network. In particular, liminal infrastructural space is produced in unauthorized colonies through not only these neighborhoods’ quasi-legal status and unequal access to urban water, but also through gendered discourses and the socially differentiated ways water infrastructures are co-produced, managed, and made livable by residents. As water is primarily accessed beyond the network via tubewells and tankers, I demonstrate how these fractured modalities ultimately constitute gendered infrastructural assemblages that enable water’s circulation across neighborhoods but also serve to deepen forms of gendered marginality and differentiation. Here, gendered infrastructural practices and labor to negotiate and supplement fragmented components of water infrastructure shape subjectivities and possibilities for social relations and urban claims-making. These infrastructural assemblages expose both the situated experience of urban liminality, as well as its transcendent possibilities.

Analysis of Difference in Household Debt across Regions of Thailand

This study analyzed the determinants of household debt in Thailand at both the regional and the national levels using the panel data of 76 provinces over the years 2009–2017. The Panel Quantile Regression Model was employed to enable the analysis of the formation of household debt ranging from low to high levels. The findings indicate that household indebtedness in different regions has been shaped by a variety of factors, and that households in the same region with different levels of debt burden would experience different impacts or outcomes. We also tested the convergence of household debt, which produced the thought-provoking finding that household debt convergence failed to occur at both the national and the regional levels, while household debt divergence was found instead at the statistical significance level in some regions. The growing debt divergence phenomenon might be an outcome indicator of the unequal access to credit sources among different households in Thai society.