Sleep as Homework and Engagement in Rehabilitation

In today’s push for shorter and quicker hospitalisations, everyday life often becomes a place of rehabilitation for people after they undergo surgical procedures. In order for hospitals to manage shortened periods of admission and to facilitate post-operative rehabilitation, a patient‘s active engagement has become a central element to clinical treatment and care in Denmark. For example, in the recovery from orthopedic surgery, sleep becomes a type of "homework" assignment that is a vital element of the patient‘s rehabilitation trajectory. Building on the theoretical concept of ‘engagement’ developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2005), we examine the patient‘s relation to sleep as part of recovery; we refer to this as ‘sleep engagement.’ In particular, we analyze sleep as part of an institutional pedagogy in rehabilitation, and we ask how this pedagogy mobilizes rehabilitation for older patients after they have been admitted to the hospital for an orthopedic surgical procedure. Using ethnographic material, our analysis leads to a discussion of institutional expectations for what it means to be engaged in one's own patient trajectory. The article presents three results: 1) Expectations of sleep as an institutionally defined homework assignment are fulfilled through the establishment of the ‘rehabilitable and non rehabilitable body’; 2) As an active attempt to mobilize resources in rehabilitation, patient sleep engagement becomes part of a historical and contextual nexus; and 3) Institutional sleep potential creates new points of ambivalence—on the one hand, sleep is an optimization-promoting requirement in order to exercise while, on the other hand, the midday nap reflects an outdated view of old age that opposes an active lifestyle perspective.

A Real-world Approach to Motivate Students on the First Class of a Computer Science Course

A common belief among students is that computing is a boring subject that lacks a connection to the real world. The first class (one 80-minute session) in an introductory computer science course may be an appropriate instance to combat such a belief. Previous studies have used coursewide interventions, e.g., games and physical/tangible devices to improve students’ motivation. However, although other approaches help motivate students, they may lack real-world context or have a high cost of deployment. This article proposes a novel real-world based approach to introduce programming concepts in the first class of the introductory computer science course. This approach, called Protobject based, is applicable to courses with over 100 students, has a low deployment entry barrier, requires low investment, and may be used creatively to implement different experiences. Furthermore, the Protobject-based approach has an equivalent motivational effect—at least in the short-term—to a Game-based approach even if it is entirely focused on the real world. The low requirements of the approach make it especially suitable for an 80-minute first class in an introductory computer science course. The Protobject-based approach has been preliminarily validated and compared to a pure game-based approach with a study with 376 participants, and we present the analysis of motivation questionnaires, a pre-test and post-test, and a homework assignment given to the students. We posit that more research into initiatives such as this one—that can show students how computer science can impact the real world around them—is warranted.

Effects of the Attention Training Technique on Brain Activity in Healthy University Students Assessed by EEG Source Imaging

This study aimed to investigate the neurocognitive effects of the Attention Training Technique (ATT) on brain activity in healthy participants. The participants included 20 university students who were asked to practice ATT as a homework assignment for 20 days. The intracerebral source localization of their electroencephalogram during rest and the ATT task, which comprised selective attention, attention switching, and divided attention conditions, was evaluated by standardized low-resolution brain electromagnetic tomography. Brain activity during rest was subtracted from that during the ATT task, and that was compared before and after the homework assignment. The results for the divided attention condition indicated significantly decreased alpha 1 frequency band power in the left orbital frontal cortex (OFC) and alpha 2 power in the right inferior temporal cortex. Further, decreased alpha 1 power in the left OFC correlated with reduced subjective difficulty during the divided attention condition. One possibility is that the brain activity changed as the effect of ATT practice, although this study cannot confirm causality. Further studies are required which include a control group that would complete similar training without the ATT task.

Artistry in language invention

Courses in language construction are often taught with an eye to generating interest in the linguistics major from undergraduate students who might otherwise be uninterested in taking an introductory course. With the focus primarily on linguistics, the artistry of language invention is often lost. This chapter lays out a method of teaching and evaluating language construction that is rigorous, informed by linguistics, and takes language creation seriously as an art form. Specifically, this chapter argues for the importance of instruction in naturalistic language creation. Two forms of naturalism are introduced and contrasted: weak naturalism (based on statistical typological patterns) and strong naturalism (based on simulating natural linguistic evolution). The chapter closes with an extended example of a homework assignment employing some of the ideas introduced in the chapter, plus a word of caution about the use of linguistic theory in a course on language construction.