YOUTH CULTURE IN THE NEW SOCIAL REALITY

Статья посвящена рассмотрению специфики культуры молодежи в условиях новой социальной реальности, детерминированной последствиями пандемии новой коронавирусной инфекции и ускорением темпов изменения социальных процессов. Автором акцентируется внимание на сложностях адаптации социальной системы к новым глобальным вызовам и рискам в условиях неопределенности и на трудностях построения жизненных стратегий молодежью как наиболее незащищенной частью общества. Отмечается выраженная актуальность научного исследования процессов, протекающих в молодежной среде на фоне пандемии, в области переосмысления взаимного влияния культуры и различных социально-демографических групп. Особое внимание уделено анализу отношения молодежи к ценностям и рассмотрению механизмов передачи социального опыта старшего поколения. Автором отмечается роль культуры молодежи в формировании самовыражения и мировоззрения молодого поколения в соответствии с социальными реалиями, отмечаются специфика виртуальных форматов коммуникации и стремление к социальной активности молодежи. The paper discusses the specifics of youth culture in the new social reality, determined by the consequences of the pandemic of a new coronavirus infection and accelerating the pace of change in social processes. The author focuses on the difficulties of adapting the social system to new global challenges and risks in conditions of uncertainty and on the difficulties of building life strategies for young people as the most vulnerable part of society. The publication points to the pronounced relevance of scientific research on the processes taking place in the youth environment against the background of the pandemic in the field of rethinking the mutual influence of culture and various socio-demographic groups. Special attention is paid to the attitude of young people to the values and social experience of the older generation. The author notes the role of youth culture in shaping the self-expression and worldview of the young generation in accordance with social realities, as well as the specifics of virtual communication and the desire for social activity of young people.

Interpersonal Affective Touch in a Virtual World: Feeling the Social Presence of Others to Overcome Loneliness

Humans are by nature social beings tuned to communicate and interact from the very beginning of their lives. The sense of touch represents the most direct and intimate channel of communication and a powerful means of connection between the self and the others. In our digital age, the development and diffusion of internet-based technologies and virtual environments offer new opportunities of communication overcoming physical distance. It however, happens that social interactions are often mediated, and the tactile aspects of communication are overlooked, thus diminishing the feeling of social presence, which may contribute to an increased sense of social disconnection and loneliness. The current manuscript aims to review the extant literature about the socio-affective dimension of touch and current advancements in interactive virtual environments in order to provide a new perspective on multisensory virtual communication. Specifically, we suggest that interpersonal affective touch might critically impact virtual social exchanges, promoting a sense of co-presence and social connection between individuals, possibly overcoming feelings of sensory loneliness. This topic of investigation will be of crucial relevance from a theoretical perspective aiming to understand how we integrate multisensory signals in processing and making sense of interpersonal exchanges, this is important in both typical and atypical populations. Moreover, it will pave the way to promising applications by exploring the possibility to use technical innovations to communicate more interactively in the case of people who suffer from social isolation and disconnection from others.

Codes of Modern Written Communication: Acoustic-Auditory vs. Manual-Visual

The article introduces the semiotic, cognitive, and technical aspects of the most important trends in the modern written communication, which arise as a result of the competition between acoustic-auditory and manual-visual codes. The author believes that Russian education has to adapt to the contemporary trends in virtual communication, which requires a preliminary research. The problem is that the integral-systemic presentation of communicative content is developing as a result of the growing share of visual data in various types of communication. The school course of Russian is based on elementary strategies and cannot keep up with these changes. Video-clip unites give the visual-written perception much better holistic possibilities than those of the phono-auditory-written channel. The competition of these two forms of writing is unlikely to displace the weaker opposition member. Chances are that it will redistribute their functions based on the advantages of each form.

Evaluating Remote Task Assignment of an Online Engineering Module through Data Mining in a Virtual Communication Platform Environment

E-learning has traditionally emphasised educational resources, web access, student participation, and social interaction. Novel virtual spaces, e-lectures, and digital laboratories have been developed with synchronous or asynchronous practices throughout the migration from face-to-face teaching modes to remote teaching during the pandemic restrictions. This research paper presents a case study concerning the evaluation of the online task assignment of students, using MS Teams as an electronic platform. MS Teams was evaluated to determine whether this communication platform for online lecture delivery and tasks’ assessments could be used to avoid potential problems caused during the teaching process. Students’ data were collected, and after filtering out significant information from the online questionnaires, a statistical analysis, containing a correlation and a reliability analysis, was conducted. The substantial impact of 37 variables was revealed. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient calculation revealed that 89% of the survey questions represented internally consistent and reliable variables, and for the sampling adequacy measure, Bartlett’s test was calculated at 0.816. On the basis of students’ diligence, interaction abilities, and knowledge embedding, two groups of learners were differentiated. The findings of this study shed light on the special features of fully online teaching specifically in terms of improving assessment through digital tools and merit further investigation in virtual and blended teaching spaces, with the goal of extracting outputs that will benefit the educational community.

Decarbonising Academia’s Flyout Culture

Flight is technologically and culturally central to academic life. Academia’s flyout culture is built on a set of shared beliefs and values about the importance of flying to being an academic. But flight also generates a large proportion of academia’s carbon emissions, posing a cultural challenge to flight’s ongoing importance. In this chapter, we assess the underlying values animating flyout culture and examine how those values might change as universities respond to pressures to decarbonise operations. We approach this analysis in four parts. First, we identify six values that support flyout culture—values of ideas, efficiency, quality, evaluation, recreation and status. Second, we discuss how each value will be affected by four modes of decarbonisation: carbon offsets; shifting travel modes; centralised, infrequent or slow conferencing; and virtual communication. Third, we consider new values that may emerge as universities decarbonise: values of localism, climate concern, emissions transparency and verification. Finally, we discuss inertia that will resist change and optimism about how academia can realign its operations and culture with a liveable climate. As decarbonisation pressures grow, the interplay of cultural dimensions will determine if such efforts succeed or fail.

Virtual Dental Care - Pediatric Teledentistry

Teledentistry falls under virtual dental care where use of virtual communication is in between dentist and the patient to provide dental care and education to patients. Patients receive virtual examinations and are provided consultation, diagnosis, treatment planning, guidance, transmission of dental information and education via tele-communications. During this COVID-19 pandemic it has offered a solution to resume dental practice as a tool ensuring safety for all. Pediatric teledentistry helps by saving time, allowing child- dentist interaction before the visit and reducing stress for patients, guardians and dentists. Telescreening and teletriage can be implemented publically into routine dental practice and also as a triage-based emergency management strategy as it provides an effective compromise between limiting patient admission, ensuring their pain control and symptom relief.

EXAMINING VIRTUAL REFERENCE SERVICES IN ACADEMIC LIBRARIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST

This research focuses on examining the availability of Virtual Reference Services in academic libraries in the Middle East. Virtual Reference Services could be provided in several ways, for example: by telephone, email, live chat, video conferencing, texting, and recently using social media applications like Twitter. This research will explore the presence of Virtual Reference Services in Middle Eastern academic libraries, and the ways in which they are presented. 55 academic libraries’ websites have been examined with a checklist that includes: the nature of reference services available, the time it took to locate the Virtual Reference Services, the text included in the link to describe the services, and the number of links navigated on the webpage to find the reference services. The main objective of this research is to examine the use of Virtual Reference Services in Middle Eastern university libraries and to increase the awareness of the libraries’ resources and services. Findings of this study showed that live chat as a Virtual Reference Service in the Middle East is not very prevalent. In addition, it was found that email as a means of virtual communication is used most commonly by the academic libraries that provided Virtual Reference Services.

Methodological Fundamentals for Forming Art Values of Students-Musicians in Arts and Educational Activities

The article is devoted to the problem of value formation of a future music teacher in the process of professional training. Art education is considered as a component of training that accumulates performing, musical, methodological directions. The artistic education for Music teachers determines the poly-artistic vector of professional training, which includes understanding music and other arts. The success of artistic education is ensured by the subjectivity of a future teacher-musician who accepts such activities as a universal professional value. The hierarchy of pedagogical conditions of effective arts and educational activities is substantiated. The initial positions for substantiation of methodological fundamentals of arts and educational activities of the future Music teacher are specified, namely teacher’s focus on self-development and on values of other people. The groups of methods relate to motivation for the complex of musical activity, poly-artistic development, thesaurus in the field of various arts. The core of the methodological fundamentals is personal artistic communication with art as well as interpersonal artistic communication. The need for the functioning of a specific arts and educational environment is substantiated in order to provide artistic communication, The functional connection of pedagogical conditions and methods of formation of artistic values of students-musicians in arts and educational activities as subjects of environmental art education is explained. The prospects of research of the problem caused by actualization of processes of virtual communication, risks of minimizing of interpersonal art communication are defined. Key words: students-musicians, arts and educational

Models of rhetorical relations in Russian blogging as an indicator of interlocutors’ information behavior

Russian blog texts are characterized by the fact that the respondent expresses opinions in order to convince the author of the effectiveness of certain ideas that cover his/her private life and professional activities. The respondent presents arguments in favor of his/her opinion, introduces the rationale for it, and at the same time indicates that the point of view previously expressed by the blogger is also relevant in the contextual situation under discussion. Rhetorical relations project conflict-free development of easy communication. As a result, the points of view put forward by the blogger and the respondent complement each other. It turns out that the same situation potentially generates both positive and negative emotions, and this is emphasized in the virtual communication based on the implementation of the phatic function of language. Rhetorical relations within the blog text help to combine different epistemic positions expressed by the interlocutors. In this regard, an urgent problem of linguistic research of Russian blog texts is to determine whether the interlocutors who exchange opinions and assessments form integral models of dialogic communication, based on which means of linking the stimulating and reacting messages are connected. This problem has not yet received proper empirical analysis in Russian studies and general language theory, although its solution, as we believe, contains significant implications for detailing the pragmatic specifics of blog communication. The aim of the study is to implement a structural and pragmatic analysis of rhetorical relations in blog texts, which involves identifying the dominant markers of these relations, their basic model and its variants. The goal stated in the article is realized through the following research methods: (1) the method of observation and interpretation of blogging while analyzing the peculiarities of the linguistic means of implementing connectivity; (2) descriptive-analytical (contextual) method-direct analysis of blog text fragments as a linear sequence; (3) a method for modeling rhetorical cause-and-effect relationships between segments of a single replica and at the level of integral dialogic unity in the blog text. It is concluded that rhetorical relations fix national and cultural stereotypes, which, in turn, determine the material and ideal scope of the degree of relevance of the addressees evaluation activity. When implementing such speech actions, the interlocutors take into rigid consideration not only the frequent and dominant cultural scripts of dialogic axiological performance, but also the relevant stereotypes of such activities that are set by the language system. The rhetorical relations between stimulating and reacting messages in the context of computer-mediated communication generate facilitate the processes of decoding the informative and emotional content of the jointly generated text and its implications.

The Impact of the Online Environment on Academic Learning and Communication

Starting from the premise that teaching is an act of communication, which is currently being done online, the main concern of education specialists is to optimize the process of online communication so as academic learning to be effective, meaningful and profound. As there is an interdependent relationship between communication and learning, this study is an investigative approach that aims to provide some data on students' perceptions of online communication. Effective and persuasive didactic communication, especially in the online environment, raises a number of difficulties and questions. How can the online communication process be optimized so that learning could be made more efficient? How can a challenging climate in the digital environment be built, what methods are more effective for stimulating interest and activating students? How do students relate to online training, what are the difficulties they encounter, the advantages and disadvantages they perceive? These are only a few questions that we are trying to find answers to in this study. In order to conduct our investigation, we used a sample of 126 participants, and as a research method we used the questionnaire-based survey and the interview. Following the processing of the results obtained, we were able to formulate conclusions relevant to virtual communication. Among them we mention: training students in the online didactic activity is more difficult, their involvement and participation being strongly influenced by the stress caused by technology. As for building a disinhibiting, stimulating environment, students have high expectations from the teachers.