Digital Commons Network^™

Barriers In Adopting Blended Learning In A Private University Of Pakistan And East Africa: Faculty Members’ Perspective, Nusrat Fatima Rizvi, Saleema Gulzar, Wachira Nicholas, Beatrice Nkoroi

Institute for Educational Development, Karachi

Background: Education methods have undergone transformation over the centuries. Use of technology is the cornerstone for innovation in teaching methods. Hence, blended learning which includes face to face and online modalities is being increasingly explored as effective method for learning. This pilot study determines the perceptions of faculty members in a private international university on barriers influencing adoption of technology for teaching and learning.

Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted through a self-reported questionnaire using ‘survey monkey’. The data was entered and analyzed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS version 20). Frequencies and proportions are reported.

Results: Findings …

Blackness Written, Erased, Rewritten James Weldon Johnson, Teju Cole, And The Palimpsest Of Modernity, Daphne Lamothe

Africana Studies: Faculty Books

Book summary:

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) exemplified the ideal of the American public intellectual as a writer, educator, songwriter, diplomat, key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and first African American executive of the NAACP. Originally published anonymously in 1912, Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is considered one of the foundational works of twentieth-century African American literature, and its themes and forms have been taken up by other writers, from Ralph Ellison to Teju Cole. Johnson's novel provocatively engages with political and cultural strains still prevalent in American discourse today, and it remains in print over …

Home: The Syrian-West Virginian Story A Multimedia Project, Colleen Sobolov Good

Capstones and Honors Theses

This professional project is a multimedia project focusing on three Syrian West Virginians living in three different Syrian communities in West Virginia. The project will be disseminated using a project website. It will include content curated by the project author (photo, audio and written stories, data visualizations, maps) and information selected by the participants themselves (photos/objects selected by the subjects as representations of home, timelines of important events outlined by the subjects). The content will add to the information available on different cultural communities in West Virginia in general, and on the Syrian West Virginian community in particular. It is …

Epistemological Matters Matter For Theological Understanding, Joseph F. Laporte

Faculty Publications

This article leads the reader to appreciate some of the importance of philosophical epistemology, to the field of theology, by way of two fascinating philosophical topics. As it does so, it provides some development and clarification of two notions important in epistemology: first, rationality, and second, the distinction sometimes called the “propositional–experiential” distinction. The first is the more central to mainstream philosophy today. Since at least Plato, philosophers have asked: what is it to know something, or to be rational or right-headed, as opposed to kooky or gullible, in believing something? Christian philosophers have applied this study to the …

Index To Volume 48—Title, The University Of Pacific, Mcgeorge School Of Law

University of the Pacific Law Review

No abstract provided.

"In The Land Of The Chaldeans": The Search For Abraham's Homeland Revisited, Stephen O. Smoot

BYU Studies

Readers of the Hebrew Bible first encounter Abram (later Abraham), the spiritual father of the three great monotheistic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—at the end of Genesis 11. There they discover he was the son of a certain Terah and claimed “Ur of the Chaldeans” as his home (Gen. 11:28). Being as central as Abraham is to the patriarchal narratives of Genesis and, subsequently, to the faith of scores of believers across the globe, both faithful and nonbelieving readers have turned a critical eye toward the passages where Abraham makes an appearance and have attempted to discern if any historicity lies …

Full Issue

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.

Indonesia’S Centripetal Democracy And Economic Growth, Michael T. Rock

Economics Faculty Research and Scholarship

What has been the impact of democracy on growth in Indonesia? An early view emphasized a growth and investment slowdown, but more recent data suggest otherwise. What accounts for the reversion to New Order growth and investment rates? My answer is the adoption of more centripetal and developmental democratic institutions in an otherwise messy democracy that has pushed political parties and presidents to compete for votes by promising to clean up government and restore growth.

The Beryozovo Cup: A Byzantine Object At The Crossroads Of Twelfth-Century Eurasia, Alicia Walker

History of Art Faculty Research and Scholarship

No abstract provided.

"Put My Thang Down, Flip It And Reverse It": Black Women's Interstitial Languages Of Body And Desire, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

Literatures in English Faculty Research and Scholarship

This essay explores the subversive presences of invented languages in African American women’s literatures in the twenty-first century. I focus my analysis on the invented languages that animate playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’s In The Blood and Fucking A (2001), Toni Morrison’s novel Love (2003), and rapper Missy Elliott’s 2001 single, “Work It,” each of which engages key questions of intersectional embodiment, belonging, and desire at the turn of the twenty-first century. Examining these texts alongside contemporary feminist linguistic scholarship and African diaspora cultural criticism on the politics of language, I argue that Parks, Morrison, and Elliott develop what I term “interstitial …

Open Educational Resources And Rhetorical Paradox In The Neoliberal Univers(Ity), Nora Almeida

Publications and Research

As a phenomenon and a quandary, openness has provoked conversations about inequities within higher education systems, particularly in regards to information access, social inclusion, and pedagogical practice. But whether or not open education can address these inequities, and to what effect, depends on what we mean by “open” and specifically, whether openness reflexively acknowledges the fraught political, economic, and ethical dimensions of higher education and of knowledge production processes. This essay explores the ideological and rhetorical underpinnings of the open educational resource (OER) movement in the context of the neoliberal university. This essay also addresses the conflation of value and …

Review Of The Spirituality Of Awe: Challenges To The Robotic Revolution. Kirk J. Schneider. Reviewed By Daniel Liechty., Daniel Liechty

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Review of:

Kirk J. Schneider, The Spirituality of Awe: Challenges to the Robotic Revolution. Waterside Press (2017). 142 pages, $14.95 (paperback).

The Creation Of The Border Crisis: How The Media Influenced The Situation At The U.S./Mexico Border In 2014, Alejandra Baron

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In 2014, thousands of women and children from Central America trekked across Mexico to reach the United States border in hopes of seeking asylum. As oppose to previous immigration surges, it was the first time that this amount of asylum seekers had reached within a short period of time the border. The media in the United States took an important role in describing the occurrences at the U.S./Mexico border in the rhetoric and dialect used. The polarization of the audience mimicked the partisan government that could not agree on a solution and left the situation at the border in a …

Presenting A Labelled Dataset For Real-Time Detection Of Abusive User Posts, Hao Chen, Susan Mckeever, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

Social media sites facilitate users in posting their own personal comments online. Most support free format user posting, with close to real-time publishing speeds. However, online posts generated by a public user audience carry the risk of containing inappropriate, potentially abusive content. To detect such content, the straightforward approach is to filter against blacklists of profane terms. However, this lexicon filtering approach is prone to problems around word variations and lack of context. Although recent methods inspired by machine learning have boosted detection accuracies, the lack of gold standard labelled datasets limits the development of this approach. In this work, …

Extended List Of Stop Words: Does It Work For Keyphrase Extraction From Short Texts?, Svetlana Popova, Gabriella Skitalinskaya

Conference Papers

In this paper we study the problem of key phrase extraction from short texts written in Russian. As texts we consider messages posted on Internet car forums related to the purchase or repair of cars. The main assumption made is: the construction of lists of stop words for key phrase extraction can be effective if performed on the basis of a small, expert-marked collection. The results show that even a small number of texts marked by an expert can be enough to build an extended list of stop words. Extracted stop words allow to improve the quality of the key …

A Neuro-Fuzzy Controller For Grid-Connected Heavy-Duty Gas Turbine Power Plants, Mohamed Iqbal Mohamed Mustafa, Joseph Xavier Rayappan, Kanakaraj Jagannathan

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Frequent load fluctuation and set-point variation may affect the stability of grid-connected heavy-duty gas turbine power plants. To overcome such problems, a novel neuro-fuzzy controller is proposed in this paper for single-shaft heavy-duty gas turbines ranging from 18.2 MW to 106.7 MW. A neuro-fuzzy controller was developed using a hybrid learning algorithm and the effectiveness of the controller for all heavy-duty gas turbine plants (5, 6, 7, and 9 series) is demonstrated against load disturbance and set-point variation in a grid-connected environment. Various time domain specifications and performance index criteria of the neuro-fuzzy controller are compared with that of a …

Holmpatrick Graveyard — A Description, Frank Prendergast

Other Resources

The term ‘graveyard’ describes a burial ground attached to a church, and ‘historic graveyard’ describes any graveyard or burial ground in use prior to the early twentieth-century. In such places, communities connect with their own history and ancestry, and identify with their place of origin. They have cultural and heritage significance too and, for these reasons, their conservation and interpretation are necessary.

Holmpatrick Graveyard is situated in the centre of Skerries, a small coastal town 27 km north of Dublin City. An archipelago of three small islands fringes the local coastline. One of these is locally known as Church Island …

Voyages Between France And Ireland: Culture, Tourism And Sport, Frank Healy, Brigitte Bastiat

Books

The voyage – the quest, the odyssey, the expedition – is one of the driving forces of civilisation. From ancient times to the present day, human beings have travelled through necessity (wars, persecutions, economic and political pressures), by vocation (religious and humanitarian) and for pleasure (tourism, culture and sport).

A voyage intensifies our perception of self, leading us to define and redefine our identity in the liminal space where we are confronted with the Other. This often leads to a change of perspective in our attitudes to culture, identity and politics.

The sea is an important feature of the geography …

Civil Rights Gone Wrong: Racial Nostalgia, Historical Memory, And The Boston Busing Crisis In Contemporary Children’S Literature, Lynnell L. Thomas

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

On May 14, 2014, three white Boston city councilors refused to vote to approve a resolution honoring the sixtieth anniversary of Brown v. the Board of Education because, as one remarked, “I didn’t want to get into a debate regarding forced busing in Boston.” Against the recent national proliferation of celebrations of civil rights milestones and legislation, the controversy surrounding the fortieth anniversary of the court decision that mandated busing to desegregate Boston public schools speaks volumes about the historical memory of Boston’s civil rights movement. Two highly acclaimed contemporary works of children’s literature set during or inspired by Boston’s …

A Comparative Analysis Of Access To Reproductive Health Care In Laos And Southeast Asia, Malakhone Sonethavong

Master's Theses

This thesis research aims to unravel main barriers that prevent women from being able to access reproductive health care in Laos in comparison with other two Southeast Asia countries which are Thailand and Vietnam. The comparison of Laos, Thailand and Vietnam will be explored through an analysis of a literature review. This research explores the critical issues and on finding a mutual understanding between the role of the policy makers and the implementers of policies. At the end of the research, some recommendations on health care system improvement and personal perspective towards the rights of women on reproductive health and …

The Culture Of Gender/The Gender Of Culture: Cuban Women, Culture, And Change—The Island And The Diaspora, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Essay analyzes the role of the Cuban woman in society—both on the island as well as in the diaspora. The purpose of this Essay is to assess whether culture has changed among either (or both) Cuban women on the island after the revolution and those who have emigrated since then. The Essay develops this topic in three parts. The first part presents the role of women in society in general and specifically in Latina/o societies. Following, the work addresses the history of Cuba, in order to weave in the record of women's movements and women's organizations on the island …

Straight Out Of Compton: Developmental Equality And A Critique Of The Compton School Litigation, Nancy E. Dowd

UF Law Faculty Publications

In Part I, I set out my developmental equality model in three sections. First, I briefly explore the ecological perspective on child development, a broadly accepted developmental model, and its relation to best interests. Second, I consider the limitations of a ‘neutral’ ecological perspective, using as my example data about the life course of African American boys from birth to age 18. Finally, I suggest how to shift the lens to one of developmental equality, using the theoretical models of Cynthia Garcia Coll and Margaret Beale Spencer. While linked to the experience of children of color in the United States, …

Glocalizing Women's Health And Safety: Migration, Work, And Labor, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

UF Law Faculty Publications

Worldwide, women's equality remains elusive in the social, political, civil, economic and cultural spheres. Such reality presents a challenge in the movement of persons across state borders because, globally, the world is experiencing a feminization of migration. In turn, the feminization of migration effects threats to the health and safety of migrant women, whose well-being is in peril at all stages of the migration journey – from the country of origin, to the transit states, to the receiving state – from smugglers and official actors alike. Because the globalization discourses exclude the movement of persons and focus on the movement …

“Porque Hací Ya Conocemos”: Dialogic Ways Of Knowing Through Digital Learning Communities And Critical Coaching, Melissa Summer Wells

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative action research case study was to create dialogic, power-sharing spaces that recognized the diverse ways of knowing that teachers, families, and students brought to mutually-constructed learning environments through two strategies, digital learning communities and critical coaching. Specifically, the study explored how families, teachers, and students engaged in digital learning communities; how these parties exercised power in these digital spaces; and how critical coaching partnerships formed between teachers and literacy coaches. The researcher (a literacy coach) engaged in a critical coaching partnership with an early childhood educator over the course of four months. Engagements in this …

History Of Applied Science & Technology: An Open Access Textbook, Danielle Mead Skjelver, David Arnold, Hans Peter Broedel, Sharon Bailey Glasco, Bonnie Kim, Sheryl Dahm Broedel

Open Educational Resources

This textbook is designed to to meet the needs of History of Applied Science and Technology courses at colleges and universities around the world. Chapters will be organized around the theme of the transformative impact of technological and epistemological changes on worldview and human behavior as they relate to everyday life and global choices. We believe this textbook is the first History of Applied Science and Technology textbook to take a global approach, addressing persistent gaps in coverage in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. This is a collaborative, open access project. If you are interested in participating, please let us …

Front Matter, Joonna Smitherman Trapp, Brad Peters

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

No abstract provided.

Jaepl, Vol. 22, Winter 2016-2017, Joonna Smitherman Trapp, Brad Peters

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Editors’ Message Essays SPECIAL SECTION: DEEP READING STRATEGIES Jane Thompkins - Deep Reading Vajra Watson - Life as Primary Text: English Classrooms as Sites for Soulful Learning Tisha Ulmer - Using Pre-reading Strategies to Provide Historical Context in a Literature Course Grace Wetzel - ‘The Most Peaceful I Ever Felt Writing’: A Contemplative Approach to Essay Revision TEACHING AND LEARNING Kate Chaterdon - Contemplative Neuroscience and the Teaching of Writing: Mindfulness as Mental Training Ondine Gage - Resisting a Restrictive Discourse Policy J. Michael Rifenburg - The Performance of Literate Practices: Rhetoric, Writing, and Stand-up Comedy Rosanne Carlo - Getting …

Resisting A Restrictive Discourse Policy, Ondine Gage

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

A survey, an interview with a remarkable teacher, and an analysis of classroom interactions reveal strategies for countering federal and state policies against students’ right to their own language.

Back Matter, Joonna Smitherman Trapp, Brad Peters

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

No abstract provided.

Book Reviews, Julie Nichols, Brad E. Lucas, Maureen Hall, Gae Lyn Henderson

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Julie Nichols - Threshold Concepts. Brad E. Lucas, et al. - Adler-Kassner, Linda, and Elizabeth Wardle, eds. Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2015. Maureen Hall - Waxler, Robert P. The Risk of Reading: How Literature Helps Us to Understand Ourselves and the World. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Gae Lyn Henderson - Goodson, Ivor, and Scherto Gill. Critical Narrative as Pedagogy. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.