Investigating functional thinking in the elementary classroom : foundations of early algebraic reasoning

This paper examines the development of student functional thinking during a teaching experiment that was conducted in two classrooms with a total of 45 children whose average age was nine years and six months. The teaching comprised four lessons taught by a researcher, with a second researcher and classroom teacher acting as participant observers. These lessons were designed to enable students to build mental representations in order to explore the use of function tables by focusing on the relationship between input and output numbers with the intention of extracting the algebraic nature of the arithmetic involved. All lessons were videotaped. The results indicate that elementary students are not only capable of developing functional thinking but also of communicating their thinking both verbally and symbolically.

"Men at play : masculinities in Australian theater since the 1950s" -- By Jonathan Bollen, Adrian Kiernander and Bruce Parr

Adopting a thematic rather than chronological arrangement, this co-authored book surveys representations of men and masculinity in post-war Australian theater. Its searching and sophisticated analyses draw upon playscripts, critical records and archival material, including screen versions of stage productions. The study is organized around two distinct periods of Australian theater history: the 1950s to 1970, during which time a national theatremovement flourished, and the mid-1980s onward.Whilst some attention is given to different genres, discussion centers primarily on realist works from the mainstream. Several plays usually omitted from orthodox theater histories, such as Barry Pree’s A Fox in the Night (1959), are given detailed treatments.

Fractions, reunitisation and the number-line representation

Centre for Mathematics and Science Education, QUT, Brisbane, Australia This paper reports on a study in which Years 6 and 10 students were individually interviewed to determine their ability to unitise and reunitise number lines used to represent mixed numbers and improper fractions. Only 16.7% of the students (all Year 6) were successful on all three tasks and, in general, Year 6 students outperformed Year 8 students. The interviews revealed that the remaining students had incomplete, fragmented or non-existent structural knowledge of mixed numbers and improper fractions, and were unable to unitise or reunitise number lines. The implication for teaching is that instruction should focus on providing students with a variety of fraction representations in order to develop rich and flexible schema for all fraction types (mixed numbers, and proper and improper fractions).

Queensland Aborigines, multiple realities and the social sources of suffering: Psychiatry and moral regions of being (Part 1)

This two part paper considers the experience of a range of magico-religious experiences (such as visions and voices) and spirit beliefs in a rural Aboriginal town. The papers challenge the tendency of institutionalised psychiatry to medicalise the experiences and critiques the way in which its individualistic practice is intensified in the face of an incomprehensible Aboriginal „other‟ to become part of the power imbalance that characterises the relationship between Indigenous and white domains. The work reveals the internal differentiation and politics of the Aboriginal domain, as the meanings of these experiences and actions are contested and negotiated by the residents and in so doing they decentre the concerns of the white domain and attempt to control their relationship with it. Thus the plausibility structure that sustains these multiple realities reflects both accommodation and resistance to the material and historical conditions imposed and enacted by mainstream society on the residents, and to current socio- political realities. I conclude that the residents‟ narratives chart the grounds of moral adjudication as the experiences were rarely conceptualised by local people as signs of individual pathology but as reflections of social reality. Psychiatric drug therapy and the behaviourist assumptions underlying its practice posit atomised individuals as the appropriate site of intervention as against the multiple realities revealed by the phenomenology of the experiences. The papers thus call into question Australian mainstream „commonsense‟ that circulates about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people which justifies representations of them as sickly outcasts in Australian society.

Modeling corneal surfaces with three-dimensional basis functions

Purpose: To ascertain the effectiveness of object-centered three-dimensional representations for the modeling of corneal surfaces. Methods: Three-dimensional (3D) surface decomposition into series of basis functions including: (i) spherical harmonics, (ii) hemispherical harmonics, and (iii) 3D Zernike polynomials were considered and compared to the traditional viewer-centered representation of two-dimensional (2D) Zernike polynomial expansion for a range of retrospective videokeratoscopic height data from three clinical groups. The data were collected using the Medmont E300 videokeratoscope. The groups included 10 normal corneas with corneal astigmatism less than −0.75 D, 10 astigmatic corneas with corneal astigmatism between −1.07 D and 3.34 D (Mean = −1.83 D, SD = ±0.75 D), and 10 keratoconic corneas. Only data from the right eyes of the subjects were considered. Results: All object-centered decompositions led to significantly better fits to corneal surfaces (in terms of the RMS error values) than the corresponding 2D Zernike polynomial expansions with the same number of coefficients, for all considered corneal surfaces, corneal diameters (2, 4, 6, and 8 mm), and model orders (4th to 10th radial orders) The best results (smallest RMS fit error) were obtained with spherical harmonics decomposition which lead to about 22% reduction in the RMS fit error, as compared to the traditional 2D Zernike polynomials. Hemispherical harmonics and the 3D Zernike polynomials reduced the RMS fit error by about 15% and 12%, respectively. Larger reduction in RMS fit error was achieved for smaller corneral diameters and lower order fits. Conclusions: Object-centered 3D decompositions provide viable alternatives to traditional viewer-centered 2D Zernike polynomial expansion of a corneal surface. They achieve better fits to videokeratoscopic height data and could be particularly suited to the analysis of multiple corneal measurements, where there can be slight variations in the position of the cornea from one map acquisition to the next.

What are students' understandings of how digital tools contribute to learning in design disciplines?

Building Information Modelling (BIM) is evolving in the Construction Industry as a successor to CAD. CAD is mostly a technical tool that conforms to existing industry practices, however BIM has the capacity to revolutionise industry practice. Rather than producing representations of design intent, BIM produces an exact Virtual Prototype of any building that in an ideal situation is centrally stored and freely exchanged between the project team, facilitating collaboration and allowing experimentation in design. Exposing design students to this technology through their formal studies allows them to engage with cutting edge industry practices and to help shape the industry upon their graduation. Since this technology is relatively new to the construction industry, there are no accepted models for how to “teach” BIM effectively at university level. Developing learning models to enable students to make the most out of their learning with BIM presents significant challenges to those teaching in the field of design. To date there are also no studies of students experiences of using this technology. This research reports on the introduction of Building Information Modeling (BIM) software into a second year Bachelor of Design course. This software has the potential to change industry standards through its ability to revolutionise the work practices of those involved in large scale design projects. Students’ understandings and experiences of using the software in order to complete design projects as part of their assessment are reported here. In depth semi-structured interviews with 6 students revealed that students had views that ranged from novice to sophisticate about the software. They had variations in understanding of how the software could be used to complete course requirements, to assist with the design process and in the workplace. They had engaged in limited exploration of the collaborative potential of the software as a design tool. Their understanding of the significance of BIM for the workplace was also variable. The results indicate that students are beginning to develop an appreciation for how BIM could aid or constrain the work of designers, but that this appreciation is highly varied and likely to be dependent on the students’ previous experiences of working in a design studio environment. Their range of understandings of the significance of the technology is a reflection of their level of development as designers (they are “novice” designers). The results also indicate that there is a need for subjects in later years of the course that allow students to specialise in the area of digital design and to develop more sophisticated views of the role of technology in the design process. There is also a need to capitalise on the collaborative potential inherent in the software in order to realise its capability to streamline some aspects of the design process. As students become more sophisticated designers we should explore their understanding of the role of technology as a design tool in more depth in order to make recommendations for improvements to teaching and learning practice related to BIM and other digital design tools.

Reading the environment : narrative constructions of ecological subjectivities in Australian children's literature

Ways in which humans engage with the environment have always provided a rich source of material for writers and illustrators of Australian children's literature. Currently, readers are confronted with a multiplicity of complex, competing and/or complementing networks of ideas, theories and emotions that provide narratives about human engagement with the environment at a particular historical moment. This study, entitled Reading the Environment: Narrative Constructions of Ecological Subjectivities in Australian Children's Literature, examines how a representative sample of Australian texts (19 picture books and 4 novels for children and young adults published between 1995 and 2006) constructs fictional ecological subjects in the texts, and offers readers ecological subject positions inscribed with contemporary environmental ideologies. The conceptual framework developed in this study identifies three ideologically grounded positions that humans may assume when engaging with the environment. None of these positions clearly exists independently of any other, nor are they internally homogeneous. Nevertheless they can be categorised as: (i) human dominion over the environment with little regard for environmental degradation (unrestrained anthropocentrism); (ii) human consideration for the environment driven by understandings that humans need the environment to survive (restrained anthropocentrism); and (iii) human deference towards the environment guided by understandings that humans are no more important than the environment (ecocentrism). iv The transdisciplinary methodological approach to textual analysis used in this thesis draws on ecocriticism, narrative theories, visual semiotics, ecofeminism and postcolonialism to discuss the difficulties and contradictions in the construction of the positions offered. Each chapter of textual analysis focuses on the construction of subjectivities in relation to one of the positions identified in the conceptual framework. Chapter 5 is concerned with how texts highlight the negative consequences of human dominion over the environment, or, in the words of this study, living with ecocatastrophe. Chapter 6 examines representations of restrained anthropocentrism in its contemporary form, that is, sustainability. Chapter 7 examines representations of ecocentrism, a radical position with inherent difficulties of representation. According to the analysis undertaken, the focus texts convey the subtleties and complexities of human engagement with the environment and advocate ways of viewing and responding to contemporary unease about the environment. The study concludes that these ways of viewing and responding conform to and/or challenge dominant socio-cultural and political-economic opinions regarding the environment. This study, the first extended work of its kind, makes an original contribution to ecocritical study of Australian children's literature. By undertaking a comprehensive analysis of how texts for children represent human engagement with the environment at a time when important environmental concerns pose significant threats to human existence, I hope to contribute new knowledge to an area of children's literature research that to date has been significantly under-represented.

Vision-based topological mapping and localisation

Competent navigation in an environment is a major requirement for an autonomous mobile robot to accomplish its mission. Nowadays, many successful systems for navigating a mobile robot use an internal map which represents the environment in a detailed geometric manner. However, building, maintaining and using such environment maps for navigation is difficult because of perceptual aliasing and measurement noise. Moreover, geometric maps require the processing of huge amounts of data which is computationally expensive. This thesis addresses the problem of vision-based topological mapping and localisation for mobile robot navigation. Topological maps are concise and graphical representations of environments that are scalable and amenable to symbolic manipulation. Thus, they are well-suited for basic robot navigation applications, and also provide a representational basis for the procedural and semantic information needed for higher-level robotic tasks. In order to make vision-based topological navigation suitable for inexpensive mobile robots for the mass market we propose to characterise key places of the environment based on their visual appearance through colour histograms. The approach for representing places using visual appearance is based on the fact that colour histograms change slowly as the field of vision sweeps the scene when a robot moves through an environment. Hence, a place represents a region of the environment rather than a single position. We demonstrate in experiments using an indoor data set, that a topological map in which places are characterised using visual appearance augmented with metric clues provides sufficient information to perform continuous metric localisation which is robust to the kidnapped robot problem. Many topological mapping methods build a topological map by clustering visual observations to places. However, due to perceptual aliasing observations from different places may be mapped to the same place representative in the topological map. A main contribution of this thesis is a novel approach for dealing with the perceptual aliasing problem in topological mapping. We propose to incorporate neighbourhood relations for disambiguating places which otherwise are indistinguishable. We present a constraint based stochastic local search method which integrates the approach for place disambiguation in order to induce a topological map. Experiments show that the proposed method is capable of mapping environments with a high degree of perceptual aliasing, and that a small map is found quickly. Moreover, the method of using neighbourhood information for place disambiguation is integrated into a framework for topological off-line simultaneous localisation and mapping which does not require an initial categorisation of visual observations. Experiments on an indoor data set demonstrate the suitability of our method to reliably localise the robot while building a topological map.

Yet to be known

TBA: Triptych: Digital Print, PVC Text, Acrylic Sheet Total Size: 252cm x 119cm---------- The work employs text based representations of indigenous plants (3500 species names) and quotations from an eminent botanist. This information is spatialised to represent the geographic area within which the plants where recorded (by others-Gov’t database).---------- The work was exhibited at Eyes wide open (curators K Bradby and A Brandenberg) which was held at Gorepani Gallery, Albany WA to coincide with the first national screening on SBS Television of the Western Australian documentary A Million Acres a Year (Rijavec, F, Harrison, N & Bradby K (directors), Snakewood Films & Film Australia, c2003).

Sandplain

Triptych: Digital print, Acrylic Sheet--------- Total size: 252 cm x 119cm---------- The work employs text based representations of agricultural plants (26 species names). This information is spatialised to represent the geographic area within which the plant species are harvested.---------- The work was exhibited at Eyes wide open (curators K Bradby and A Brandenberg) which was held at Gorepani Gallery, Albany WA to coincide with the first national screening on SBS Television of the Western Australian documentary A Million Acres a Year (Rijavec, F, Harrison, N & Bradby K (directors), Snakewood Films & Film Australia, c2003).

Wanderer beyond game worlds

We discuss issues and opportunities for designing experiences with 3D simulations of nature where the landscape and the interactant engage in an equitable dialogue. We consider the way digital representations of the world and design habits tend to detach from corporeal dimensions in experiencing the natural world and perpetuate motifs in games that reflect taming, territorializing or defending ourselves from nature. We reflect on the Digital Songlines project, which translates the schema of indigenous people to construct a natural environment, and the inherent difficulty in cross-culturally representing inter-connectedness. This leads us to discuss insights into the use of natural features by western people in cultural transmission and in their experiences in natural places. We propose McCarthy and Wright's dialogical approach may reconcile conceptions of place and self in design and conclude by considering experiments in which designers digitally reconstruct their own corporeal experience in natural physical landscape.

The little grey cat engine

The little grey cat engine (greyCat) is part of a series of projects which explore software which can enable access to the potentially empowering nature of represented space and game design. GreyCat is the result of research into the culture of the software itself in order to provide participatory environments which enable the telling of ‘small stories’ – stories and experiences which are those of the everyday or those of a cultural perspective other than that prioritised by most world building softwares or game engines. GreyCat offers a simple framework which allows participants to use their own image materials (photographs for the most part) as a basis for spatial exploration of their own places.---------- Truna aka j.turner (2008) The little grey cat engine: telling small stories (Demo), Australasian Computer Human Interaction Conference, OZCHI 2008, December 8th-12th, Cairns, Australia---------- Research Publications: truna aka j.turner & Browning, D. (2009) Designing spatial story telling software, in proceedings OZCHI09, Melbourne---------- Truna aka j.turner, Browning, D. & Champion, E. (2008) Designing for Engaged Experience, In proceedings Australasian Computer Human Interaction Conference, OZCHI 2008, December 8th-12th, Cairns, Australia---------- Truna aka. J.turner & Bidwell, N. (2007) Through the looking glass: game worlds as representations and views from elsewhere, Proceedings of the 4th Australasian conference on Interactive entertainment, Melbourne, Australia---------- Truna aka j.turner, Browning, D & Bidwell, N. (2007) Wanderer beyond game worlds, in proceedings, Hutchinson, A (ed) PerthDAC 2007: The seventh International Digital Arts and Culture Conference: The future of digital media culture, 15-18 September 2007, Perth, Australia, Curtin University of Technology---------- Truna aka j.turner (2006) To explore strange new worlds: experience design in 3 dimensional immersive environments - role and place in a world as object of interaction, In proceedings, Australasian Computer Human Interaction Conference, OZCHI 2006, November 22nd-24th, Sydney, Australia, November 20th – 24th 2006, pp 26- 29---------- Truna aka j.turner (2006) Digital songlines environment (Demonstration), In proceedings 2006 International conference on Game research and development, Perth, Australia---------- Truna aka j.turner (2006) Destination Space: Experiential Spatiality and Stories, Special Session on Experiential Spatiality, In proceedings 2006 International conference on Game research and development, Perth, Australia

Jack's Bay

Jack's Bay expands understandings of the role of photographic media in the representation of landscapes. It does so by combining architectural construction with B&W photographic processing techniques. A purpose-built room-sized camera obscura is first constructed over a portion of the landscape to be recorded. Photosensitive paper is applied to the interior wall surfaces and is exposed to the inverted light entering a small aperture. These photographs are subsequently developed within the camera itself and consequently 'suffer' embellishments and aberrations from the makeshift darkroom conditions. In this way the specificity of both the landscape and the event of its recording are registered in the final image. Many images were destroyed in the process. The idea of the work is to help the viewer reflect on the role media plays in our understanding of landscape and to thus question the means by which they themselves record and interpret landscape representations.

Corackerup Breakaway

Corackerup Breakaway expands understandings of the role of photographic media in the representation of landscapes. It does so by combining architectural construction with B&W photographic processing techniques. A purpose-built room-sized camera obscura is first constructed over a portion of the landscape to be recorded. Photosensitive paper is applied to the interior wall surfaces and is exposed to the inverted light entering a small aperture. These photographs are subsequently developed within the camera itself and consequently 'suffer' embellishments and aberrations from the makeshift darkroom conditions. In this way the specificity of both the landscape and the event of its recording are registered in the final image. Many images were destroyed in the process. The idea of the work is to help the viewer reflect on the role media plays in our understanding of landscape and to thus question the means by which they themselves record and interpret landscape representations.

Working sheep

Working Sheep expands understandings of the role of photographic media in the representation of landscapes. It does so by combining architectural construction with B&W photographic processing techniques. A purpose-built room-sized camera obscura is first constructed over a portion of the landscape to be recorded. Photosensitive paper is applied to the interior wall surfaces and is exposed to the inverted light entering a small aperture. These photographs are subsequently developed within the camera itself and consequently 'suffer' embellishments and aberrations from the makeshift darkroom conditions. In this way the specificity of both the landscape and the event of its recording are registered in the final image. Many images were destroyed in the process. The idea of the work is to help the viewer reflect on the role media plays in our understanding of landscape and to thus question the means by which they themselves record and interpret landscape representations.