Examining current provision, practice and experience of initial teacher training providers in Ireland preparing pre service teachers for the inclusion of students with special education needs in physical education classes.

Research from an international perspective in relation to the preparation of pre service teachers in physical education and special educational needs indicates that initial teacher training providers are inconsistent in the amount of time spent addressing the issue and the nature of curricular content (Vickerman, 2007). In Ireland, research of Meegan and MacPhail (2005) and Crawford (2011) indicates that physical education teachers do not feel adequately prepared to accommodate students with Special Educational Needs (SEN) in physical education classes. This study examined initial teacher training provision in Ireland in the training of pre service physical education teachers in SEN. The methodology used was qualitative and included questionnaires and interviews (n=4). Findings indicated that time allocation (semester long modules), working with children with disabilities in mainstream settings (school or leisure centre based), lack of collaboration with other PETE providers (n=4) and a need for continued professional development were themes in need of address. Using a combined approach where the recently designed European Inclusive Physical Education Training (Kudlácěk, Jesina, & Flanagan, 2010) model is infused through the undergraduate degree programme is proposed. Further, the accommodation of hands on experience for undergraduates in mainstream settings and the establishment of inter institutional communities of practice, with a national disability research initiative, is essential to ensure quality adapted physical activity training can be accommodated throughout Ireland.

A dual-band antenna enabling improved quality of service in multi-radio wireless sensor applications in indoor environments

Science Foundation Ireland (CSET - Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology, Grant No. 07/CE/11147)

Student voice in Irish post-primary schools: a drama of voices

This research is an exploration of the expression of student voice in Irish post-primary schools and how its affordance could impact on students’ and teachers’ experiences in the classroom, and at whole-school level through a student council. Student voice refers to the inclusion of students in decisions that shape their experiences in classrooms and schools, and is fundamental to a rights-based perspective that facilitates students to have a voice and a say in their education. Student voice is essential to the development of democratic principles, active citizenship, and learning and pedagogy. This qualitative research, based in three post-primary case-study schools, concerns teachers in eighteen classrooms engaging in dialogic consultation with their students over one school year. Teachers considered the students’ commentary and then adjusted their practice. The operation of student councils was also examined through the voices of council members, liaison teachers and school principals. Theorised within socio-cultural (social constructivist), social constructionist and poststructural frames, the complexity of student voice emerges from its conceptualisation and enactment. Affording students a voice in their classroom presented positive findings in the context of relationships, pedagogical change and students’ engagement, participation and achievement. The power and authority of the teacher and discordant student voices, particularly relating to examinations, presented challenges affecting teachers’ practice and students’ expectations. The functional redundancy of the student council as a construct for student voice at whole-school level, and its partial redundancy as a construct to reflect prefigurative democracy and active citizenship also emerge from the research. Current policy initiatives in Irish education situate student voice in pedagogy and as dialogic consultation at classroom and whole-school level. This work endorses the necessity for and benefit of such a positioning with the author further arguing that it should not become the instrumental student voice of data source, accountability and performativity.

The many voices of Piedmont: language, identity and alterity in the works of modern and contemporary Piedmontese writers

The aim of this project is to carry out a linguistic analysis of a group of modern and contemporary narratives written by authors from the same Italian region: Piedmont. The novels and short stories examined stand out for the intriguing ways in which they move between a variety of idioms – Italian, Piedmontese dialects, English and pastiches, with some rare excursions into French. A sociolinguistic study and an overview of political changes that Piedmont underwent from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries are provided, with the purpose of outlining the region’s sociogeographical and historical background which can be seen to have fostered multilingualism in a group of writers. With the support of linguistic studies and philosophical theories on the relation between identity, alterity and language (such as Edwards’s Language and Identity and Bakhtin’s reflections on language), I then elucidate the presence of diverse linguistic varieties in selected narratives by Cesare Pavese, Beppe Fenoglio, Primo Levi, Nanni Balestrini, Fruttero & Lucentini, Benito Mazzi and Younis Tawfik. In other words, my purpose is to explain the reasons for multilingualism in each writer, as well as to underscore the ideological positions which lie behind the linguistic strategies of the authors. With this study I attempt to fill a gap and cast new light on Piedmontese literature. Although some critical studies on the use of dialect or English exist on individual authors and works (e.g. Meddemmem on Fenoglio’s use of English and Beccaria on Pavese’s inclusion of Piedmontese dialect), and some important contributions to the history of Piedmontese literature have appeared in print, to date no current, systematic study that compares different Piedmontese writers under the language/identity theme has been published. The study concludes with a summary of the evolution of plurilingualism in Piedmont and highlights the common trends in the use of multiple linguistic varieties as tools for both social demarcation and an opening up to alternative, marginalised andforeign cultures.

Team-teaching for inclusive learning: Purposes, practices and perceptions of a team-teaching initiative in Irish post-primary schools

Background. Schools unequivocally privilege solo-teaching. This research seeks to enhance our understanding of team-teaching by examining how two teachers, working in the same classroom at the same time, might or might not contribute to the promotion of inclusive learning. There are well-established policy statements that encourage change and moves towards the use of team-teaching to promote greater inclusion of students with special educational needs in mainstream schools and mainstream classrooms. What is not so well established is the practice of team-teaching in post-primary settings, with little research conducted to date on how it can be initiated and sustained, and a dearth of knowledge on how it impacts upon the students and teachers involved. Research questions and aims. In light of the paucity and inconclusive nature of the research on team-teaching to date (Hattie, 2009), the orientating question in this study asks ‘To what extent, can the introduction of a formal team-teaching initiative enhance the quality of inclusive student learning and teachers’ learning at post-primary level?’ The framing of this question emerges from ongoing political, legal and educational efforts to promote inclusive education. The study has three main aims. The first aim of this study is to gather and represent the voices and experiences of those most closely involved in the introduction of team-teaching; students, teachers, principals and administrators. The second aim is to generate a theory-informed understanding of such collaborative practices and how they may best be implemented in the future. The third aim is to advance our understandings regarding the day-to-day, and moment-to-moment interactions, between teachers and students which enable or inhibit inclusive learning. Sample. In total, 20 team-teaching dyads were formed across seven project schools. The study participants were from two of the seven project schools, Ash and Oak. It involved eight teachers and 53 students, whose age ranged from 12-16 years old, with 4 teachers forming two dyads per school. In Oak there was a class of first years (n=11) with one dyad and a class of transition year students (n=24) with the other dyad. In Ash one class group (n=18) had two dyads. The subjects in which the dyads engaged were English and Mathematics. Method. This research adopted an interpretive paradigm. The duration of the fieldwork was from April 2007 to June 2008. Research methodologies included semi-structured interviews (n=44), classroom observation (n=20), attendance at monthly teacher meetings (n=6), questionnaires and other data gathering practices which included school documentation, assessment findings and joint examination of student work samples (n=4). Results. Team-teaching involves changing normative practices, and involves placing both demands and opportunities before those who occupy classrooms (teachers and students) and before those who determine who should occupy these classrooms (principals and district administrators). This research shows how team-teaching has the potential to promote inclusive learning, and when implemented appropriately, can impact positively upon the learning experiences of both teachers and students. The results are outlined in two chapters. In chapter four, Social Capital Theory is used in framing the data, the change process of bonding, bridging and linking, and in capturing what the collaborative action of team-teaching means, asks and offers teachers; within classes, between classes, between schools and within the wider educational community. In chapter five, Positioning Theory deductively assists in revealing the moment-to-moment, dynamic and inclusive learning opportunities, that are made available to students through team-teaching. In this chapter a number of vignettes are chosen to illustrate such learning opportunities. These two theories help to reveal the counter-narrative that team-teaching offers, regarding how both teachers and students teach and learn. This counter-narrative can extend beyond the field of special education and include alternatives to the manner in which professional development is understood, implemented, and sustained in schools and classrooms. Team-teaching repositions teachers and students to engage with one another in an atmosphere that capitalises upon and builds relational trust and shared cognition. However, as this research study has found, it is wise that the purposes, processes and perceptions of team-teaching are clear to all so that team-teaching can be undertaken by those who are increasingly consciously competent and not merely accidentally adequate. Conclusions. The findings are discussed in the context of the promotion of effective inclusive practices in mainstream settings. I believe that such promotion requires more nuanced understandings of what is being asked of, and offered to, teachers and students. Team-teaching has, and I argue will increasingly have, its place in the repertoire of responses that support effective inclusive learning. To capture and extend such practice requires theoretical frameworks that facilitate iterative journeys between research, policy and practice. Research to date on team-teaching has been too focused on outcomes over short timeframes and not focused enough on the process that is team-teaching. As a consequence team-teaching has been under-used, under-valued, under-theorised and generally not very well understood. Moving from classroom to staff room and district board room, theoretical frameworks used in this research help to travel with, and understand, the initiation, engagement and early consequences of team-teaching within and across the educational landscape. Therefore, conclusions from this study have implications for the triad of research, practice and policy development where efforts to change normative practices can be matched by understandings associated with what it means to try something new/anew, and what it means to say it made a positive difference.

User experience of mobile cloud applications - current state and future directions

The increasing penetration rate of feature rich mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets in the global population has resulted in a large number of applications and services being created or modified to support mobile devices. Mobile cloud computing is a proposed paradigm to address the resource scarcity of mobile devices in the face of demand for more computing intensive tasks. Several approaches have been proposed to confront the challenges of mobile cloud computing, but none has used the user experience as the primary focus point. In this paper we evaluate these approaches in respect of the user experience, propose what future research directions in this area require to provide for this crucial aspect, and introduce our own solution.

Delivering mobile cloud services to the user: description, discovery, and consumption

The mobile cloud computing paradigm can offer relevant and useful services to the users of smart mobile devices. Such public services already exist on the web and in cloud deployments, by implementing common web service standards. However, these services are described by mark-up languages, such as XML, that cannot be comprehended by non-specialists. Furthermore, the lack of common interfaces for related services makes discovery and consumption difficult for both users and software. The problem of service description, discovery, and consumption for the mobile cloud must be addressed to allow users to benefit from these services on mobile devices. This paper introduces our work on a mobile cloud service discovery solution, which is utilised by our mobile cloud middleware, Context Aware Mobile Cloud Services (CAMCS). The aim of our approach is to remove complex mark-up languages from the description and discovery process. By means of the Cloud Personal Assistant (CPA) assigned to each user of CAMCS, relevant mobile cloud services can be discovered and consumed easily by the end user from the mobile device. We present the discovery process, the architecture of our own service registry, and service description structure. CAMCS allows services to be used from the mobile device through a user's CPA, by means of user defined tasks. We present the task model of the CPA enabled by our solution, including automatic tasks, which can perform work for the user without an explicit request.

Service users experiences of a therapeutic group programme in an acute psychiatric inpatient unit.

Psychiatric nurses have been facilitating therapeutic groups in acute psychiatric inpatient units for many years; however, there is a lack of nursing research related to this important aspect of care. This paper reports the findings of a study which aimed to gain an understanding of service users' experiences in relation to therapeutic group activities in an acute inpatient unit. A qualitative descriptive study was undertaken with eight service users in one acute psychiatric inpatient unit in Ireland. Data were collected using in-depth semi-structured interviews and analysed using Burnard's method of thematic content analysis. Several themes emerged from the findings which are presented in this paper.

Investigation into a best practice model for providing an integrated user experience with mobile cloud applications

Mobile Cloud Computing promises to overcome the physical limitations of mobile devices by executing demanding mobile applications on cloud infrastructure. In practice, implementing this paradigm is difficult; network disconnection often occurs, bandwidth may be limited, and a large power draw is required from the battery, resulting in a poor user experience. This thesis presents a mobile cloud middleware solution, Context Aware Mobile Cloud Services (CAMCS), which provides cloudbased services to mobile devices, in a disconnected fashion. An integrated user experience is delivered by designing for anticipated network disconnection, and low data transfer requirements. CAMCS achieves this by means of the Cloud Personal Assistant (CPA); each user of CAMCS is assigned their own CPA, which can complete user-assigned tasks, received as descriptions from the mobile device, by using existing cloud services. Service execution is personalised to the user's situation with contextual data, and task execution results are stored with the CPA until the user can connect with his/her mobile device to obtain the results. Requirements for an integrated user experience are outlined, along with the design and implementation of CAMCS. The operation of CAMCS and CPAs with cloud-based services is presented, specifically in terms of service description, discovery, and task execution. The use of contextual awareness to personalise service discovery and service consumption to the user's situation is also presented. Resource management by CAMCS is also studied, and compared with existing solutions. Additional application models that can be provided by CAMCS are also presented. Evaluation is performed with CAMCS deployed on the Amazon EC2 cloud. The resource usage of the CAMCS Client, running on Android-based mobile devices, is also evaluated. A user study with volunteers using CAMCS on their own mobile devices is also presented. Results show that CAMCS meets the requirements outlined for an integrated user experience.

Development of miniaturized antennas and adaptive tuning solutions for body sensor network applications

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are currently having a revolutionary impact in rapidly emerging wearable applications such as health and fitness monitoring amongst many others. These types of Body Sensor Network (BSN) applications require highly integrated wireless sensor devices for use in a wearable configuration, to monitor various physiological parameters of the user. These new requirements are currently posing significant design challenges from an antenna perspective. This work addresses several design challenges relating to antenna design for these types of applications. In this thesis, a review of current antenna solutions for WSN applications is first presented, investigating both commercial and academic solutions. Key design challenges are then identified relating to antenna size and performance. A detailed investigation of the effects of the human body on antenna impedance characteristics is then presented. A first-generation antenna tuning system is then developed. This system enables the antenna impedance to be tuned adaptively in the presence of the human body. Three new antenna designs are also presented. A compact, low-cost 433 MHz antenna design is first reported and the effects of the human body on the impedance of the antenna are investigated. A tunable version of this antenna is then developed, using a higher performance, second-generation tuner that is integrated within the antenna element itself, enabling autonomous tuning in the presence of the human body. Finally, a compact sized, dual-band antenna is reported that covers both the 433 MHz and 2.45 GHz bands to provide improved quality of service (QoS) in WSN applications. To date, state-of-the-art WSN devices are relatively simple in design with limited antenna options available, especially for the lower UHF bands. In addition, current devices have no capability to deal with changing antenna environments such as in wearable BSN applications. This thesis presents several contributions that advance the state-of-the-art in this area, relating to the design of miniaturized WSN antennas and the development of antenna tuning solutions for BSN applications.

A next application prediction service using the BaranC framework

Predicting user behaviour enables user assistant services provide personalized services to the users. This requires a comprehensive user model that can be created by monitoring user interactions and activities. BaranC is a framework that performs user interface (UI) monitoring (and collects all associated context data), builds a user model, and supports services that make use of the user model. A prediction service, Next-App, is built to demonstrate the use of the framework and to evaluate the usefulness of such a prediction service. Next-App analyses a user's data, learns patterns, makes a model for a user, and finally predicts, based on the user model and current context, what application(s) the user is likely to want to use. The prediction is pro-active and dynamic, reflecting the current context, and is also dynamic in that it responds to changes in the user model, as might occur over time as a user's habits change. Initial evaluation of Next-App indicates a high-level of satisfaction with the service.

Researching homelessness: Challenging exclusion?

This themed issue of Social Inclusion provides a timely opportunity to reflect on how contemporary research is addressing the multi-dimensional issue of homelessness around the world. The papers presented here provide a wide range of new evidence on homelessness including theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions. They draw on a range of national experiences in Europe and beyond, and addressing the issue of social inclusion and social exclusion of homeless or previously homeless people from a range of perspectives and approaches. It is hoped that the contributions to this themed issue will prove influential in terms of both scholarship and potential to enhance policy making and service delivery to some of our most excluded citizens.