S(t)imulating learning : pedagogy, subjectivity and teacher education in online environments

Australian higher education increasingly relies on flexible modes of delivery as a means of attracting and retaining students in a highly competitive global education market. While education is among those disciplines that have been most actively involved in the shift from face-to-face to online learning and teaching, the transition for many teacher educators is fraught with tensions and contradictions. For some, teaching online is seen as primarily a cost-cutting exercise on the part of universities, and has little to do with improving the quality of student learning. For others, the online environment offers multiple pedagogic possibilities that have yet to be fully explored. Yet others consider online environments as problematic, posing challenges to pedagogic and peer relationships that are generally seen as integral to 'good' teaching. This paper draws on an empirical study of teacher education faculties in five Australian universities, and analyses excerpts from interviews about learning and teaching with teacher educators, educational designers and faculty management. We argue that understanding how teacher educators constitute learner and teacher subjectivities through their beliefs about and approaches to pedagogy is crucial to the future of online tertiary education. In particular, we consider how teacher educators' attitudes toward and approaches to online learning and teaching are predicated on their perceived subject positions as either 'stimulating' or 'simulating' particular kinds of learning interactions.

In the Syrian taste : crusader churches in the Latin East as architectural expressions of orthodoxy

This paper explores how the architectural expression of orthodoxy in the Eastern churches was transferred to Europe before the Crusades and then reinforced through the Crusaders’ adoption of the triple-apsed east end “in the Syrian Taste” in the Holy Land. Previously, I have shown how it can be deduced from the archaeological remains of churches from the 4th-6th C that early church architecture was influenced by the theological ideas of the
period. It is proposed that the Eastern orthodox approach to church
architecture as adopted by the Crusaders paralleled the evolution of medieval theology in Europe and can be seen as its legitimate expression.

Energy-efficient management of data center resources for cloud computing : a vision, architectural elements, and open challenges

Cloud computing is offering utility-oriented IT services to users worldwide. Based on a pay-as-you-go model, it enables hosting of pervasive applications from consumer, scientific, and business domains. However, data centers hosting Cloud applications consume huge amounts of energy, contributing to high operational costs and carbon footprints to the environment. Therefore, we need Green Cloud computing solutions that can not only save energy for the environment but also reduce operational costs. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements for energy-efficient management of Cloud computing environments. We focus on the development of dynamic resource provisioning and allocation algorithms that consider the synergy between various data center infrastructures (i.e., the hardware, power units, cooling and software), and holistically work to boost data center energy efficiency and performance. In particular, this paper proposes (a) architectural principles for energy-efficient management of Clouds; (b) energy-efficient resource allocation policies and scheduling algorithms considering quality-of-service expectations, and devices power usage characteristics; and (c) a novel software technology for energy-efficient management of Clouds. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of rigorous performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results demonstrate that Cloud computing model has immense potential as it offers significant performance gains as regards to response time and cost saving under dynamic workload scenarios.

Why educators should bring an end to pedagogy

As Australia is moving towards a national curriculum there are also activities to nationalise teacher education. This involves various departments of state and federal governments, third-party bodies funded by government such as the Curriculum Corporation and Teaching Australia, and non-government organisations such as the Business Council of Australia. These agencies are producing models and principles which aim on establishing standards of best practice for how they want teachers to teach. Within all of this activity the term ‘pedagogy’ is often employed to represent aspects of these best practices. Examples include ‘productive pedagogies’, ‘new pedagogies’, ‘pedagogical content knowledge’ and ‘pedagogical strategies’. However these are all means only without any end purposes which identify them as being valuable for education. In this paper I will argue that in order to have educative value teachers themselves must exercise a degree of professional autonomy to bring their own end purposes to their choice of pedagogy.

Situating situatedness through Æffect and the architectural body of Arakawa and Gins

This paper explores the situated body by briefly surveying the historical studies of effect and of affect which converge in current work on attention. This common approach to the situated body through attention prompted the coining of a more inclusive term, Æffect, to indicate the situated body’s mode of observation. Examples from the work of artist-turned-architects, Arakawa and Gins, will be discussed to show how architectural environments can act as heuristic tools that allow the situated body to research its own conditions. Rather than isolating effect from affect, observer from subject, organism from environment, Arakawa and Gins’ work optimises the use of situated complexity in the study of the site of person. By constructing surrounding in which to observe and learn about the shape of awareness, their procedural architecture suggests ways in which the interaction of top-down conceptual knowledge and bottom-up perceptual learning may construct possibilities in emergent rather than programmatic ways.