Search results for "Cybernetics"
showing 10 items of 331 documents
How Research Came Inside Me as a New Knowledge
2018
Scholars have argued that there is no simple definition for research due to a wide variety of disciplines and educational contexts; how students are involved in research may vary a lot with a discipline, and with national and regional curricula within a particular discipline. The present study advances autoethnographic accounts of two Bhutanese students' participation in research. The context of participation is their exchange period, and specifically their attendance at a particular Computing Education Research course, at Uppsala University. The autoethnographic epiphanies that our report suggest transformations in perspective as to what research is and what it may provide personally. The …
The Role of the Philosophy of Technology in French-Language Studies of Video Games
2018
This chapter analyzes the role played by the philosophies of technology in the development of French-language studies devoted to video games. This intellectual tradition is well represented within the field, in a variety of forms which are characteristic of the main trends in the French-language philosophy of technology. The field of games studies allows comparing and contrasting these different approaches to a single object. I analyze the specificities of the French-language field, its theoretical options, and the role played by the philosophy of technology in its points of divergence from the dominant trends in game studies. Four studies located at the intersection between philosophy of t…
An Explication of the Use of Inference to the Best Explanation
2011
The aim of the present paper is, first, to give an explication of the very phrase “best explanation”, and second, to give some suggestions about its methodological use. The explication on offer will be given in terms of two set-theoretical criteria of comparing the relative explanatory power of alternatives. One criterion is designed to compare rival hypotheses put forward in the framework of a fixed background knowledge, the other is designed to compare an original background knowledge with its attempted revision. The proposal will be claimed to resolve the problems of Duhemian variety as well as the incommensurability problem.
Fractal Aspects of Galaxy Clustering
2008
In the past decade, the mathematical concept of fractal has exerted a great influence in a large variety of scientific disciplines. It is very common to find recent papers on the application of fractals to different fields in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, etc. The success of the fractal geometry in the description of many systems is due to the fact that deep insights into very simple objects show how fractal measures are more natural for their study.
Exploring Collective Action Dynamics in Online Communities from a Critical Realist Perspective
2016
Scholars have been increasingly studying Online Communities (OCs) for a variety of purposes, focusing on issues like individual motivation, knowledge sharing, and governance structure. Few studies focused on the entanglement among technology, people, and organizational structures that support working dynamics within OCs. This paper addresses this issue by exploring causal mechanisms sustaining the collective actions of OCs through a retroduction process. Based on the study of the OC of an Italian political movement, the Five Star Movement, the concept of affordance is involved to describe the generative mechanisms and new affordances are identified on collective action within OCs. Our work …
Group model building: a collaborative modelling methodology applied to critical infrastructure protection
2012
Large crises management, affecting CIs needs multidisciplinary knowledge including technical, economical, social, political, legal and managerial knowledge. Being these crises international a huge variety of agents is involved in their response. This situation concludes in a set of stakeholders who only have fragmented knowledge. In the presence of dispersed and incomplete knowledge, and of fragmented and disrupted crisis management, the collaborative approach group model building (GMB), where modelling experts unify fragmented, tacit knowledge from domain experts, is a valuable option. However, GMB has been little used in CIP. We have done so in the context a European project on crisis man…
Digital Approaches to Integrating Refugees into Higher Education—Frontiers and Advances
2021
This SpringerBriefs volume illustrates the potentials of digital learning opportunities in higher education for refugees with different educational, social, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds from various perspectives and based on research conducted in several countries. Global challenges for academic success that refugees face when seeking to enter higher education are outlined. One possibility to reduce the obstacles for refugees entering higher education is to offer digital learning platforms. A selection of international digital education platforms for refugees are presented, which are based on a variety of approaches to accommodate the needs of prospective refugee students. Based on …
Mozambique’s Megaproject-Based Economic Model: Still Struggling with Uneven Development?
2019
Megaprojects in aluminium production, coal and natural gas extraction, and hydropower generation play a key role in the Mozambican economy. Based on the concepts of global value chains and linkages, this chapter shows that remarkable transformations are taking place in these sectors, including the expansion of production, the attraction of FDI and the emergence of new players from the Global South who now compete with transnational companies from traditional economic partner countries of Mozambique. The authors highlight potentials (in terms of economic transformation, especially positive side effects through the provision of electricity and rehabilitation of transport infrastructure) as we…
Mentoring of new teachers as a contested practice: Supervision, support and collaborative self-development
2014
Abstract This article examines contested practices of mentoring of newly qualified teachers within and between Australia (New South Wales), Finland and Sweden. Drawing on empirical evidence from a variety of studies, we demonstrate three archetypes of mentoring: supervision, support and collaborative self-development. Using the theory of practice architectures, we show that (1) these three forms of mentoring represent three different projects: (a) assisting new teachers to pass through probation, (b) traditional mentoring as support, and (c) peer-group mentoring; and (2) these different projects involve and imply quite different practice architectures in the form of different material-econo…
Examples of Analysing Debates as Politics
2017
This chapter presents eight concrete but different examples of research into the presence of politics or the political in texts and debates. They illustrate that politics can be examined in the various forms it takes and using a variety of approaches. First, politics is related to different actors, strategies, issues and media, all of which can be researched. Second, the researcher can develop different research questions and interests, and choose different material types. And third, the interpretative tools and strategies used will differ from study to study, and from researcher to researcher. The examples highlight how the interpretative analytical tools can be used with regard to differe…