Modular architecture central to Christchurch's urban regeneration
"Martin Trusttum, from CPIT's Faculty of Creative Industries, likens his ArtBox project to a game of Tetris. 'It's just like Tetris but in slow motion. They are cubes and eventually they will come together to form a precinct.'
ArtBox will be located on the corner of Madras and St Asaph streets on the old Southlander Tavern-Jetset Lounge site opposite Anton Parsons' sculpture Passing Time.
It is a rare collection of mobile and flexible modules designed by Sydenham-based F3 and will offer about 18 spaces suitable for galleries and studios. It offers a practical, timely solution to the many low-cost premises used as galleries and studios destroyed by the February 2011 earthquake. "
(Vicki Anderson, 07 September 2012, Stuff.co.nz)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Trevor Hussey and Patrick Smith: The Uses of Learning Outcomes
"This paper argues that learning outcomes need to be reclaimed from their current use as devices for monitoring and audit, and returned to their proper use in aiding good teaching and learning. We require a broader, flexible and more realistic understanding of learning outcomes, better suited to the realities of the classroom and of practical use to those teachers who wish to respond to the enthusiasm of their students. To this end, a new model is produced that starts from the idea of an articulated curriculum, and embraces both intended and emergent learning outcomes. The model employs the distinction between predicted and unpredicted learning outcomes, together with the distinction between those that are desirable and those that are undesirable. The resulting account is intended to aid understanding of the nature and proper use of learning outcomes in teaching and learning."
(Trevor Hussey & Patrick Smith, p.357, 2003)
Trevor Hussey & Patrick Smith (2003). "The Uses of Learning Outcomes", Teaching in Higher Education, Vol. 8, No. 3, 2003, pp.357-368, ISSN 1356-2517 (print)/ISSN 1470-1294 (online)/03/030357-12, 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd., DOI: 10.1080/1356251032000088574
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Responsive Web Design
"Recently, an emergent discipline called 'responsive architecture' has begun asking how physical spaces can respond to the presence of people passing through them. Through a combination of embedded robotics and tensile materials, architects are experimenting with art installations and wall structures that bend, flex, and expand as crowds approach them. Motion sensors can be paired with climate control systems to adjust a room's temperature and ambient lighting as it fills with people. Companies have already produced 'smart glass technology' that can automatically become opaque when a room's occupants reach a certain density threshold, giving them an additional layer of privacy.
In their book Interactive Architecture, Michael Fox and Miles Kemp described this more adaptive approach as 'a multiple-loop system in which one enters into a conversation; a continual and constructive information exchange.' Emphasis mine, as I think that's a subtle yet powerful distinction: rather than creating immutable, unchanging spaces that define a particular experience, they suggest inhabitant and structure can-and should-mutually influence each other.
This is our way forward. Rather than tailoring disconnected designs to each of an ever-increasing number of web devices, we can treat them as facets of the same experience. We can design for an optimal viewing experience, but embed standards-based technologies into our designs to make them not only more flexible, but more adaptive to the media that renders them. In short, we need to practice responsive web design. But how?"
(Ethan Marcotte, 25 May 2010)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Technology Enhanced Learning: ubiquitous access to knowledge
"Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) research aims to improve the quality of formal and informal learning, and to make accessible forms of knowledge that were simply inaccessible before. But research does not translate easily into practice, at school, in higher education or in the workplace. The forms of pedagogy that characterise learning in these settings have remained more or less invariant even when radical technologies have been introduced."
(Technology Enhanced Learning)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
A naïve ontology for concepts of time and space for searching and learning
"User-oriented digital information search environments call for flexible information access interfaces that may interact with a dynamically changing searcher view in capturing a variety of media. Optimal use of conventional libraries and bibliographic databases requires a general understanding of the knowledge structure of the collection domain (Hsieh-Yee 1993; Pennanen & Vakkari 2003). Novice searchers without such understanding, however, can seek the help of librarians and intermediaries when they get lost in search processes.
Increasing numbers of digital libraries and online resources on the Internet provide potential users with opportunities to access and interact with these resources directly from offices and homes. Such trends seem to offer searchers useful information access environments for a variety of information resources. However, in such environments, novice searchers are forced to seek the information they need without the help of librarians or other intermediaries. In reality, many novice users of digital libraries do not have a general understanding of the knowledge structure of the digital collections held by these libraries. Eventually they may give up pursuing their information needs when they get lost during search processes or obtain unsatisfactory search results.
This research project seeks to find a way to overcome such limitations of existing information access interfaces developed for traditional libraries and bibliographic information services. Specifically, we explore a qualitative research method for eliciting the knowledge structure of novice searchers and patterns of its modification in their search and learn processes, and build on it a naïve ontology for time and space."
(Makiko Miwa & Noriko Kando, 2007)
Hsieh-Yee, I. (1993). Effects of search experience and subject knowledge on the search tactics of novice and experienced searchers. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 27(3), 117-120.
Miwa, M. and Kando, N. (2007). "A naïve ontology for concepts of time and space for searching and learning" Information Research, 12(2), paper 296 [Available at http://InformationR.net/ir/12-2/paper296.html]
Pennanen, M. & Vakkari, P. (2003). Students' conceptual structure, search process and outcome while preparing a research proposal. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 54(8), 759-770.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
