The 'Humour' element in engineering lectures across cultures:An approach to pragmatic annotation

Humour is one of the most difficult pragmatic devices for lecturers and students to engage with, and for researchers to identify systematically. Humour does not always travel well across cultures. It can cause particular problems of miscommunication for the lecturers delivering and for those students receiving it in unfamiliar cultural contexts. This paper demonstrates the use of pragmatic annotation for mapping the distribution, duration, and specific function of humour based on nine attributed types. The analysis looks at 76 English-medium lectures from the UK, Malaysia, and New Zealand, which form part of the Engineering Lecture Corpus. Differences in preferred humour type, amount, and laughter response rate are evident across the three cultural subcorpora. In the increasingly globalized academic setting, understanding of such cultural differences is important to all academics and students on the move.</p

Debt relief as a platform for reform: the case of Nigeria's virtual poverty fund

In June 2005 the Paris Club group of creditors announced a US$30 billion debt relief package for the Nigerian government, which included a US$18 billion debt write off. This paper describes how these debt relief savings have been managed and spent, with a focus on the development and implementation of a comprehensive tracking system that aimed to effectively monitor debt relief expenditures. The paper argues that the Nigerian case implies debt relief can be a valuable tool for supporting public sector reform

Aesthetic surgery and the expressive body

In this paper we explore the relation between bodies and selves evident in the narratives surrounding aesthetic surgery. In much feminist work on aesthetic surgery such narratives have been discussed in terms of the normalising consequences of the objectifying, homogenising, cosmetic gaze. These discussions stress the ways in which we model our bodies, under the gaze of others, in order to conform to social norms. Such an objectified body is contrasted with the subjective body; the body –for –the self. In this paper, however, we wish to make sense of the narratives surrounding such surgery by invoking the expressive body, which fits on neither side of this binary. We wish to explore how the modification of the body’s anatomical features (physiology) are taken to be a modification of its expressive possibilities, and therefore as modifications of possibilities for inter-subjective relations with others. It is such expressive possibilities, which, we suggest, underlie decisions to undergo surgical procedures. The possibility of modification of the expressive possibilities of the body, by the modification of its anatomical features, rests on the social imaginaries attached to anatomical features. In the context of such imaginaries individual decisions to undergo or promote surgery can be both intelligible and potentially empowering. However, the social consequences of such acts are an increasing normalisation of the ‘body under the knife’ and an intolerance of bodily difference. This, we suggest, can only be changed by a re-visioning of bodily imaginaries so that expressive possibilities can be experienced across bodies with a range of physiological features

Making sense of ‘pure’ phenomenography in information and communication technology in education

Research in information and communication technology in education places an increasing emphasis on the use of qualitative analysis (QA). A considerable number of approaches to QA can be adopted, but it is not always clear that researchers recognize either the differences between these approaches or the principles that underlie them. Phenomenography is often identified by researchers as the approach they have used, but little evidence is presented to allow anyone else to assess the objectivity of the results produced. This paper attempts to redress the balance. A small‐scale evaluation was designed and conducted according to ‘pure’ phenomenographic principles and guidelines. This study was then critiqued within the wider context of QA in general. The conclusion is that pure phenomenography has some procedural weaknesses, as well as some methodological limitations regarding the scope of the outcomes. The procedural weaknesses can be resolved by taking account of good practice in QA. The methodological issues are more serious and reduce the value of this approach for research in collaborative learning environments

A novel alternative. Book groups, women, and workplace networking

Drawing on the results of a small qualitative research project involving four work-based book groups – three in the UK and one in the USA- this article examines the ways in which participation in workplace reading groups facilitates women’s networking within work organizations, in terms of both formal and informal as well as expressive and instrumental networking. It has long been recognized that women’s employment progression is hampered, in part, by their exclusion from male-dominated networks. Taking a gendered approach to the analysis of workplace networking, this study suggests that book groups can function as an alternative to traditional old boys’ networks, in some instances. Within the workplace the collective reading of literature, I suggest, can potentially function as a means to extend the social as well as the more career-focused opportunities of its participants

Understanding Attainment Disparity:The Case for a Corpus-Driven Analysis of the Language used in Written Feedback Information to Students of Different Backgrounds

Background: Disparity of attainment between different groups of students in UK higher education has been correlated with ethnicity (UUK &amp; NUS, 2019). For example, students who declared their ethnicity as Black were 20% less likely to graduate with a top classification than those who declared their ethnicity as White (OfS, 2018a). The causes of such attainment gaps are complex, and one important factor may be the nature of the feedback given by academic staff on assignments written by different groups of students. This paper aims to explore the feasibility of investigating this hypothesis by analyzing written feedback and looking for patterns in feedback given to different groups of students. Literature Review: Research on attainment among Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) students in the UK has explored a number of aspects, and has generally concluded that there are issues of “belonging” (Richardson, 2015), particularly in institutions where the majority of academic staff and students are White, but that no single variable can explain the disparity. The wording of feedback on lower-scoring papers has been shown to be more impersonal and distant than that given to students on higher-scoring papers (e.g., Gardner, 2004), which has the (unintended) result of increasing the sense of belonging of higher performing students in ways that can build incrementally over the years of a degree course. While there have been many such small-scale studies of written feedback, none have aimed to collect large quantities of authentic written feedback for analysis. Research Questions: The hypotheses that drive our exploration are that written feedback information (WFI) (Boud &amp; Malloy, 2013) is worded differently to different groups of students, and that there is a direct relationship between this aspect of feedback and academic attainment as measured by grades on summative assessments. Specifically, we asked: 1. Can a framework of WFI functions be developed for our data that share a meaningful set of attributes? 2. Can these categories be used to differentiate WFI to different groups of students? Methodology: A small pilot corpus was compiled from written feedback comments on twelve student assignments from two large Faculties. Metadata was added to each file, and the WFI comments were annotated and analyzed according to a framework developed in a branching format through a recursive construction process informed by the literature reviewed and the data in the corpus. This technique was used to characterize the WFI styles of the two Faculties. Results: The results show that all WFI comments could be classified using the novel systematic framework developed, and that its binary nature enabled ready cross-tabulation with metadata variables. Praise and critique were found to be most frequent, with specific praise of ideas (P1A) accounting for 68% of all praise, and specific critique of content (C1A) accounting for 49% of all critique. Observations tend to be the longest feedback comments (average 15.4 words). When the two Faculties are compared, two different feedback styles are evident, with Fac1 providing more advice, query, and observation style feedback than Fac2, and Fac2 providing more praise and critique than Fac1

Grounded Theory as an approach to studying students’ uses of learning management systems

This paper presents the first phase of a qualitative study of students’ use of a Learning Management System (LMS). A group of students at Kingston University with experience of two different systems were afforded the opportunity to study the relationship between the interface to an LMS and the usability of the system

On reification: A reinterpretation of designed and emergent practice

This paper is a response to the article: ‘Examining the five‐stage e‐moderating model: designed and emergent practice in the learning technology profession, published in ALT‐J 11 (1). Whilst we agree with the concerns of the authors on the problems of commodification and the increasing control of learning technology from a financial or predominantly management perspective, we wish to offer a reinterpretation of the research by taking a stricter analysis of the events described by the authors

The substance of interaction: design and policy implications of NGO- government projects in India

Collaboration between government and non-government organizations has been a recurrent feature of many development interventions in India. This paper is based on case studies of 11 such programs.Non-governmental organizations India., Government., India Economic development.,