Browsing Conference Contributions /KS K3 by Title

Academic Writing in a Multi-lingual and Multi-disciplinary Context
Finnegan, Damian; Kauppinen, Asko; Wärnsby, Anna (2011) The Role of the Student Experience in Shaping Academic Writing Development in Higher Education, European Association of Teachers of Academic Writing (EATAW), 29th June – 1st July 2011 University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland	other

English abstract:

Damian Finnegan (damian.finnegan@mah.se) Asko Kauppinen (asko.kauppinen@mah.se) Anna Wärnsby (anna.warnsby@mah.se) Academic Writing in a Multi-lingual and Multidisciplinary Context One crucial challenge of academic writing concerns the increasing heterogenisation of student populations. In many writing classes, we now find “any combination of native-born, international, refugee, permanent resident, and naturalized students,” exhibiting considerable linguistic diversity and multiple levels of English proficiency (Preto-Bay and Hansen, 2006; see also Hall, 2009). At the same time, interest towards academic writing in European higher education is growing, yet resources for teaching do not reflect this. Moreover, the wider student base demands practical application from their writing courses, not theoretical knowledge of language skills (see, for example, Anderson 1983, 2009 on procedural vs. declarative knowledge). To show how these problems can be addressed, we discuss the course Academic Writing in English offered at Malmö University, Sweden, which currently enrolls approximately 300 students per year. The course design is explicitly based on the general model of information processing, which assumes that “complex behavior builds on simple processes” (McLaughlin and Heredia, 1996, p. 213). The focus of all learning activities is on acquisition of procedural knowledge geared towards comprehension and production. One distinctive feature of this course is the very tight integration of electronic resources and other teaching material. This provides student populations various types of continuous feedback and highly individualised learning paths. In this paper, we present and evaluate empirical data pertaining to students’ experience of the content, structure and resources in this course. We also discuss the preliminary results obtained through tests administered before, during and after the course. References Anderson, J. R. 2009. Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications. 7th edition. New York: Worth Publishers. Anderson, J. R. 1983. The Architecture of Cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hall, Jonathan. 2009. “WAC/WID in the Next America: Redefining Professional Identity in the Age of the Multilingual Majority.” The WAC Journal. Vol. 20, November. 33-49. McLaughlin, B. and Hereda, J. L. C. 1996. “Information-processing Approaches to Research on Second Language Acquisition and Use.” In Ritchie, W. C. and Bhatia, T. K. (eds.), Handbook of Second Language Acquisition. San Diego: Academic Press, 213-228. Preto-Bay, Ana Maria and Kristine Hansen. 2006. “Preparing for the Tipping Point: Designing Writing Programs to Meet the Needs of the Changing Population.” WPA: Writing Program Administration, Vol. 30, Nos. 1-2, Fall. 37-57.

Eire Pres Final Draft 5.pdf (6.676Mb)

Automated Feedback, Student Experience and Writing as a Process
Finnegan, Damian; Kauppinen, Asko; Wärnsby, Anna (2012) Academic Writing in a Changing World, Second International Conference on Academic Writing (IFAW II) July 31 – August 1 2012 , Tel Aviv, Israel	other

English abstract:

Damian Finnegan (damian.finnegan@mah.se) Asko Kauppinen (asko.kauppinen@mah.se) Anna Wärnsby (anna.warnsby@mah.se) Automated Feedback, Student Experience and Writing as a Process Many EFL learners struggle with issues pertaining to grammar, style and idiomaticity, and, traditionally, language teachers spend a lot of time addressing these mechanical errors (see Zamel 1985). This corrective practice seems to shape learner expectations of the type of feedback that is most effective or useful to them (Hedgcock and Lefkowitz 1996). In the context of teaching academic writing, this may easily pose a problem for allocating teacher resources away from teaching writing as a process to taking care of the learner language issues. Nowadays, e-platforms designed specifically to cater for academic writing offer a new range of feedback possibilities for teachers. Tasks pertaining particularly to language use can, for example, be created so that the feedback is fully automated. The easy and immediate access to such feedback is beneficial for learners with different proficiency levels (Brandl 1995). In our course, in order to free teacher resources for feedback on students’ critical thinking, treatment of sources, structure and context, we used automated feedback, i.e. direct corrections with metalinguistic comments generated within the e-platform, to feedback on skill building exercises pertaining to grammar, style and idiomaticity. Previous research indicates that direct corrective feedback on mechanical errors is efficient in facilitating learning (see Sheen 2007 for an overview of the field). In a pilot study on student experience of the writing process, we noticed that the level of student satisfaction with this automated feedback was surprisingly high and valued as much as the extensive written teacher feedback on papers submitted for examination. In our current study, we explore the impact automated feedback has on student experience of learning skills pertaining to the mechanics of writing as described above from beginner to advanced students of academic writing. Some of the factors we consider are the immediacy/remoteness of the feedback, the extent of the metalinguistic comment and the connection of the skill building exercises to the teaching materials. References Brandl, K. K. 1995. Strong and Weak Students' Preferences for Error Feedback Options and Responses. The modern Language Journal, vol. 79, no. 2, 194-211. Hedgcock, J. and Lefkowitz, N. 1996. Some Input on Input: Two Analyses of Student Response to Expert Feedback in L2 Writing. The Modern Language Journal, vol. 80, no. 3, 287-308. Sheen, Y. 2007. The Effect of Focused Written Corrective Feedback and Language Aptitude on ESL Learners' Acquisition of Articles. TESOL Quaterly, vol. 41, no. 2, 255-283. Zamel, V. 1985. Responding to student writing. TESOL Quaterly, 19, 79-101.

Automated Feedback Il.pdf (11.36Mb)

Awaiting the Voiceover. The Oresund Film Commission Location Database...
Hellström, Maria : Kingston University, UK (2007)	conference PAPER

English abstract:

Today it is more difficult than ever to isolate the reproduction of buildings and landscapes from a growing and ever more all-embracing “economy of images and signs” (Lash and Urry, 1994). Even though repeated attempts are being made from within the spatial professions to develop a tectonically or geo-morphologically formulated immunity to these changes, the built environment appears as a subject matter in an increasing number of fields, from trend analytics and economic forecasting to environmental science and health care. One of these new and increasingly important fields of architectonical practice is film production. As a “micro-environment with global span” (Sassen 2003), this spatio-temporal domain has developed its own platforms and tools for commissioning and curating architectural environments, thus providing a new and increasingly important cartography of contemporary space (Abbas, 2003). Here, the emerging film commissions play an active role, engaging not only in promotion of the architectural environment, but furthermore also in its categorization, assessment and reproduction. What we have to ask, however, is what are the premises for this new spatial production, and how does it affect the further intermediation of architectural knowledge? Through a case study of the Oresund Film Commission and its web based “location database”, this paper aims to discuss these and related issues. A compilation of more than five hundred still images of potential locations for film production, covering anything from “fairytale scenery and medieval villages tucked in lush fields” to “contemporary European settings” (www.oresundfilm.com), the database provokingly actualizes the ambiguities of architectural typologization and archival practices – on the one hand its dependency upon an often unarticulated aesthetic narrative or naturalized voice-over and on the other hand its inclination to blend with a global branding culture. Together with a number of similar location databases, it is, however, also an example of the changing representational and reproductive conditions characterizing a mediatized architectural arena, rendering to the place-specific and local a new and extended role as enunciative entrances in a geo-political play. The paper interrogates and examines this new cinematographically driven locality production as well as the expectations, both for adaptation and change, to which it gives rise. The argument developed is that neither urban design nor architectural curatorship can consider themselves independent of processes of mediatization. Nevertheless, it is not a curatorial assignment to uncritically provide an increasingly powerful media industry with a legitimizing voice-over. Instead, what is needed is rather a new attention to the urban narrative that goes beyond passive commentary, taking into account the discursive potentials that an expanded architectural media-geography eventually holds.

Between the Horror Show and the Wall of Silence Reflections on fictio...
Hemer, Oscar : Nordic Association for Comparative Literature (Norlit) (2011) NorLit 2011 (Roskilde University): Conference on Literature and Politics. 4-6 August 2011.	peer-reviewed conference PAPER

English abstract:

South Africa and Argentina are both extraordinarily rich in cultural production and moreover share a common experience of transition from a traumatic near past; in South Africa the system of racial segregation known as Apartheid and the culmination of violence in the ”interregnum years”; in Argentina the latest military dictatorship and its ”dirty war” on the militant left, which took the character of extermination. The concept of transition has different connotations in the two cases, primarily due to the diametrically opposed political experiences. The demise of the apartheid state was conceived as the victory of the liberation struggle, whereas Argentina’s return to democracy was in a way the result of a double defeat; the annihilation of the revolutionary guerrillas was followed by the humiliation for their vanquishers in the disastrous war against Great Britain over the Falkland/Malvinas islands. The inventory of the cultural production of the transition distinguishes between reactive and proactive expressions with regard to the disputed near past. The first category applies to most of the books and films that were produced in the aftermath of the truth commissions. Like the contemporary media coverage of the Argentinean Conadep and the South African TRC, many of the early narrations had a sensationalist tinge and contributed to el show del horror, as it was called in Argentina. In South Africa, the horrors were to be played down for the reconciliatory purpose, whereas Argentina soon saw the emergence and prevalence of what could be regarded as another form of reactive response; the dissociation from “the failed utopias”, through irony or mockery. The reactive expressions basically reproduce the fictions that are circulating in the society. The disputed past is signaled by common markers that tend to turn into clichés; in Argentina the Mother come Grandmother of Plaza de Mayo, the adopted orphan come adolescent in search of his/her disappeared parents, and, as counterpart, the distinguished gentleman next-door with a shady past as torturer and murderer; in South Africa the disillusioned former freedom fighter come drug addict and petty criminals vs. the incompetent affirmative action beneficiary or the noveau riche black businessman in his conspicuous BMW. Generally speaking, these narratives are mirroring the transition in a way that may be interesting from an ethnographic point of view, but neither as art nor as social critique. The proactive strategy, by contrast, implies an interrogation of society and history by means of fiction (or documentary forms with fictional elements). Both South Africa and Argentina abound with examples of such interrogations that arguably have played a proactive role in the transition process, displaying public lies and self-deceptions, deconstructing prevailing myths rather than forging new identities.

Norlit_paper_OH.pdf (293.6Kb)

Blind and Fake: Exploring the Geography of the Expanded Book

Hellström Reimer, Maria; Lapcevic, Milica; Simeone, Luca
Conference paper in Proceedings of the Nordes’11: The 4th Nordic Design Research Conference MAKING DESIGN MATTER!; : School of Art and Design, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland (2011)
Nordes’11: The 4th Nordic Design Research Conference MAKING DESIGN MATTER! 29-31 May, 2011. School of Art and Design, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland.

conference
PAPER

English abstract:

It seems like we are now rapidly leaving the galaxy of printed matter. As screen-based media is making its entry into our everyday lives, it is pushing aside an object – the book - that has structured our forms of being together for almost six hundred years. This shift is not absolute but successive, and it raises a lot of questions. What kind of mediating practices are developing beyond printed media? And how do these practices structure and organize common spaces and publicities? Even though today, we are far into the electronic age, in a way we are still suspended in between modern individualized life and new, more floating societal formations. Therefore, rather than presupposing the disappearance of the book, this paper approaches the idea of the book as an expanded and inter-medial “boundary object” (Star and Griesemer 1989). In this respect, the point of departure is the expanded book project Roma Europa Fake Factory (REFF) (Henderson et. al. 2010) – a platform for global discussion and exchange concerning the management and governance of new public spheres in the electronic age. Playing out the visual authority of the printed text against the flickering of the net through the use of inter-mediating QR codes (Quick Response Codes) and fiducial markers, the project constituted a critical and artefactual intervention, remixing and mashing up the forcible means of the printed word with the intermediary potentials of electronic circuits. In the paper, we discuss the project through one of the contributions – Blind Points of Transition – a combined text- and video-based dialogue; on the one hand an exploration of the book and the net as different locations, and on the other hand a tentative mapping of the intermediary territory between two geographically separate places. Focusing on the transition of text through different media, the paper critically examines the spatial expansion and modifications of the book as it enters electronic circuits, thus proposing a ‘blind and fake’, or in other words a questioning form of boundary modification; dislocating the critical focus from visuality to agency and from permanent property to intermediary production.

237.pdf (213.0Kb)

Communication and convergent spaces : spatial practices among rural i...
Andersson, Magnus (2012) ECREA 2012: Fourth European Communication Conference, 24-27 October 2012, Istanbul	other

English abstract:

The focus of this paper is rural inhabitants in Sweden and their re-negotiation of rural spaces through mediated practices. This question is primarily based on the idea that individual actors’ chances to negotiate space have increased due to mediatization processes. Practices of different kinds – professional, political, social and cultural – are not to the same extent as earlier tied to particular time-space contexts. In addition to this underlying point of departure, rural inhabitants’ negotiation of space can be related to the prevailing complex and dynamic relationship between the urban and the rural. With a ‘Lefebvrian’ perspective this relationship is a three-fold construction, constituted by (1) (material) localities, (2) (mediated) representations and (3) everyday life (including imaginations) (Lefebvre, 1974/1991; cf. Halfacree, 2007; Jansson and Falkheimer, 2006). When communication is considered in such a framework the following can be stated: (1) the infrastructure of communication (roads, public transports broadband, etc) has increased the bonds between the country and the city. For example, it is very possible to live in either the city or the countryside and work in the ‘other’ area. Commuting and telecommuting (but also ‘urban sprawling’) blur the geographic boundaries. This is then in contrast to (2) media representations, which tend to reproduce the distinction between urbanity and rurality, for example through depictions of ‘hectic and stressful city life’ in contrast to ‘calm rural idylls’. Worth mentioning here is lifestyle media, for example glossy magazines and TV-programmes, which often create paradoxical links between the urban, creative and dynamic nodes and the aestheticized, ‘idyllicized’ and presumed ‘fixed’ countryside (cf. Jansson, 2010). This leads to the empirical focus of this article; (3) everyday life and its imaginations. Based on ethnographical interviews with rural inhabitants in southern Sweden, the paper argues that the inhabitants mediated practices may contribute to convergence of rural and urban spaces – as well as separation between them. Of particular interest in this context are mediated practices related to salaried work (telecommuting) and communication practices in support for a local village community – practices, which many times are conducted by the same people. The paper will consider and problematize the spatial aspects of these practices; the consequences for: the individuals and their activity spaces; the local community and its boundaries; and, at last, the general relationship between the urban and the rural.

Cultural Landscapes as the Complex Meta-texts of Clashing Metaphors
Yigit Turan, Burcu; Stiles, Richard; Hellström Reimer, Maria : ECLAS (2010) ECLAS Annual Conference 2010, "Cultural landscape". 29-09-2010 - 02-10-2010. Istanbul, Turkey.	peer-reviewed conference PAPER

English abstract:

“Landscape”, the European Landscape Convention tells us, “an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors”, irrespective of whether “natural, rural, urban [or] peri-urban.” Yet, the vast major- ity of the areas referred to in the Convention are designed, organically evolved or asso- ciative cultural landscapes outside of an urban context. This induces us to ask how people may perceive and interact with the urban cultural landscape and how this may influence the Convention’s aim of promoting landscape protection, management and planning. As an important part of recent identity politics, cultural landscapes are often associated with more or less stable communicative contents, symbolisms and messages (Inglis, 1987; Lo- wenthal, 1991; Daniels, 1993). In popular discourse, they are often romanticized and consid- ered natural assets, affecting also the development of professional normative frameworks, whether in the field of cultural heritage, environmental planning or design. Even though there is a significant research on the complexity of meanings that landscapes involve (Daniels & Cosgrove, 1988; Schama, 1996), as well as a considerable critique associated with the social processes behind these complexities (Barthes,1957/1993; Mitchell, 2002); the active ‘read- ing’ of landscapes as a basis for landscape architectural operations remains an exception. Yet, landscapes, and especially urban landscapes, have continuously been encoded as eve- ryday as “meta-texts” to operate and govern multiple interacting layers of economic, politi- cal, ecological, cultural and psychological realities of life. Many phenomena and problems emerging through landscape as multilayered power structure are usually not comprehended and touched by landscape architecture. There is thus a necessity to read and expose these complexities in order to find original, critical and reflective planning and design interventions that answer to the problems and realities emerging in and as urban landscapes. To question and re-construct the role of landscape architecture is necessary, requiring a critique of its knowledge construction and the conditioning of its cognitive, critical and creative skills ulti- mately defining the profession. This study will attempt to present some critical viewpoints, highlighting the theoretical debates on the ‘reading’ of ‘cultural landscape’. It will elaborate the subject asking following questions: - What could be learned from the landscapes emerging outside of the frameworks of the normative values and codes of the environmental planning and design disciplines? - What could be derived from critical theories of landscape as for the development of a reflexive landscape architecture? - How could the role of landscape architecture in the larger context of geographical realities be analysed, criticized and re-envisioned? - How should landscape architectural education be reconstructed/deconstructed ac- cording to the arguments of this study? These questions form the core argumentation along with theoretical arguments and exempli- fications from different cases.

eclas2010.pdf (21.92Mb)

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Arbetarlitteraturen och konstruktionen av arbetarklassen i det "mångk...
Nilsson, Magnus Conference paper in Arbetarhistoria idag : rapport från arbetarhistorikermötet i Landskrona i maj 2007 : Centrum för Arbetarhistoria Skrifter från Centrum för Arbetarhistoria;3 (2009) Arbetarhistorikermöte, Landskrona, 24-25 maj 2007	conference PAPER

Swedish abstract:	Med utgångspunkt i analyser av Susanna Alkoskis Svinalängorna och Åsa Linderborgs Mig äger ingen diskuteras hur arbetarlitteraturen bidrar till konstruktionen av fenomenet arbetarklass och hur arbetarhistoriker kan använda sig av arbetarlitteratur som källa till kunskap om arbetarklassen.

Augmenting Pen and Paper to Support Creative Collaboration in Design ...
Peterson, Bo; Pettersson, Mårten; Malmborg, Lone : perthDAC 2007 (2007) Presented at 7th International Digital Arts and Culture Conference, Perth, Australia, September 2007	peer-reviewed conference PAPER

A visualization toolkit for transportation simulation systems
Hajinasab, Banafsheh; Davidsson, Paul; Löwgren, Jonas; Persson, Jan A Conference poster in Proceedings of the 7th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Making Sense Through Design; : ACM (2012) 7th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI '12), October 14-17 2012, Copenhagen, Denmark.	conference POSTER