Collaborative projects

TEACHING PRODUCTIVITY AND ITS ENEMIES is a distribution of my original doctoral dissertation "Language Tangle : Predicting and Facilitating Outcomes in Language Education" ( http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/804346 )  with a new title better reflecting its actual theme, barriers to teaching productivity.

Although the keys to teaching success are elusive, some of the destructive forces at work against success have enough constancy to be worth the trouble of a well-developed defence system. I will collectively describe forces acting against teaching success as “the enemies of language teaching productivity”.  A productive teacher is one who adds to the learning productivity of students. A productive student is one who  acquires and retains what needs to be learned (a skill, a body of knowledge or a method of thinking) with the most efficient use of his or her mental resources, time and money...

As a working teacher, I am concerned with managing the psychology of my students as well as my own. The “enemies” in this ghostly arena of the human mind are well known to any experienced teacher. However, the bulk of this book is concerned with other distractors – enemies without. Typically they take the form of individuals and groups within institutions who have agendas which clash with what the teachers and students are trying to achieve. Productivity for these other players has an altogether different meaning from the learner’s pursuit of knowledge...

The past twenty years have seen a new generation of artists working together in small groups and large collectives to explore new avenues of art, design, performance, and communication. With in-depth interviews and a rich array of imagery, Come Together explores the processes and motivations behind forty of the most distinctive of these groups. From large, globe-spanning collectives to highly-focused duos, each collective is not just creating distinctive work but also influencing wider aspects of our culture, from music and political protest to fashion and food, ushering in a new way of thinking about what it means to create, conceive, and make art together.

Artists featured:
AAS, Abäke, Andrea Crews, Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Center for Tactical Magic, Chto Delat, Club Real, DAS INSTITUT, Dearraindrop, DIS, Discoteca Flaming Star, Etcétera..., Eva and Franco Mattes, Fallen Fruit, Friends With You, hobbypopMUSEUM, The Icelandic Love Corporation, Improv Everywhere, Instant Coffee, LuckyPDF, Metahaven, Paper Rad, Project Projects, The Propeller Group, PSJM, Public Movement, R A K E T A, Reactor, Ruangrupa, SIMPARCH, Slanguage, Slavs and Tatars, Société Réaliste, Space Hijackers, SUPERFLEX, Temporary Services, This is a magazine, Tokyo Picnic Club, What, How and for Whom/WHW, The Yes Men.

During the past few years, New York has seen the restaging of two groundbreaking underground art exhibitions, originally organized in 1980 by Lower East Side-based collective Colab: The Real Estate Show and The Times Square Show. The former, which took place illegally on New Year’s Eve in a vacant, city-owned building at 125 Delancey Street—and was shut down by the police after few hours—was restaged in Spring 2014 at four Downtown venues: James Fuentes Gallery, Cuchifritos, TheLodge Gallery, and ABC No Rio. The latter was organized in a disused Times Square massage parlor and restaged in Fall 2012 at Hunter College’s Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery.

Both the original shows are representative of the revolution from below that characterized the NewYork art world in the postmodernist era, particularly the influence of punk and street cultures on an emerging generation of artists involved less in conceptual than social and cultural issues. CollaborativeProjects Inc., known informally as Colab, was a loosely organized group of artists active from 1977 to the mid-1980s, with headquarters in ABC No Rio, a still existing squat on Rivington Street in the Lower East Side. Its network varied from thirty to a hundred members, and included artists, writers, and curators like John and Charlie Ahearn, Andrea Callard, Diego Cortez, Jane Dickson, Stefan Eins, ColeenFitzgibbon, Bobby G., Mike Glier, Jenny Holzer, Becky Howland, Lisa Kahane, Alan W. Moore, James Nares, Tom Otterness, Christy Rupp, Kiki Smith, Wolfgang Staehle, and Robin Winters.

Both shows have contributed to moving the canon of exhibition history toward the acceptance of anti-art forms, cooperative practices, underground culture, and tactics of institutional critique into official art history. This essay will examine the two exhibitions as examples of an “aesthetic of disappearance ”that brought artists to invent an alternative “art world” that challenged dominant cultural institutions,social hierarchies, and media power systems. Colab’s core concern with the issue of gentrification will be used as a paradigm to understand how New York City, the urban context that surrounds the shows and their restaging, has drastically mutated in the past three decades, even though some issues have remained the same.

Impact is one of the most important aspects of the evaluation criteria in Horizon Europe. As such, one should refer to the presentation of the impact with a lot of attention and dedication. In this article, which is part one of a series of articles on this important topic, we explain how to approach the Horizon Europe ‘Impact’ section for Horizon Europe collaborative projects. As well, we will offer our initial tips for writing this section in order to increase the proposal’s competitiveness.

In this paper, we report on our 5-year's practical experience of designing, developing and then deploying a Model-based Requirements Engineering (MBRE) approach and language in the context of three different large European collaborative projects providing complex software solutions. Based on data collected both during projects execution and via a survey realized afterwards, we intend to show that such an approach can bring interesting benefits in terms of scalability (e.g., large number of handled requirements), heterogeneity (e.g., partners with different types of RE background), traceability (e.g. from the requirements to the software components), automation (e.g., requirement documentation generation), usefulness or usability. To illustrate our contribution, we exemplify the application of our MBRE approach and language with concrete elements coming from one of these European research projects. We also discuss further the general benefits and current limitations of using this MBRE approach and corresponding language.

One way to improve the education of our students is to promote the creation of massive collaborative projects. These projects, also seen as learning products, would also help to better scale our learning experiences (Massive Open Online Courses-MOOCs) and generate collective value from the hours and cognitive efforts invested doing academic work. But the complexities to assess those projects are challenging. This requires to develop new monitoring and feedback systems for these kind of projects. This article presents an exploratory analysis for applying learning analytics methodologies based on social networks analysis, factorial analysis, k-means clustering and " naïve " Bayes algorithms.

"In his foreword to these highly personal documentary interventions by Cuban artist Henry Eric, Kevin Power writes that "Eric's broader sense of history has anchored itself in the particulars of his own life and artwork. His central metaphors are, perhaps, repair, respect, and recovery: the redress of the injustices official history always does to the small actors who lived and made it." Most people outside of Cuba are largely ignorant of the details of "official history" in that country, and completely unaware -- as most Cubans themselves may be -- of the parallel stories that have not found their place in the sanctioned version of events. This book makes a valiant and uncompromising effort to show a little of what has been hidden, and what we, thanks to Eric's carefully documented, often wry observations, now are able to identify and thus save from oblivion. Lies and truths, this book seems to say, have equal weight in memory. Both will continue to exist and be recorded. Sometimes, as in LA REVANCHA, we get a little more than we hope for, something more than worth remembering".

If you are considering applying to Horizon Europe Collaborative projects grant, and do not have experience with Horizon Europe or its previous programs – this is an excellent article to begin with!

While there is a very wide span of information that must be taken into account when applying to a Horizon Europe collaborative projects grant, we made a useful “first steps” article. In this article, we focus on all the basic aspects and requirements that are related to a Horizon Europe Collaborative project grant. We will review the expected proposal preparation path, and explore important terms such as Work Program, destinations, topics, consortium, excellence, impact, implementation, budget and more. Within this article, you will find references to additional important articles we’ve written on each specific Horizon Europe term or requirement. We invite you to treat this as a helpful guide to refer to throughout your grant preparation journey.

This article presents the use of tactile models and prototype as common language tools among designers, blind and visually impaired (B&VI), inserted in a collaborative design methodology. With the objective of realizing an interior architecture project and an outdoor area, including toys, for an association for visually impaired people in the city of Passo Fundo, RS, Brazil. It describes the process of participation and interaction between Association members, both adults and children, and architects in the development of these projects. It shows results of two co-design actions, which will subsidize a broader objective of a research that aims to define co-design methods, techniques and tools applied to the inclusion of Visually Impaired People in the process of architecture, urbanism, landscaping and interior design. The research related two co-design. The first is the co-design of the waiting / reception room and the external area for socializing and leisure, carried out with the adults of the association, took place in three moments: in the focus group, in the interaction with the tactile model and on the tours accompanied. The second co-design was carried out with the children of the association to develop two toys, the first to be inserted within the proposal of improving reception/ waiting, and the second for placement in the outdoor area of socializing and leisure. The interaction among designers, blind and visually impaired was intensive, allowing modifications and diverse insights about types of floors, layout and better and adequate colors for the best comfort and mobility inside the spaces. It seeks to demonstrate the importance of co-design as a way of including B&VI, as they are able to increase well-being and self-esteem, while effectively participating in the creation of the environment in which they are inserted; they manage to leave the passive zone that they normally find themselves in with regard to the architectural design process. The next steps of the research are to finalize the toy design of the external area and the execution of all spaces.

How can we research mobility, in practice, today? Pleas in favour of multi-sited ethnographies were followed by the implementation of cross-border qualitative data collections. But the transnationalisation of ethnographic methods, developed at a local level, raises new challenges. In this paper, the team of the erc project homing reviews the obstacles encountered, and solutions developed, to implement a qualitative study across ten countries. The authors adopt a triple lens, to look at (1) the extent to which collaborative qualitative research implies to revisit the ethnographic pact, at the basis of the researcher-informant relationship; (2) the concrete strategies implemented to share qualitative data within a team of researchers; (3) how a combination of phases of individual data collection and collective data analysis favoured processes of distributed cognition. By doing so, this paper analyses why and how we can implement qualitative collective surveys to study contemporary mobility.

This paper explores a proposal for a new form of ‘architectural agency’ as a means to undertake live projects in education. This has been tested by the authors in a programme of live projects named OB1 LIVE begun in 2008. These projects are commissioned by community-based clients and created by year one students at Oxford Brookes School of Architecture. Live projects are often understood as ‘building’ projects happening outside the studio, as if in opposition to design studio projects. OB1 LIVE seeks to take theoretical ideas into the city and bring the real world into the studio.

The paper tests and extends pedagogic theories raised by John Hejduk’s, Education of an Architect and explores the realisation of his theoretical projects into built works by reflecting on Writing the City, his student-built project in Stockholm in 1998. Live projects expose the social, cultural and political processes of both design and construction. We outline our pedagogical strategy to use live projects to situate the learning of students in a place that is relevant to their expectations of both architectural education and practice.

This creates a shift in teaching method from the contemporary student/tutor relationship. The ‘architectural agency’ requires tutors to negotiate with a client willing to give time and flexibility of expectation in return for the energy and originality of student designers. The tutor-as-agent is critical to the dynamic of this relationship, their skills being essential to support learning and creativity and meet the expectations of all participants.

Keywords:
Agency
Architectural Education
Architectural Practice
Collaborative Projects
Community Groups
Live Projects
Pedagogy

This paper focuses on the development of SCOPES (Systems of activity, Contradictions, Outcomes, Praxis, Expansive learning, Science education), as a new methodological tool for Science Education in early childhood and primary education. Towards this direction, a set of collaborative science education projects on Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) was analyzed. The key components of the collaborative projects were: a) the design and the analysis of some innovative teaching learning sequences embedded in the culture and the history of science, b) the connection of the learning tasks with the societal rules, the community of learners and the subjects, c) the object-oriented systems of activity, d) the outcome driven systems of activity, e) the actions mediated by artifacts, f) the analysis of the contradictions emerged in the activity systems and g) the formative interventions in Science Education for expansive learning. This is a review paper on five doctoral theses which addresses the complexity of science teaching and learning in formal and informal settings. It introduces a multi-dynamic tool for new researchers, curriculum developers and practitioners. The ultimate scope of this attempt is to foster transformative thinking and logical reasoning within a multidimensional context.