Speed Bumps And Roundabouts Lessons I Ve Learned On The Journey

Why didn’t life work out as I planned? My plan was great! I would grow up with a loving family. I would have many friends to make pinky promises with. I would get top grades through school and be popular to boot. I would study for a degree I was passionate about, and I would meet . . . “The One” (sigh) . . . we would get married and have children who looked and behaved like baby angels. Oh, and I’d live happily ever after, of course. Was that too much to ask? I didn’t plan for my parents to divorce. I didn’t plan to change schools because of bullying. I didn’t plan for university to fill me with doubts about whether I was good enough. I didn’t plan to be single at 28. I didn’t plan to run away to the other side of the world. But look where I’ve ended up. Life is never the smooth and straightforward journey we expect. Along the way, things slow us down and turn us around. Speed Bumps and Roundabouts is a story of those things: Hope. Vulnerability. Apathy. Gratitude. Beauty. Boundaries. Waiting . . . The journey is worth it, the scenery can be captivating, but we’ll never know unless we keep going . . . over the speed bumps and around the roundabouts.

Networked learning is learning in which information and communications technology (ICT) is used to promote connections: between one learner and other learners; between learners and tutors; between a learning community and its learning resources. Networked learning is an area which has great practical and theoretical importance. It is a rapidly growing area of educational practice, particularly in higher education and the corporate sector. This volume brings together some of the best research in the field, and uses it to signpost some directions for future work. The papers in this collection represent a major contribution to our collective sense of recent progress in research on networked learning. In addition, they serve to highlight some of the largest or most important gaps in our understanding of students' perspectives on networked learning, patterns of interaction and online discourse, and the role of contextual factors. The range of topics and methods addressed in these papers attests to the vitality of this important field of work. More significant yet is the complex understanding of the field that they combine to create. In combination, they help explain some of the key relationships between teachers' and learners' intentions and experiences, the affordances of text-based communications technologies and processes of informed and intelligent educational change. This volume will prove very valuable to researchers and teachers working in (higher) education and corporate education.

Private First Class R was an excellent soldier so it was unlike him to be late. When he came in a few minutes later I could see by the grim look on his face that something was terribly wrong. He immediately began to cry and tell me that his wife had miscarried the child they had so badly wanted. I had never seen anyone cry as much as he did that morning and one box of tissues simply was not enough. After a while, the front of his uniform was soaked from his many tears, and I felt horrible seeing him suffer. It was one of those times when I would have moved Heaven and Earth if I could have but I could not. It humbled me because I wanted to order someone to do something to fix the problem, but this time it would not be that simple. I had always taken pride in looking out for the welfare of the soldiers in my charge but this time was different; I knew I was not a miracle worker but I felt I had let him down because as much as I wanted to, I did not have the power to bring back his baby. It was the worst day of my Army career because a good soldier who looked up to me for wisdom and guidance was in peril, and there was nothing I could do. I felt like a weakened Superman hopelessly dragging his feet through a field of Kryptonite, because there I was with all my rank and power that the Army had entrusted in me, but I was useless to him.

This book presents ideas for strengthening the foundations for transformational change in polar and global education leadership in all stages of the education process. Despite being an established concept endorsed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is still not in the educational mainstream but is vital in mitigating against the intensifying impacts of global change and adapting to the shifts that have already occurred. Drawing on examples from real world projects in the United States, Germany, Mexico, Japan, Peru and Greenland, this book assesses the new educational strategies, pedagogies and technologies which have been adopted by polar educators to stimulate students’ interests in sustainability and re-orient education to global citizenship science. The experiential nature of the pedagogies shown in the case studies and educational activities builds background knowledge of cutting-edge research and empowers participants to communicate authentic research practices and show how data collection in the polar region is applicable in other parts of the globe. Highlighting the many ways in which educators for global citizenship can have a decisive role in transforming individuals and society, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, education and Arctic studies. It will also be a valuable resource for professional educators working in ESD.

“This book will—no question—make you think in new ways. Why have we surrendered our cities to cars? What might it be like to inhabit a space designed for people instead? It’s exciting and hopeful—this we can do!” —Bill McKibben, author of The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon Almost everywhere in the world, streets are designed for travel at the highest speed, giving precedence to the chunkiest vehicles. We take for granted that the streets outside of our homes are designed only for movement from one point to another. But what happens if we radically rethink how we use these public spaces? Could we change our lives for the better? In Movement: How to Take Back Our Streets and Transform Our Lives, journalist Thalia Verkade and mobility expert (“the cycling professor”) Marco te Brömmelstroet take a three-year shared journey of discovery into the possibilities of our streets. They investigate and question the choices and mechanisms underpinning how these public spaces are designed and look at how they could be different. Verkade and te Brömmelstroet draw inspiration from the Netherlands and look at what other countries are doing, and could do, to diversify how they use their streets and make them safer. During the pandemic, decision-makers in cities around the world were confronted with the questions of who our streets belong to, how we want to use them, and who gets to decide. Making our communities safer, cleaner, and greener starts with asking these fundamental questions. To truly transform mobility, we need to look far beyond the technical aspects and put people at the center of urban design. Movement will change the way that you view our streets.

Learning has been fundamental to the growth and evolution of humanity and civilization. The same concepts of learning, applied to the tasks that machines can perform, are having a similar effect now. Machine learning is evolving computation and its applications like never before. It is now widely recognized that machine learning is playing a similar role to electricity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in modernizing the world. From simple high school science projects to large-scale radio astronomy, machine learning has revolutionized it all—however, a few of the applications clearly stand out as transforming the world and opening up a new era. Machine Learning for Societal Improvement, Modernization, and Progress showcases the path-breaking applications of machine learning that are leading to the next generation of computing and living standards. The focus of the book is machine learning and its application to specific domains, which is resulting in substantial civilizational progress. Covering topics such as lifespan prediction, smart transportation networks, and socio-economic data, this premier reference source is a dynamic resource for data scientists, industry leaders, practitioners, students and faculty of higher education, sociologists, researchers, and academicians.

Towards Sustainable Futures serves as a guide to better understand what roles evaluation can play in sustainability. Rather than proposing a single definition of sustainability or methodological approach, this book gives us the tools to improve the quality and relevance of evaluation of sustainability. Divided into two parts, the first part introduces the reader to key debates and challenges related to evaluation of sustainability. Part Two provides examples of methods and applications. By combining a stellar line up of specialists, theorists, and practitioners in the field of development evaluation with expert, accessible and engaged analysis of key issues, Towards Sustainable Futures is a must-read source for re-tooling and re-focussing evaluation towards the green transition imperative. It should be essential reading for scholars and practitioners of evaluation. Chapters 1, 4, 6 and 15 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.