Innovation Showcases
Online Bachelor’s Degree Completion for Students Living at the Margins: Curriculum, Culture and Technology Considerations View Digital Media
Innovation Showcase Tony Williams
As part of a global initiative grant, Creighton University offered an online Bachelor of Science degree in Leadership for students living at the margins through the Jesuit Worldwide Learning (JWL) program. Program personnel designed purposeful pathways to lead students to degree completion. Issues in implementation included the integration of international students in a typically domestic-based program, connectivity issues, and communication challenges between students and faculty.
When Children Read the World Before the Words: Games, Multiliteracies, and Language Education View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Giuliana Brossi, Kevin Lopes, Michely Avelar
Multi-modal reading by young children through interactions with digital provides many forms of meaning-making. Digital games are cultural artifacts that provide an environment that recruits modalities of language as oral, written, images, gestures, and sounds besides connecting diversity of people. To play games, children need to read the world before the words. They need to understand the meanings of colors, icons, sounds, to decode maps and when is the best time to press the button. So, much more than entertainment, games are language. Although children benefit from different forms of interaction with digital games, it might become a very exclusive and excluding social practice, when it comes to young children from less privileged social classes. In this sense, an extension project created at Goias State University, in Inhumas has developed games as teaching and learning material, for social practices during classes with young children. The extension project has been acting upon local language and curriculum policies since 2012, and in 2022 the group proposed a research project that has connected professors and students from diverse backgrounds, institutions and courses in efforts to create a multi platform game so children may learn English as an additional language while playing a game that consists in a dive into a fabulous world of children stories. This paper shows the initial steps that were taken in this collaborative research in order to bring these forms of meaning-making to children from the public schools who study English in Inhumas since 2006.
A Multimodal Application to Connect Families in Vulnerable Housing Situation and Volunteers: A Project in Higher Education
Innovation Showcase Mariana Lopetegui, Katia E Muck
Social vulnerability is a growing factor within cities and can generate several problems, including housing, which triggers several other factors responsible for the worsening of the situation. This project developed an application to connect volunteers, construction professionals and families in vulnerable situations to improve the environment in which these families live, reducing risk factors, qualifying labor for work in the industry construction, and collecting leftovers of construction materials and directing the demand to the registered families in need. The theoretical support addresses the use of multimodality in apps, the housing problem, the issue of collective effort and self-construction, and volunteering. The application was developed using the online tool Fábrica de Aplicativos. The objective is to promote a better quality of life for those who are in a vulnerable situation. Additionally, a project was designed to employ this App in higher education, with Senior students from the undergraduate courses of Architecture, Design, and Civil and Electric Engineering so that they can have a place to develop their abilities to put the theory into practice and, at the same, develop the habit of conducting volunteering work. The application will initially be utilized in the city of Lages, State of Santa Catarina, Brazil. However, as it is a digital tool, it can be replicated anywhere in the country.
