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The thesis concerns the future, or futures, in young people's pursuit of higher education in refugee situations in Lebanon and Jordan. The project is an empirical study about the experiences and responses that are less visible yet central to the everyday life of the young population who are displaced due to the 2011 Syrian uprising and the subsequent conflicts. Situating higher education for refugees in the overlapping global and national frameworks of humanitarianism and development, the project asks how refugee students experience and respond to the educational opportunities and lack thereof. Acknowledging intersecting experiences in the everyday life of the young participants, the thesis also looks into the strategies students devised in hoping towards higher education, and in negotiating the period of "waiting" as a refugee and as a young person entering adulthood. To understand the experiences, strategies, and responses to the challenges of the everyday in relation to educational pursuits, the project takes an interdisciplinary, ethnographic and reflexive approach to gather insights that focused on refugees' everyday experiences, emotions and strategies in the struggles they face. The fieldwork took place during September 2018-April 2019 mainly in the urban areas of Lebanon and Jordan. With its experience-near interpretations, the thesis broadens the understanding of the complex temporal and affective aspects of refugees' experiences in higher education and their expectations towards the future. It fills the critical gap of research on refugee higher education in Southern contexts. By engaging with the meanings of "hope" and "the future" often presented in the practical field of refugee education, it argues that education and higher education for refugees cannot fulfil "hopes for the future" with the current dominant humanitarian logic of minimal provision and crisis-informed and temporary patchwork. It argues that meaningful participation, rather than liminal access, is what embodies education that contains a future. Education that contains a future is by no means abstract but is in the very practical sense of everyday commuting, networking, initiating, participating and hoping.

Weblogs, one of the Web 2.0 applications, are popular among this Internet generation. Nevertheless, researchers have just begun to study their affordances for education. This report reviews the literature published in the past five years on using weblogs in teaching and learning and identifies most prominent characteristics of weblogs. It finds that weblogs have the potential to support teachers’ pedagogical strategies in terms of knowledge construction, social development, new literacies, reflection, communication and collaboration, and home-school connection. This report also compares contemporary educational blogging services, Edublogs and 21Classes, to provide practitioners some insights about how to practice blogging in their classroom. This paper concludes with an emphasis on teachers’ roles in technology integration and discusses future direction for research on academic use of weblogs.

In this thesis, I study various aspects of solutions to eleven-dimensional supergravity and its descendents. The former is at one corner of the moduli space of M-theory. While it is not clear how to formulate M-theory; it is equally interesting to see how far we can proceed from this low energy window. First of all, various techniques are applied to construct supergravity solutions preserving partial supersymmetry. A seven-dimensional membrane solution in the gauged supergravity is constructed by lifting a self-dual string in six dimensions, and its supersymmetric property is explored in certain detail. Then fractional BPS solutions from Sn x Sn reduction of six and ten-dimensional supergravities are constructed via the method of G-structures. The form of the solutions is totally determined by Laplace equations with specified boundary conditions. Secondly, the concept of duality is realized in two aspects. A certain type of *-theory, obtained from time-like T-dualization of the usual string and M-theory, is studied and its hyperbolic reduction results in de Sitter solutions, which are favored by modern astrophysical observations. Then the mass of R-charged AdS black holes is properly defined with Hamilton-Jacobi counterterms added in the supergravity action, as another illustration of the AdS/CFT correspondence. Finally, the concept of holonomy in Riemannian geometry is generalized to the discussion of generic supersymmetric solutions in various supergravity theories, as an alternate and comparable method for classifying supersymmetric solutions of fractional BPS. The subtlety of higher-order integrability is also discussed at the end.

This study contributes to two major areas of research into problem-based learning: (1) investigations of self-directed learning from a social perspective and (2) examinations of the effects of different modes of communication imbedded in PBL. Content analysis and discourse analysis were applied to two different implementations of PBL in a graduate nursing course: online treaded discussions using problems at the level of principles and face-to-face discussions using real patient cases. Primary data included 751 online messages and eight sessions of face-to-face discussions. The first part of the study investigated the interplay between self-directed learning and group interactions by focusing on the formation of learning topics and the collaborative use of learning resources. Results indicated that the content posted by peers provided a fruitful foundation for the formation of learning topics and subsequent discussions pursued by students. Also, throughout these discussions, students broadened their conceptual knowledge and incorporated academic publications in reference to professional and personal experiences. The discussions produced iterative interrelated processes of knowledge building and information searching. The second part of the study investigated common and unique discursive interactions in the two PBL settings online and face-to-face. While both settings supported authentic learning and students' initiatives for learning, each offered distinct learning opportunities. Online discussions provided more support for crafting multiple perspectives, presenting multiple resources, and reflecting on multiple approaches for the same problem. The real-time, immediate responses to the problem, nevertheless, assisted with inspection of misunderstandings displayed during the discussions. Students were directly involved in each other's inquiry and clinical reasoning processes for decision making. This study argues that the reciprocal relationship between self-directed learning and group interaction in online discussions supports the exploration of a wide range of related issues and connections between information from various resources. Therefore, educators should take advantage of online discussions to encourage the investigation of ethical dilemmas, controversial and debatable topics, or diverse theoretical perspectives. Yet, online discourses were not sufficient for understanding nursing practices. Students relied on each other's immediate feedback to monitor and critique clinical reasoning. Thus, having students discuss fully contextualized cases face-to-face helps students apply knowledge to realistic situations.