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Advances in writing technologies have fostered the gradual move from Paper-Based (PB) to Computer-Based (CB) writing assessment in foreign language (FL) education. The trend was further boosted by the outburst of the Covid-19 pandemic, which led to drastic changes in teaching and assessment practices. In higher education (HE) contexts, writing assessment in English as a foreign language (EFL) is more and more often managed by means of online learning platforms, where students create and submit written assignments on the computer. This paper examines a sample of 100 EFL exam essays completed by 100 Italian university students. Half of the essays were computer-typed on Moodle from home during the Covid-19 lockdown, whereas the other half were handwritten on paper during a face-to-face exam session after the Covid-19 emergency. The study presented herein compares the amount and types of formal errors in the CB and PB written assignments respectively. The results of the comparison may be useful to suggest hypotheses on the impact that both writing modality and environment can have on the quality of EFL writing in assessment contexts.

Se trata de exploraciones esenciales en torno al papel, su textura y las relaciones originadas a partir de su recorte y superposición en capas. Son obras minimalistas en su técnica que despliegan paisajes de formas plegadas y laminadas con profundidad y equilibrio que parten también del imaginario personal sobre la arquitectura. Las composiciones tienen un formato de 21x21 cm. Las mismas reglas operan en todas ellas: el orden y el número de capas, colores, etc., pero se recombinan en cada pieza de forma diferente. Las capas de papel se separan entre sí a unas distancias concretas y se unen de forma solidaria sólo por una pestaña en la parte superior, lo que permite una cierta libertad y tolerancia en la separación entre ellas, de forma que la percepción puede variar levemente en función del plegado o la curvatura del papel, incluso de las condiciones de humedad y atmosféricas.

A pioneer in the study of Islamic architecture, Henry Viollet (1880-1955) travelled from Egypt to Central Asia between 1904 and 1913. From his missions, the French architect and archaeologist brought back more than 4,500 written and photographic documents, today kept at the Bibliothèque universitaire des langues et civilisations orientales in Paris. These archives document Viollet’s excavations at Samarra and his surveys of Islamic monuments, particularly in Iraq and Iran. In 2021-2022 a scientific project funded by the GIS CollEx-Persée and co-partnered with BULAC and CeRMI has been set up to study part of the iconographic materials stored in these archives (EpiPOM project). In the frame of this project, an international conference was organized in Paris on 23 June 2022 to bring together a network of researchers in the arts of Islam into a collaborative study of this partly undisclosed archival material.

This article analyses a seemingly mundane feature of a mental health centre for immigrants and refugees in Paris: the documents used by budding therapists undertaking their apprenticeships. Supervisors developed these documents in order to train therapist apprentices to learn the explanatory models of patients, identify the voice of patients, and incorporate medical anthropology into their therapeutic practice. The documents were central to the experiences of therapist apprentices because they occupied most of their time and were a substitute for supervision and patient contact. Documents disciplined the speech of therapist apprentices and focused their attention on specific aspects of patients’ histories. Therapist apprentices found these documents and documentary practices to be problematic because they reduced patients’ complex migration and medical histories to a series of tick boxes and short answers. These documents generated new forms of uncertainty among therapist apprentices about how to present clinical information about patients to their supervisors. This article is part of a larger study that considers mental health services for immigrants and refugees as communities of practice in which therapist apprentices learned to develop clinical and caring skills for vulnerable patient populations. By drawing on and contributing to scholarship on apprenticeship, uncertainty, documents, and bureaucracy, this article demonstrates how bureaucratic processes and documentary artefacts may generate unnecessary forms of uncertainty and hinder participation in communities of practice.

Within the last decade, challenges of diagnosis have emerged on the global health agenda, accompanied by an expansion in the use of point-of-care and rapid detection devices in low-resource contexts where laboratory facilities are scarce. Few studies have explored how these changes are shaping people’s diagnostic journeys and their modes of accessing such technologies. In this paper I show how sick people and their families in a peri-urban area in Burkina Faso attempt to access diagnostic technologies and make themselves visible to the healthcare system through papers. In this context, I show how referral papers and diagnostic papers take on significance for people as they attempt to access care and diagnostic technologies and ‘carry’ knowledge between different levels of the healthcare system. The use of papers is often an uncertain undertaking, as they remain unintelligible to the sick and the layperson. I highlight how the form of the papers makes a crucial difference to the ways that sick people are able to use them. Papers and diagnostic technologies present both opportunities and challenges, and simultaneously engender hope, uncertainty, disappointment, and despair for the sick seeking a cure. Uncertainties, especially financial ones, arise with the possibility of new referrals and diagnostic tests, and along the way many give up or are immobilised when faced with diagnostic ambiguity.

The academic and administrative problems involved in the quest to integrate the language sciences are reviewed. It is claimed that the explanatory power of a truly interdisciplinary approach to language can only be achieved on a meta-paradigmatic level. This failure to consider the disparities in theoretical persuasions, it is noted, is a major factor in the demise of the task force approach to problem solving. Two meta-paradigmatic models are introduced and it is argued that the phenomenological approach to language research provides a basis for greater insights about the nature of language than the traditional positivistic model. What is significant about this investigation is that it not only advocates a more sophisticated analysis of the various schools of thought within the language sciences, but it also demonstrates the fact that discrepancies in language theory and practice can only come about if the various scholars of the language sciences are willing to make a concerted effort to transcend the traditional boundaries of their academic training by resolving language-related issues and sharing powerful insights within the broad dimension of interdisciplinary linguistics. (Author)

With the creation of the Dip. A. D., formal teaching of art history became mandated in the Uk’s art schools. In a talk to university heads of art history, who would be required to train the required art historians, Gombrich addressed the problem of what they should teach. Far from advocating the common university curriculum, he recommended drawing upon local traditions of art and craft practices. While suggesting that students should have a basic awareness of art history’s historical map, if they should become needed to teach the subject, ‘I should try to investigate with them what it was like to be an artist in the past, what tasks he had to perform and in what concrete contexts the works of art took shape which we still admire.’

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Reseña del libro, Critical Essays on the Privatisation Experience, Palgrave Macmillan (International Papers in Political Economy), Basingstoke y Nueva York, 2009, 252 pp., ISBN 978-1-4039-9936-8.

Background: The partograph has been endorsed by World Health Organization (WHO) since 1994 which presents an algorithm for assessing maternal and foetal conditions and labor progression. Monitoring labour with a partograph can reduce adverse pregnancy outcomes such as prolonged labor, emergency C-sections, birth asphyxia and stillbirths. However, partograph use is still very low, particularly in low and middle income countries (LMICs). In Bangladesh the reported partograph user rate varies from 1.4% to 33.0%. Recently, an electronic version of the partograph, with the provision of online data entry and user aid for emergency clinical support, has been tested successfully in different settings. With this proven evidence, we conducted and operations research to test the feasibility and effectiveness of implementing an e-partograph, for the first time, in 2 public hospitals in Bangladesh Methods: We followed a prospective crossover design. Two secondary level referral hospitals, Jessore and Kushtia District Hospital (DH) were the study sites. All pregnant women who delivered in the study hospitals were the study participants. All nurse-midwives working in the labor ward of study hospitals were trained on appropriate use of both types of partograph along with standard labour management guidelines. Collected quantitative data was analyzed using SPSS 23 statistical software. Discrete variables were expressed as percentages and presented as frequency distribution and cross tabulations. Chi square tests were employed to test the association between exposure and outcome variables. Potential confounding factors were adjusted using multivariate binary logistic regression methods. Ethical approval was obtained from the institutional review board of the International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b). Findings: In total 2918 deliveries were conducted at Jessore DH and 2312 at Kushtia DH during one-year study period. Of them, 1012 (506 in each facility) deliveries were monitored using partograph (paper or electronic). The trends of facility based C-section rates was downwards in both the hospitals; 43% to 37% in Jessore and from 36% to 25% in Kushtia Hospital. There was a significant reduction of prolonged labour with e-partograph use. In Kushtia DH, the prolonged labour rate was 42% during phase 1 with the paper version which came down to 29% during phase-2 with the e-partograph use. The similar result was observed in Jessore DH where the prolonged labour rate reduced to 7% with paper partograph from the reported 30% prolonged labour with e-partograph. The e-partograph user rate was higher than the paper partograph during both phases (phase 1: 3.31, CI: 2.04–5.38, p < .001 and in phase 2: 15.20 CI: 6.36–36.33, p < .001) after adjusting for maternal age, parity, gestational age, religion, mother’s education, husband’s education, and fetal sex Conclusion: The partograph user rate has significantly improved with the e- partograph and was associated with an overall reduction in cesarean births. Use of the e-partograph was also associated with reduced rates of prolonged labour. This study has added to the growing body of evidence on the positive impact of e-partograph use. We recommend implementing e-partograph intervention at scale in both public and private hospitals in Bangladesh. Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Riegl, Dvořák, Sedlmayr and Pächt have each of them aroused widespread enthusiasm at one point or another, the same cannot be said of Julius Schlosser (1866-1938). To speak in general terms about his intellectual trajectory and its significance, one meets two questions, the first rather obvious, and the other quite opaque. Although he wrote and lectured in a style that was difficult, his arguments were consistent and perhaps predictable – a continuation of Wickhoff’s approach, and the principles upheld by the Institut für Geschichtsforschung, as well as something later called structure and system, which is most apparent today in his thoughts about what he called the language and grammar of art, but also in his study from 1889 of the original architectural layout of western European abbeys which is a very early example of a functional analysis. In the last decade or two of his life he seems by contrast to have made some generalizations apparently difficult to reconcile with his earlier devotion to the particularity of historical sources.

This paper builds its arguments on the (re)interpretation of 'human' and its entanglements with nonhumans in the digital age. Since the concept of humanness has prominently transformed into something innovative because of immense improvements in science and technology, and thereby society, terms such as human, nonhuman, posthuman, and transhuman including cyborgs, have emerged as concepts that require to be reinterpreted in the digital age. In a planet where cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, 5G technology, autonomous vehicles, quantum computers, genetic engineering, edge computing, microchips, green tech, and hydrogen fuel cells are commonly regarded as innovative inventions of the 21st century, the positions of humans are decentralized and displaced from centralized to more peripheric spheres. Beginning from anthropocentrism, broadly defined as a thought process that makes humans the primary measure of everything, this paper exposes the (trans)formation of humans from anthropocentricism to posthumanism and paradoxically from posthumanism to transhumanism by drawing upon the philosophical discussions of Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Cary Wolfe, Francesca Ferrando. By interrogating the socio-cultural existence of humans through epistemological and ontological viewpoints, this paper attempts to (re)define the place of humans in the digital age with a focus on the relationship between human and nonhuman beings and their entanglements.