Month: March 2021
Exploring the Effect of Pull Factors on Recreational Needs in Heritage Tourism
Attracting travelers and preserving heritage are important issues in heritage tourism because several heritage sites have failed to attract travelers. Past studies found that heritage architecture, art activity, wide nature, regional attractions, recreational benefits, and long-term values were critical considerations in heritage tourism. Specifically, heritage architecture, art activity, wide nature, and regional attractions were pull …
The Role of Soft Power Along the Current Silk Road
The Silk Routes have long been a passage for exchange of goods and commodities as well as the exchange of religion and culture. One aspect in the exchange of culture, was the soft power that was generated along with it, which in turn facilitated closer ties between states and/or formed unique bonds between people of …
Reflective Practice and Teaching Postgraduate Counselling Students
In the fields of counselling and psychology, reflective practice is a process where we critically analyse our actions with the aim of improving professional practice. Within a counsellor education setting, the current paper reports on counselling skills lecturers’ engagement in reflective practice during the course of one academic semester. Using a reflective practice approach the …
Reading Habits, Feminism and Views About Feminism in India
Culture changes from time to time, both men and women are affected by the cultural change in many ways, women empowerment is an integral part of the same. There are different issues faced by men and women in different countries across the world. And in developing countries like India there are many different perspectives about …
Reading Kenji Miyazawa after 3.11: Region, Utopia, and Resilience
Interpretations of Miyazawa Kenji’s work have gone through several iterations since his death: from virtual obscurity he was recovered as an author of children’s literature and poetry, and, in the postwar, his writing was appreciated for its incorporation of Buddhist themes and Miyazawa himself became synonymous with provincial Japan. After the 3.11 earthquake, tsunami, and …
Forest Shamans: The Sacred Tree and Narratives of the Folk History
This paper examines the oral narratives of female shamans and people involved in their religious practices in modern Japan. Narratives are told and retold, ultimately becoming traditional oral histories that are closely related to local people’s lives. This paper discusses the ways in which such narratives make and can be read as folk history. As …
Facts, Fiction, Propaganda? An Analysis of Chinese Belt and Road Discourses
At the Second Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) Forum in Beijing, Xi Jinping described the “new silk road” as a model for international win-win progress through cooperation. Official China claims that the concept is neither “a geopolitical strategy” nor “a China-dominated geo-economic scheme”. A closer look, however, reveals that China’s BRI discourses differ immensely depending …
At the Intersection of Technology and Teaching: The Critical Role of Educators in Implementing Technology Solutions
Educators are critical for the successful implementation of any technology. Acrobatiq by VitalSource can use data to demonstrate the dramatic impact instructors—and their course policies—can have on courseware engagement. Acrobatiq courseware incorporates learning content, formative practice, homework assignments, adaptive practice, and summative assessments into a single learning environment for students, with additional data dashboards for …
A Maid in the U.S. House: Architecture, Occupied Japan, and Tokyo Joe
This paper aims to shed light on the hitherto understudied relations between Japanese women and architecture in the postwar Hollywood film Tokyo Joe (1949), starring Humphrey Bogart. Set in Japan during the postwar U.S. occupation, the film features a well-equipped dependent housing designated as a “U.S. House” and a nursemaid who works there. In historical …
Parental Perspective on Distance Learning During Class Suspension – A Study Form Hong Kong ECE Sector
Ever since the first class suspension announced in Feb 2020 due to the prevalence of Covid-19, many schools, including all kindergartens, primary, secondary and tertiary education, have redirected their face-to-face learning to online learning to strive for ‘suspending classes without suspending learning’. The physical closure has switched face-to-face learning to learning at home, which gave …
Design Thinking in AI Systems Design for Engineering Courses
Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes one of the essential courses that all students should learn regardless their disciplines. In this work, a teaching and learning pedagogy is proposed and implemented to conduct AI’s lesson in engineering course through design thinking. There is no additional course is required in the pedagogy, but the lesson is part of …
Gendering Robots – The Influence of Visual Design on Gender Perception in Robots
With the rise of gendered innovations, the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has begun to pay more attention to gender issues of robots, especially the effects of gendered robots on Human-Robot Interaction. This study aims to investigate the influence of robots’ visual design on people’s gender perception in robots by using Kansai engineering methods. A …
The Topsy-Turvy World of the University Classroom
This paper will review how the Global Pandemic starting in 2020 has affected classes at a typical Japanese university. Initially, the university students at an all women’s college were considered to be passive and not willing to take risks. However, as the instructor was forced to switch from face-to-face to online classes using the university’s …
Strategies of Integration: Challenges and Possibilities in the Online Teaching of Music During the Pandemic
The pandemic crisis has ushered a new era in the teaching of music. The suddenness of the crisis and the transfer of teaching to an online setting brusquely undermined the conviction that online pedagogies were to be transient and purely instrumental to the learning environment of the classroom. “Classrooms,” indicated a music teacher, “is where …
Forced Migration and Trauma: Looking at Life Stories of Forced Migration From Burma (1941-42) in the Event of Japanese Bombing
“The 20th century even more than any age before is the age of the refugee” and simultaneously works on migration seem incomplete without looking into the migrant experiences. In fact, to study migration more holistically would mean to study objective analysis of migration along with lived experience of the migrants, which is made possible through …
Do You Believe In Magic? Exploring the Cultural Boundaries of Magical Thinking
Magical thinking has been a topic of interest in the social sciences (Muchow, 1928; Piaget, 1969; Berenbaum, Boden, and Baker, 2009). Meehl (1964) asserted that magical thinking relates to a “belief, quasi-belief, or semi serious entertainment of the possibility that events which, according to the casual concepts of this culture, cannot have casual relation with …
Cultural Formation of the Expo in Japan: The Case of Producer Shinya Izumi
The Japan World Exposition Osaka 1970 was the first Expo to be held in Japan and in Asia. The planners of the Osaka Expo not only struggled to express the uniqueness of the first expo in Asia, but also revised and reinterpreted its significance and format so that it would be accepted by Japanese society. …
International Circulation of Newspaper Novels: British Empire, Japan, and the Yubin Hochi Shimbun
Japanese newspaper novels emerged as a genre in the latter half of the 19th century. In 1886, the Yubin Hochi Shimbun (YHS), a hitherto primarily political newspaper, declared that it would print novels in order to internationalize its readers. The editor Morita Shiken had visited Europe and America to learn how to run and edit …
Reinventing the Cross Culture of Paddy in Indonesia
The cross-culture of rice is interesting to revisit. After nearly twenty centuries, a clear historiography of West Java’s Indonesia rice culture history is needed. This study aims to reinventing the cross-cultural dynamics of rice in Indonesia by taking a case study in West Java province from the inception of records on rice cultivation in Indonesia …
Identity of the ǂKhomani San as Authentic Bushman in the 21st Century: An Ethnographic Study
The small indigenous community of the ǂKhomani San Bushmen in the Southern Kalahari Desert of South Africa are grappling to maintain their identity in the 21st century. Being authentic Bushman comes with a huge number of challenges for this indigenous community in retaining their cultural links to the land and their San heritage. Their authenticity …
The Impact of Advergame on Consumer Behavior: Study Among Saudi Consumers
Advergames present a unique, yet effective way of advertising owing to the high level of players’ engagement with online games. This preliminary study sought to explore the impact of advergames on brand outcomes among Saudi players. This research has capitalized the flow theory to examine this phenomenon in Saudi consumers. A questionnaire was formulated for …
Peace Comes About in Your Honour’: The Arts, Migration and Reconciliation
This presentation illustrates how a multimodal and transdisciplinary project brings together dance, music, poetry and historical and natural settings, with the ultimate aim of raising awareness about issues of migration. The mixing of Maltese poetry translated into English, with corporeal gestures and movements allows the interpreter of the work to experience and embody social, historical, …
The Academic-Industrial Program of Southeast Asian Students in Taiwan
Since 2016’s “New Southbound Policy” has developed in Taiwan, there are more and more Southeast Asian Students coming to Taiwan for study. From 2016 to 2020, their number had risen to over 30,000 students, posting an increase of 85 per cent in five years. Those students’ language learning, life adjustment and practical training on campus …
Embodied Interaction in Language Learning Materials: A Multimodal Analysis
The purpose of this research is to explore the potential of English-language learning materials as a source of multimodal communicative representation. In particular, this study examines the animated cartoon videos that supplement the text-based dialogues for how kinesics is made relevant in the moving images to enhance the communicative capacity of the English-language textbooks used …
Maximising Student Engagement in Online and Blended Learning: A Survey of Learner Preferences
Blended learning is the integration of classroom face-to-face (F2F) learning with online learning experiences to engage students in a flexible learning framework. F2F lecturing is generally described as being more engaging. However, the incorporation of online resources gives students choice and flexibility in how they approach their studies, and can offer an additional tool to …
Parental Involvement in Early Childhood Education in Lao PDR: Case of Vientiane Province
In the past decade, significant and measurable progress in Early Childhood Development (ECD) has been accomplished in Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR), but it continues to be behind the average development level of the world. Given this evidence, this case study on parental involvement in ECD attempts to examine the extent of parental involvement …
Learner Autonomy and Self-regulated Learning: The Case of University – Level French as a Foreign Language (FFL) Students
French as a foreign language (FFL) is the second most popular international language in Ghana after English, but very few Ghanaians speak French, even though it is a core subject in elementary school and an elective subject in high schools. While the general aim of most language learners remains the development of communication competence, we …
Transnational University Collaborations Through the Lenses of Content and Social Network Analyses
In the age of COVID-19 and a global pandemic, international collaborations have become as important as ever to solve complex societal challenges of which universities play important roles. In fact, transnational university collaborations beyond institutional walls extend knowledge and resources to drive innovative change for large-scale economic and social progress that would not be possible …