One-to-one computing initiatives are becoming a part of many school divisions across the United States as district leadership analyzes ways to improve student learning and create 21st century learning spaces. Studying how school divisions planned, prepared, implemented and sustained a one-to-one computing initiative is an important step that school leaders must do in order to help foster learning environments that promote critical thinking, collaboration, communication and creativity. The research presented in this paper came from a case study conducted on City School District (CSD), a kindergarten through twelfth (K-12) grade school system that implemented a one-one computing initiative for all students. A detailed analysis of archived meeting minutes, surveys, questionnaires, classroom observations, student assessments and interviews helped answer research questions that focused on the planning, implementation, and plans for sustaining the one-to-one computing initiative. The one-to-one computing initiative for CSD started with a vision created by the superintendent of schools that focused on developing an individualized education plan for all students. The vision eventually became the vision for the entire school division during the digital conversion. School leaders can use the studies' findings and recommendations to help guide them through the implementation of a one-to-one computing initiative. / Doctor of Education / Providing an electronic mobile device such as a laptop or tablet computer to all students in kindergarten through 12th grade school system is an undertaking that requires a coordinated effort from the school division’s leadership as well as the teachers, students and other community stakeholders. Beginning in 2013, City School District (CSD) began the planning process for providing every student in their school system with electronic mobile devices. After five years of planning, implementing, conducting pilot programs and expansion, CSD has been able to provide all students in grades 3-12 with an electronic mobile device. This case study focuses on three research questions. 1. How did the school division implement a one-to-one computing initiative? 2. How has the staff adapted to the innovative change of a one-to-one computing initiative? 3. How does the school division plan to continue and sustain the one-to-one computing initiative? The case study found key elements for implementing a one-to-one computing initiative by collecting data from archived meeting minutes, surveys, questionnaires and interviews. School leadership teams attempting a one-to-one computing initiative can use the findings and recommendations from this study to implement a one-to-one computing initiative.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / While the Arab spring succeeded in ousting the long-term dictator led governments from power in many Arab countries, leading the way to a new democratic process to develop in the Arab world, it did not end the old suspicions between Arab Muslims and the West. This research investigates the beginning of the relations between the Arab Muslims and the West as they have developed over time, and then focuses its analysis on perceptions from both sides beginning with 9/11 through the events known as the Arab spring. The framework for analysis is a communication perspective, as embodied in the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM). According to CMM, communication can be understood as forms of interactions that both constitute and frame reality. The study posits the analysis that the current Arab Muslim-West divide, is often a conversation that is consistent with what CMM labels as the ethnocentric pattern. This analysis will suggest a new pathway, one that follows the CMM cosmopolitan form, as a more fruitful pattern for the future of Arab Muslim-West relations. This research emphasizes the factors fueling this ethnocentric pattern, in addition to ways of bringing the Islamic world and the West to understand each other with a more cosmopolitan approach, which, among other things, accepts mutual differences while fostering agreements. To reach this core, the study will apply a direct communicative engagement between the Islamic world and the West to foster trusted relations, between the two.

This study examines contemporary Sesotho proverbs with an attempt at establishing whether they perform a significant role in society. The research highlighted the fact that they have a role to play in the 21st century. Although not commonly used as in the traditional setup, contemporary proverbs have their place as a day to day activity. In terms of language development they also add value to language change and providing alternatives in the world of challenges. Through interviews and the questionnaire, the research, indeed, showed that contemporary proverbs' survival is guaranteed. Their survival in this modem world is of great importance in this research. The observation was that some of these contemporary proverbs are the same as traditional proverbs in many aspects which include their origin and structure. Some of the contemporary proverbs use or adopt familiar patterns to express new truths, thus reflecting on new events or aspects of the modern society. The possibility is that those that adopt the structure of the Sesotho traditional proverbs have all the chance of staying in the language. Some of these contemporary proverbs, however, survive on the premise that they are jokes created for fun by youth and other members of the creative section of the society. / African Languages / D. Litt. et Phil. (African Languages)

published_or_final_version / abstract / Humanities / Master / Master of Philosophy

The effects that Women's political participation in the Middle East has on political parties and regimes have been investigated by the political science community. However, how women's political participation and changing societal roles affect women's lives has not received adequate attention. This is a comparative historical analysis that investigates how women's societal roles and political participation in Iraq changed from 1968 to the present. It examines how factors such as social conservatism, party ideology, war, sanctions, religion, and international pressure during different periods in Iraq's modern history influenced changes in Iraqi women's roles and participation over time. These changes in societal roles and political participation are used to analyze the restrictions and expansions in Iraqi women's civil rights in areas such as family, work and mobility, political and cultural expression, health and sexual control, and education. / by Gina Marie Longo. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2008. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2008. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This dissertation answers the question of what the proper balance is for victims with respect to the formation of a truth or truth and reconciliation commission that is formed to address the aftermath of an authoritarian regime or armed conflict. A review of the historical operation of entities that have operated in the aftermath of authoritarian regimes and armed conflict is conducted in this dissertation. From the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials to the present day, nations have struggled to try to devise a systematic way to deal with the aftermath of harm caused to victims as a consequence of authoritarian regimes and armed conflict. An examination of the various past truth and reconciliation commissions, the International Criminal Court, and various treaties is here juxtaposed with the Colombian Justice and Peace program implemented a decade ago to bring about peace and reconciliation in Colombia. This dissertation concludes that an entity formed with the purpose of achieving the proper balance for victims of an authoritarian regime or armed conflict, must have a truth-telling component that works in tandem with a specialized court conceived with the objective of operating alongside the commission. Thus, while there is a punitive aspect, the focus is more on the relationship between the events, solutions, and relief provided for victims. An entity with such a focus has various components, including truth-telling and some form of sanction or punishment, but always with the betterment of the past, present, and future victims as well as the subject society or country as its priority. In that vein, a set of proposed flexible guidelines are presented as the culmination of this dissertation. The flexible guidelines proposed here set forth a balanced system between the commission and the court that will provide for both punishment and reconciliation for particular countries and the victims. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2015. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This dissertation examined the literature of cutback management in the context of the Great Recession. Specifically, it studied the relationship between cutback management policies used by county governments during the recession and revenue changes. The purpose of this dissertation was to test whether or not the percent change in revenue had an impact on the probability that cutback management policies were used in the recession. According to the cutback management literature developed in the 1970s and 1980s, there should be a relationship. The theoretical framework used for this study was the rational-approach framework, which proposes that every expenditure reducing and revenue increasing policy is enacted based on the percent decrease in revenue the government faces. This suggests that the cutback management policies are a proportional response to revenue decline. The framework was operationalized by using a binary logistic regression that used policy en actment as the dependent variable and the percent change in revenue as the independent variable. Eighty-six counties were sampled and 7 years of each county's budget book were examined for policies and financial data. The research found that eleven expenditure policies and three revenue policies had a statistically significant relationship with the percent change in revenues. This resulted in the conclusion that the framework and, therefore, the cutback management literature were useful in explaining primarily expenditure policies. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2015. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Fragments of the Moon is a novel set mostly in South Korea, examining relationships between people, interpersonal spaces, architectural spaces and landscape through a cross-cultural context. Matt, a graduate architect from Perth, Australia, finds himself increasingly vulnerable to cultural confusion as he adjusts to life away from his home and friends. Having initially assumed that Seoul's western facade echoes its social dynamic, Matt increasingly discovers that the Confucianism which underpins much of contemporary Korean society makes all relationships far more complex than his assumptions had allowed. Together with a Canadian student who is seeking to find the essence of a different Korea through her investigation of Buddhism, and through meeting diverse Korean characters, readers will discover several of the many facets of contemporary Korean culture. Readers will be encouraged to test the slippery surfaces on which familiar and unfamiliar attitudes to bodies, landscape and created spaces rest. 'Body, Space, Ideas of Home: Cross-cultural Perspectives' (thesis) The thesis examines the interaction of body space, architectural space, landscape, and emotional states in contemporary literary fiction from several cultural perspectives. Bodies, landscapes, and architectural spaces are shown to be devices through which contemporary authors with different cultural backgrounds have expressed character and explored ideas, especially thematic concerns related to cultural or cross-cultural confusion or understanding. Notions of 'feeling at home' and 'being alien' are investigated through the work of authors who either have a cross-cultural heritage (e.g. Jhumpa Lahiri a Bengali/American), or who write about a culture which is not their own (e.g. Dianne Highbridge, an Australian writing about Japan). Several chosen authors explore the relationships between the spiritual and the physical, the metaphysical and the corporeal. These elements are particularly highlighted when examining the narratives of Tim Winton (The Riders, 1994) and Simone Lazaroo (The World Waiting To Be Made, 1994); and two of Japan's most popular writers, Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood, 2000) and Banana Yoshimoto (Lizard, 1995). For some writers, this exploration of spaces forms the focal point of their work; for others, it is an important facet of their narrative world, which helps to ground their writing for contemporary readers whose own backgrounds must also influence their understandings.

v. 1 [Novel]: End of the night girl [Embargoed] -- v. 2 [Exegesis]: Navigating the kingdom of night: writing the holocaust / 'End of the Night Girl': Nothing seems to go right for Molly – she’s stuck in a dead-end waitressing job, she’s sleeping with a man she doesn’t even like, and she’s just been saddled with a swarm of goldfish and a pregnant stepsister. The chance discovery of an old photograph leads her into an act of creation, and brings her into contact with the ghost of a woman who has been dead for more than sixty years. Sixty years earlier, in Poland, Gienia’s family arranges her marriage to a distant cousin. Not long after her marriage to this stranger, the Nazis invade and she has to face life in the ghetto and the horrors of Auschwitz. End of the Night Girl is a complex fictional narrative in which the lives of these two women, ‘real’ and imagined, imagined and re-imagined, are inextricably combined. ‘Navigating the Kingdom of Night’: Critics, historians and Holocaust survivors have argued for decades over whether the Holocaust should be accessible to fiction and, if so, who has the right to write those fictions. ‘Navigating the Kingdom of Night’ addresses such concerns and analyses various literary strategies adopted by authors of Holocaust fiction, including the non-realist narrative techniques used by authors such as Yaffa Eliach, Jonathan Safran Foer and John Boyne and the self-reflexivity of Art Spiegelman. Through the course of the essay I contextualise End of the Night Girl by turning my attention to works that raise critical issues of authorial intent and the reader/writer contract; for example Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird and Helen Darville’s The Hand That Signed the Paper. How did I resolve my own concerns? Which texts helped me and why? Together End of the Night Girl and ‘Navigating the Kingdom of Night’, one creatively and one critically, explore these complex and controversial questions in a contemporary Australian context. / Thesis(PhD)-- School of Humanities, 2007

Writers of fiction have long since relied on love, romance, and desire to drive the plots of their work, yet some postcolonial authors use romance and interpersonal relationships to illustrate the larger political and social forces that affect their relatively marginalized experiences in a global context. To illustrate this literary strategy, I have chosen to discuss four novels written in the twenty-first century by Pakistani authors: Tbe Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Trespassing by Uzma Aslam Khan, The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam, and Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie. With the geographical origin of these writers as a common starting place from which to compare and contrast their perspectives on global politics, their understandings of gender, and their perceptions of how the public and the private constitute and intersect each other, I will use postcolonial theory to dissect the treatment of romance in their respective novels. / v, 85 leaves ; 29 cm