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At EA/CITAR (School of Arts/Research Centre in Science and Technology of the Arts), sound has always assumed a fundamental role, both in academic research and curricular offer, featuring a Master Program in Sound Design and a Doctoral Program Specialization in Computer Music. This paper presents an overview of some recent artistic/research projects undertaken by students and researchers at this institution, which stimulate the user/listener awareness for the acoustic phenomenon. Furthermore, we describe three pedagogical practices, stemming from Soundscape and Film Sound studies, which aim at training students to avoid the devious influence of sight on the assessment of soundscapes.

Nowadays, contemporary art practices have been expanding into fields outside their own borders. According to Claire Bishop (2012), this expanded field of post-studio practices currently goes under a variety of names: socially engaged art, community-based art, experimental communities, dialogic art, littoral art, interventionist art, participatory art, collaborative art, contextual art and (most recently) social practice. By engaging, artists nurture the sense of belonging and search for an identity of the place they inhabit. In Hong Kong and Macao, as well as in the Pearl River Delta and China in general, the speed of urban transformation is forcing artists to reconsider their participation in the city in order to develop a creative place making process that is according to the new identity of the place. By doing so, they are also included in what has been defined as “creative industries” that tries to build a new image of the urban fabric. Linked with this sort of collective attitude, there is also an attempt to find a sense of local identity that has been disappearing in the face of these major developments. Engaging with the city and the communities may constitute, therefore, a challenge for the young generation, especially in hybrid places such as Hong Kong and Macao, where artists find themselves in an effort to understand the core values of their fragmented identity. In this paper we will analyze some projects that artists are doing in both SAR´s, in order to create a sense of place in this state of transition.

African women from different countries and social classes, from those seeking refugee status to diplomats and peasants' daughters, have been arriving in increasing numbers on Chinese shores since the 1980s. The amazing stories of some of these "invisible" but dynamic women have been ignored, yet they reveal great diversity and deserve scholarly attention, as they provide rich material for studies on the African diaspora in China. This article focuses on African migration to Macao, a former Portuguese colony and primary migration destination in the Pearl Delta River Region, which currently hosts the densest African population in China. It explores both the more recent and the relatively longer-term migration of African women and university students to Macao, and examines the intersection of these communities resulting from the overlap between the ongoing global movements of African diasporas and new African migratory trends to China. The article draws on the life stories as well as the educational and entrepreneurial experiences of African women in Macao, and investigates the relevance of ethnic networks of trust and reciprocity for their communities' survival. This article places specific emphais on the experiences of African women, recognizing their achievements in the face of multiple intersections of racism and sexism on the part of both state and society, and reveals how the women employ a resistance strategy by reinforcing ethnic migrant networks.

Crime fiction in China emerged in the 1890s in translations of Western works, and evolved from the mere imitation of Western crime fiction to becoming an autonomous literary genre. Despite fluctuations in popularity, the genre of Chinese crime fiction, the plots of which are based on true cases, has retained a reasonably constant presence on the literary scene, and has captured the popular imagination in contemporary China and, more recently, across the world. After the demise of Mao, under whose governance the genre was banned, the government of the early Deng regime began to favor so-called “legal system literature” (fazhi wenxue), and aimed to use it to propagate moral principles and maintain political control in opposition to writers who strived for independence and originality. Since the mid and late 1980s, which were considered the heyday of Chinese crime fiction, and the expansion of the legal system and legal institutions, crime fiction has served to illuminate the role of law and to display new social perceptions. To investigate these attitudes, I focus on works of contemporary Chinese crime fiction by arguing that they are expressions of a confluence of cultural exchange and new trends. Several factors may have contributed to such a change, from the impact of the cinema and television serials in China to the celebrity status of Chinese detectives, lawyers and judges both as crime solvers and writers in the Chinese mainland and amongst the Chinese writing diaspora. An important finding is that besides giving detailed descriptions of legal procedures, all of the works studied have clearly shifted away from the traditional formula of Chinese crime fiction, that is, of the quest of a hero for justice, punishment, and revenge, to focus on the process of solving crime and the rendering of justice through legal processes. It seems that crime fiction is becoming crucial in conveying a new understanding of citizen’s rights in an attempt to fit into ongoing contemporary debates on universalistic notions of justice and the competence of legal institutions to provide justice to increasingly marginalized sectors of contemporary China.

Virgílio de Lemos (1929-2013), poeta de vanguarda, é um dos precursores da modernidade e experimentalismo como criador do “barroco estético” que ele próprio designou como a linguagem poética marcante nas letras moçambicanas no das décadas de 50 e 60

The difficult task of innovation is a key facet of Research & Development (R&D) institutions. To Design, innovation is to make the project technically feasible, economically viable, merchandising interesting and emotionally engaging. Design Thinking integrated with R&D organizations can foster the relationship between Universities and new markets. By addressing these topics, this book researches new emerging design methods and provide an overview of Design Thinking tools that can be applied in an early stage of the R&D research process to produce meaningful results. It is taken into account that design, through Design Thinking, extends to the experience that costumers/users have with products/services or even multidimensional experiences, which is a relevant input for R&D innovation development. In fact, the establishment of coherent guidelines for the Design Thinking process is a very complex task, due to its interdisciplinary requirements, that convey many diverse mindsets. The main focus of this book is creating an analysis toolkit that enables non-specialist and specialist users to perform high-quality design solutions.

To what extent is students' understanding of computer science culturally situated? This, possibly philosophical question, has come to the surface at Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden, where many Chinese students study computer science together with the local students. We did an exploratory study using email interviews to see if our intuitions could be relied on. We collected data from Chinese students studying in master programs and analysed the data using a phenomenographic perspective. A complex intertwined relationship between the content of their learning (the WHAT), the ways in which they went about studying (the HOW), the aims of their studies (the WHY), and the competencies developed from the intercultural context they studied in (the WHERE) was observed. In this paper we offer some insights from the results of the pilot study and discuss how they have shaped our on-going study in the field.

Phenomenography is a well-known empirical research approach that is often used to investigate students' ways of learning programming. Phenomenographic pedagogy is an instructional approach to plan learning and teaching activities. This theoretical paper gives an overview of prior research in phenomenographic studies of programming and shows how the results from these research studies can be applied to course design. Pedagogic principles grounded in the phenomenographic perspective on teaching and learning are then presented that consider how to tie students' experiences to the course goals (relevance structure) and how to apply variation theory to focus on the desired critical aspects of learning. Building on this, an introductory object-oriented programming course is described as an example of research-based course design. The insights gained from the experience of running the course are shared with the community of computer science educators, as also the benefits and responsibilities for those who wish to adopt the phenomenographic perspective on learning to plan their teaching. The development of an increased awareness of the variation in students' ways of experiencing programming and the need to broaden the context of the programming course are discussed.

During the past two years, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have created wide interest in the academic world raising both enthusiasm for new opportunities for universities and many concerns for the future of university education. The discussion has mainly appeared in non-scientific forums, such as magazine articles, columns and blogs, making it difficult to judge wider opinions within academia. To collect more rigorous data we surveyed teachers, researchers, and academic managers on their opinions and experiences of MOOCs. In this paper, we present our analysis of responses from the computer science academic community (n=137). Their feelings about MOOCs are highly mixed. Content analysis of open-ended questions revealed that the most often mentioned positive aspects included affordances of MOOCs, freedom of time and location for studying, and the possibility to experience teaching from top-level international teachers/experts. The most common negative aspects included concerns about pedagogical designs of MOOCs, assessment practices, and lack of interaction with the teacher. About half the respondents claimed they had not changed their teaching as a result of MOOCs, a small number used MOOCs as learning resources and very few were engaging with MOOCs in any significant way.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have recently become a hot topic in the academic world, launching a wide ranging discussion on a number of issues. In this research, we surveyed academics' awareness, attitudes, perceptions, and experiences of MOOCs. We received responses from 236 academics from 23 countries, who were working in different roles such as teachers, researchers, managers, and pedagogical developers. Participants were invited to answer questions concerning their awareness and attitudes towards MOOCs. For participants with some knowledge of MOOCs, we requested their experiences and their observations of the impact of MOOCS on their students, teaching colleagues, and within their institutions. We found the most common reaction to MOOCs amongst the academics was concern but many were positive about the phenomenon. The academics claimed their students could be motivated to take MOOCs because of flexibility and no cost involved. While many academics were not aware of their students taking a MOOC and had not observed any changes to teaching programs at their institutions because of MOOCs, there was evidence of some activity and future plans for engagement in MOOCs.