Virtual Guest Research Articles

Improving Critical Thinking by Using Technology in the Learning Process

Improving Critical Thinking by Using Technology in the Learning Process

When Life Gives You Lemons, Do Outreach! A Program for University Professors to Virtually Connect to K-12 Students during the COVID-19 Pandemic and beyond

At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in the Spring of 2020, North Carolina (NC) public schools moved to distance education in which all students attended classes on video conferencing programs. During this time, NC State University faculty offered virtual guest talks to NC K-12 students. Eighty-eight faculty from three NC State colleges volunteered and 161 teachers requested talks, with approximately 5,400 students. Overall, significantly more teachers from the NC Piedmont region requested speakers (p<.0001); significantly more urban teachers requested talks (p<.0001); and, significantly more elementary school teachers requested speakers than middle (p<.0001) or high school (p<.0001) teachers. The program was beneficial to teachers and students, exposing them to real-world research. In the future, the program should be

Influence of Lennard-Jones Parameters in the Temperature Dependence of Real Gases Diffusion through Nanochannels.

Umbrella Sampling Molecular Dynamics has been used to determine transition energies for different guest molecules through hydroquinone β-clathrate nanochannels, as well as their temperature trend. This clathrate has been shown to successfully enclathrate different types of small gases with remarkable selectivity, and thus it has been proposed as a potential gas separation and storage medium. Most of these potential guest gases can be successfully modeled as single Lennard-Jones spheres. Then, to obtain a general view of diffusion probabilities for different potential guest molecules, a comparative study for different virtual guest molecules described by different Lennard-Jones parameters has been performed. A regular temperature trend has been obtained for the transition energies for the molecular model characteristic parameter range explored. Finally, to locate the transition energy values of real gases within the space of phases explored, calculations have been repeated for molecular models of different noble gases and H2. The correlation results presented allow a wide interpolation ability for determining the transition energies of potential guest molecules stored or diffusing through the nanochannels of the studied clathrate structure.

Taking language science to zoom school: Virtual outreach to elementary school students.

We describe guest speaker presentations that we developed to bring language science to elementary school students via videoconference. By using virtual backgrounds and guided discovery learning, we effectively engage children as young as 7 years in in‐depth explorations of language science concepts. We share the core principles that guide our presentations and describe two of our outreach activities, Speech Detectives and Bilingual Barnyard. We report brief survey data from 157 elementary school students showing that they find our presentations interesting and educational. While our pivot to virtual outreach was motivated by the Covid‐19 pandemic, it allows us to reach geographically diverse audiences, and we suggest that virtual guest speaker presentations will remain a viable and effective method of public outreach.

Virtual Guest Speakers in Textile and Apparel Courses: Student Experiences and Expectations

This paper focuses on the findings related to the second part of a continuing study of student impressions of the industry guest speaker experience in college fashion courses: student perceptions of virtual guest speakers. Data from 130 participants who were enrolled in the researchers’ textile and apparel classes at two United States universities were analyzed. Findings suggested that although there are disadvantages to the use of virtual industry guest visits, many students find them useful and enlightening. While respondents overall preferred in-person visits, student concern with technological issues seems to have lessened during the forced move to online coursework during the COVID-19 pandemic, and they have come to realize that the online medium, especially through the “chat” functionality found in videoconferencing platforms, can be an effective way to ask questions. Suggestions are made for instructors considering the use of the virtual medium for industry speaker visits.

Paradigm shift in teaching-learning from classroom to virtual mode – Challenges and opportunities

Since the unprecedented declaration of lockdown there has been a paradigm shift in medical education from chalk and board to virtual mode imposing both challenges and opportunities to faculty and students alike. As guest lecture is an innovative way of pedagogy we addressed them through an online talk to analyse the preferences towards sudden change in medical education. Students and faculty were addressed about the paradigm shift in teaching learning methods through an online guest lecture and the attendees answered a feedback questionnaire on different Teaching Learning methods. Based on responses to the questions results were plotted in Microsoft Excel and completed questionnaires were analyzed for statistics. : 90% of students and 100% of faculty found online guest lecture interesting and opined positively about having more online lectures in academic year. As far as teaching learning method is concerned both faculty and as students preferred offline/ traditional/ classroom teaching. : Online guest lecture offers more opportunities than challenges for both faculty and students. Arranging online guest lectures is economical, cost effective, has ease of attending from place of convenience provided robust internet connection is ensured, eliminates travel time as well as reduces the programme budget. Hence more number of virtual guest lectures can be arranged in an academic year for benefit of medical undergraduates. It is a novel platform for student teacher interaction and arrangement of more and more online guest lectures from eminent speakers excelling in various superspecialities should be encouraged.

129 Product testing as a learning activity within an equine nutrition course

The objective of this project was to evaluate product testing as a high-impact learning activity. Sophomore level ANMLTEC 3131T Equine Feeding and Nutrition students monitored assigned horses every 2 wk 4 times during the 2019 and 2020 fall semesters. Students collected data including: current diet, workload, BCS, heart girth circumference, body length, body weight, and general health observations. Students formulated a report and produced recommendations for their assigned horse's future nutritional management (13% in 2019 and 20% in 2020 of their total course grade). In 2019, 5 of the monitored horses were switched to a new feed (SAFE ‘N EASY Senior, BUCKEYE Nutrition, Dalton, OH) at the beginning of the semester. Venipuncture samples pre- and post-feeding and rump fat ultrasounds were conducted before the semester and then again as a lab activity. Plasma glucose and insulin data were discussed with the class. Another lab session was devoted to touring the feed mill manufacturing this feed. In 2020, all 12 of the monitored horses completed a crossover design study comparing 2 feed formulations. Fecal pH of freshly passed manure was measured as part of lab activities on 5 occasions. Another lab session was devoted to a virtual guest lecture and Q&A period with the industry nutritionist involved in designing the study. After turning in their projects, students took a post-pre survey (IRB 2019E0732 and 2020E1185). A post-pre survey required respondents to think back before an experience and rate themselves before and then also after the experience. Students (n = 18) rated their understanding/knowledge/ability for 7 statements before and after their project horse monitoring assignment using a Likert scale (1 = Very low to 5 = Very high). The 7 statements were:1) Apply best management practices for feeding equids;2) Monitor equine body condition;3) Monitor equine body weight;4) Find and use information, including label and lab analyses, to make equine feeding decisions;5) Evaluate, formulate, and balance rations;6) Evaluate the effect of diet on equine well-being/health; and7) Evaluate feed products for use in equine diets. Data from 2019 and 2020 were combined. Chi-squared tests for independence were conducted to determine if the students perceived a change in their abilities. The average Likert rating for every statement was greater after (overall average ± SD; 4.2 ± 0.7) the project compared with before (2.3 ± 1.2) for each statement ( P < 0.001). This activity is an example of a productive collaboration with an industry stakeholder to promote student learning.

CONNECTING GRADUATE STUDENTS TO VIRTUAL GUESTS THROUGH ASYNCHRONOUS DISCUSSIONS - ANALYSIS OF AN EXPERIENCE

Information technologies provide unique opportunities for higher education faculty to rethink the resources that are available to re-envision their pedagogical techniques. One such promise is the ability of the faculty member to invite virtual guest speakers or experts into the graduate course through web-based conferencing. The virtual guest can host asynchronous interactive discussions with students in the course for a specified period of time. These technologies provide students with the ability to interact with guests in new ways by expressing individual concerns and discussing them without time and place constraints. This paper describes in quantitative and qualitative terms one such experience in a graduate course where three virtual guests were invited to interact with the students over the eleven-week course.

High-Performance Memory Snapshotting for Real-Time, Consistent, Hypervisor-Based Monitors

This paper presents a concurrent-computing approach—high-performance memory snapshotting—to improving security-introspection of virtual machine guest memory. Efficient introspection improves security monitoring in existing hypervisor systems with real-time, consistent memory introspection capabilities. Efficient introspection has three requirements that each must be met to provide protection against evasive threats: native memory introspection performance, accpetable guest performance, and consistent introspection view of guest memory. Existing introspection systems have provided one or two of these properties but not all three at once. High-performance memory snapshots are evaluated as a solution for meeting all three efficient introspection requirements. In this work we describe how existing system performance can be improved with high-performance snapshotting, present an efficient introspection prototype that has been released as an element of the open-source LibVMI introspection library1, evaluate the efficient introspection prototype on both applications and microbenchmarks, provide demonstrations of introspection application modules enabled by efficient introspection, and provide performance guidance for developing introspection applications utilizing efficient introspection.

The use of student-copresented virtual guest speakers in entrepreneurial education

Students wishing to be entrepreneurs have a great need for role models to serve as inspiration and help them envision their future organization. Universities often use guest speakers for this purpose. The author introduces a methodology of using a library of audio tapes as a virtual guest speaker series, larger and more diversified than even the most well-connected university could attract. Students copresent with the executives by pairing the taped messages with student-created presentation visuals.

Simplifying virtual linux containers using docker.

Docker is a relatively new take on Linux container based virtualization. Docker is quickly being adopted and used worldwide for its ease of use. It makes use of Linux kernel namespaces and control-groups to isolate running container instances, which are self-contained and fully-functioning systems. This makes it possible for multiple container instances to run on the same host natively using the same host Linux kernel. This contrasts with the current trend of hypervisor based virtualization, which uses a virtual guest operating system running on top of the host operating system. Because each system has its own configuration, porting hefty applications can be troublesome. Using Docker, applications can be ported from a development environment to a production environment quickly and seamlessly. Docker packages this technology into an easy-to-manage system which can be maintained by both system administrators and developers alike. By utilizing Docker, businesses can increase their efficiency and productivity by saving time which is usually reserved for systems configuration.

The Use of a Virtual Guest Speaker as a Catalyst for Deep Learning

Teaching undergraduate students as they prepare to become bilingual teachers is often a challenge due to their maturational development and the logistical limitations of college courses. Nevertheless, teacher educators must foster preservice teachers’ understanding of factors that impact learning and academic success. This article analyses the use of a virtual guest speaker in an asynchronous discussion as a way to promote critical analysis of policy issues which superseded the memorization of concepts taught in the course. Analysis reveals that the virtual guest speaker served as a catalyst for critical thought about the course content.

Special Issue: Virtual Environments and Rehabilitation Guest Editors' Introduction

Special Issue: Virtual Environments and Rehabilitation Guest Editors' Introduction

Virtio network paravirtualization driver: Implementation and performance of a de-facto standard

One of the techniques used to improve I/O performance of virtual machines is paravirtualization. Paravirtualized devices are intended to reduce the performance overhead on full virtualization where all hardware devices are emulated. The interface of a paravirtualized device is not identical to that of the underlying hardware. The OS of the virtual guest machine must be ported in order to use a paravirtualized device. In this paper, the network virtualization done by the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is described. The KVM model is different from other Virtual Machines Monitors (VMMs) because the KVM is a Linux kernel model and it depends on hardware support. In this work, the overhead of using such virtual networks is been measured. A paravirtualized model by using the virtio [38] network driver is described, and some performance results of web benchmark on the two models are presented.

Special Issue: Virtual Reality and Sports Guest Editors' Introduction

Special Issue: Virtual Reality and Sports Guest Editors' Introduction

Virtual Machines And Networks - Installation, Performance, Study, Advantages And Virtualization Options

The interest in virtualization has been growing rapidly in the IT industry because of inherent benefits like better resource utilization and ease of system manageability. The experimentation and use of virtualization as well as the simultaneous deployment of virtual software are increasingly getting popular and in use by educational institutions for research and teaching. This paper stresses on the potential advantages associated with virtualization and the use of virtual machines for scenarios, which cannot be easily implemented and/or studied in a traditional academic network environment, but need to be explored and experimented by students to meet the raising needs and knowledge-base demanded by the IT industry. In this context, we discuss various aspects of virtualization - starting from the working principle of virtual machines, installation procedure for a virtual guest operating system on a physical host operating system, virtualization options and a performance study measuring the throughput obtained on a network of virtual machines and physical host machines. In addition, the paper extensively evaluates the use of virtual machines and virtual networks in an academic environment and also specifically discusses sample projects on network security, which may not be feasible enough to be conducted in a physical network of personal computers; but could be conducted only using virtual machines.

Editorial: The PhD thesis as a virtual guest house

PhD theses. Who reads them? Within UK nursing the answer is: hardly anybody, save a few PhD supervisors, students and enamoured academics. Since the millennium, the Royal College of Nursing’s Steinberg Collection of over 1000 hard bound theses has seen around 250-300 episodes of access each year. This low level of thesis usage is also characteristic of university libraries in the UK (Copeland and Penman 2004), where processes for accessing these tombstone-like tomes are often tortuous. However, libraries throughout the world are increasingly making electronically formatted theses (e‐theses) freely accessible on‐line via web‐based Institutional Repositories (Copeland et al. 2005). This offers an opportunity to transform PhD access and use. North America, Australia, Sweden, Germany and the UK have been in the vanguard of development. Following a slow start, UK nursing is gradually waking up to this opportunity. At the time of writing, within Scotland, there are five nursing PhD theses available electronically. This article draws on recent experience of actively disseminating a new nursing PhD electronically (Macduff 2007), and on many nights spent in guest houses during academic research work.

Tweens on the Internet - communication in virtual guest books

Today digital communication is a natural part of young people’s social life. It has increased drastically during the last few years, and there are still a lot of questions about what this means, and how this new media affects communication. This study focuses on young people of 11-13, i.e.the age between children and teenagers, also called tweens. In a large study, the overall aim is to see what communication in the Internet community LunarStorm means to them in their social life. This particular paper reports on the content of the asynchronous communication in the participants’ digital guest books, which is one of the main channels for communication between the participants. A group of 15 tweens from a small village in Sweden were studied when communicating in Sweden’s largest Internet community, LunarStorm. The research method used was what is usually described as cyber ethnography. The contributions in the participants’ digital guest books are not written by the guest book owners themselves, which means that the focus is on the collective aspects of this communication, and not from a specific children’s point of view. Qualitative analyses were made of the content of 947 contributions in the participants’ guest books in order to make a statistical analysis. Most of the participants’ communication was between friends in the same geographical neighbourhood concerning how things are going, what to do, when to meet and similar things. The contributions were divided into three categories: (1) Social chat (2) Chain letters, and (3) Messages incomprehensible to outsiders. The information-category was divided into three sub-categories depending on the emotions expressed. 44% of the total messages were considered as emotionally neutral information, 39% as kind or encouraging, and also with an aim to sort things out, and 6% of the total messages contained insults and elements of anger. Among the younger users of the Internet community LunarStorm, the main reason to participate seems to be to keep in touch with already known friends. Being part of an already existing group continues and develops online. The positive tone among the participants in the community and the possibility to express difficult feelings, which have been reported on earlier from LunarStorm, still seem to be present.

Evaluating the impact of guest speaker postings in online discussions

AbstractThis study investigated the impact of virtual guest speakers facilitating asynchronous discussions. The setting was an online instructional technology course with 16 graduate students and two guest speakers. The research reports the quantity and level of critical thinking of the students and guests. Each posting was coded for frequency and critical thinking. The results indicate that higher‐order thinking occurred and student participation remained high throughout the length of both threaded discussions, regardless of the amount of postings and time spent by the guests. The findings support that guest speakers can be used sparingly in online discussions while still maintaining the quality of the online discussion and frequent, meaningful interactions among students.

Special Section: Legal, Ethical, and Policy Issues Associated with Virtual Environments and Computer Mediated Reality Guest Editors' Introduction

Special Section: Legal, Ethical, and Policy Issues Associated with Virtual Environments and Computer Mediated Reality Guest Editors' Introduction