The Heritagescape: Looking at Landscapes of the Past

Heritage sites are one of the most visible, accessible and tangible manifestations of heritage and are also some of the essential building blocks of heritage. Yet we are still without a sense of how they operate over time and in relation to each other. This paper will introduce the notion of the ‘heritagescape’ as a means of interpreting and analysing heritage sites as unique social spaces that offer an experience of the past. In contrast to previous attempts to investigate these places, the heritagescape offers the means to focus both on the underlying similarities and also on the relationships of different sites to each other. As such, heritagescape offers a coherent and overarching methodology by which to identify the universal processes and elements that characterise heritage sites and will allow us to take our examination of heritage as a cultural phenomenon into the future.     

我国内地旅游网站的可用性研究——基于对海口市网民的调查

目前国内很多针对旅游网站的研究大多是关注旅游网站的功能,网站可用性方面的研究很大程度上被忽视了。本文对此进行了探索性研究：通过采用修正的启发式评价方法,定义了用户对网站评价的基准,对489份基于5大类24个指标的调查问卷进行了分析和讨论,发现了我国内地旅游网站在可用性如内容服务形式、整体结构设计等方面存在的问题,同时给出了解决这些问题的建议和措施。     

Machiavelli: A Socratic?

Erica Benner and Leo Strauss have recently challenged the reigning consensus that, having concentrated on politics, Machiavelli was not a philosopher. Readers did not always consider Machiavelli's work to be unphilosophical; and whether a commentator considers Machiavelli to be a “philosopher” depends on his or her understanding of what a philosopher is. Neither Benner nor Strauss takes the activities and studies of professors of philosophy in universities today to be definitive. Instead, they look to an older tradition both describe as “Socratic.” Benner rests her argument primarily on Machiavelli's references to Xenophon, Plato, and Plutarch. Unfortunately, Machiavelli's references to the works of Xenophon and Plato do not include those that feature Socrates. Strauss points out the similarities between Socrates and Machiavelli's emphasis on the political and their appeal to the young, but he concludes that, although Machiavelli is a “political philosopher,” his use of philosophy to serve the desires of the demos means that he is not a “Socratic.”     

Birmingham Bog outdoor laboratory: potentials and possibilities for embedding field-based teaching within the undergraduate classroom

Providing cost-effective, hands-on field-based experiences to large cohorts of undergraduate students provides a core challenge for effective teaching and learning. This grand challenge is tackled through the construction of an exemplar outdoor learning environment within the Environmental Change Outdoor Laboratory (ECOLAB): Birmingham Bog (BB). Adjacent to the Geography building, the facility aims to produce a seamless, interconnected learning environment (in both space and time) that brings inaccessible fieldwork activities direct to the classroom at the time and frequency appropriate to the learning objectives. With the integration of this facility within a 3rd year undergraduate module, we explore through group interviews the ways in which BB adapted and influenced students’ engagement with lecture material, and the extent to which the approach can complement or replace current field based teaching activities. The group interviews identified how BB was considered an example of “effective learning” within the context of the wider degree programme. However, if confirmed, the value placed on residential field courses cannot be met by such campus experiences. Despite this, BB represents an increasingly fertile space for deeper stimulation and innovative ways of learning; diversifying pedagogical techniques and enabling students to re-engage with lecture content.