NCube/papyrus huggingface dataset:
Les enjeux de l'utilisation des TIC dans les institutions de formation des enseignants au Costa Rica

In Latin America, Costa Rica has taken a pioneering role in integrating technology into the education system in the 1980s. However, the integration of technologies into teacher training is still a challenge. In order to better understand the place of technologies in teacher education, this thesis presents three research objectives: 1) to identify individual and organisational determinants associated with the adoption of technologies in teacher training institutions; 2) to determine the use of technologies by prospective teachers for their training; 3) to determine how prospective teachers perceive their effectiveness in relation to the pedagogical integration of technologies in their pedagogical approaches. Using a mixed-method research paradigm, 341 prospective teachers attending the two costarican universities providing teacher training at the pre-school and primary education level program completed both quantitative and qualitative-type questionnaires. In addition, interwievs were conducted with 16 participants and 9 governmental and university policies were analysed. Overall findings suggest that factors likely to influence professor’s decisions to adopt and integrate these technologies into teaching are both individual and organisationals. These included attitude towards technology and perceived usefulness of technology in teaching, the institutional cultural environment, as well as resources available to support uptake. Findings concerning the use of the technologies by prospective teachers suggest that the devices most frequently used for their learning are not the same as the technologies used by their professors in their teaching. In general, prospective teachers showed a high level of confidence in using technologies and in integrating technologies into their future professional activity. xiii This research contributes to the growing significance of individual, contextual and organisational influences in the adoption of technologies into teaching and into teacher training.

Keyphrases: Information and communication technologies (ICTs), ICT integration, Teacher training, Self-efficacy, Dissemination and adoption of technologies
Une exploration des tensions organisationnelles constitutives de l'expérience de la participation publique

This thesis analyzes the experiences of the citizens involved in public participation, more specifically in two neighborhood committees established as part of a major infrastructure project in Montreal. As the literature review has shown, there are tensions, contradictions and paradoxes in those experiences, but they tend to be treated as a background theme rather than brought to the fore, and consequently they lack the conceptual tools that would allow a better understanding of their significance. To address this gap in the literature, this research brings together two disciplinary fields by adopting a constitutive approach on organizational tensions (Putnam, Fairhurst et Banghart, 2016), that treats tensions as a normal condition of organizations rather than a problem to solve. The eight qualitative interviews that were conducted shown how heterogeneous these experiences are, but also how they are constituted by multiple tensions that are linked by the members in and through discourse (Sheep, Fairhurst et Khazanchi, 2017). These tensions have been presented in three families: the tension between collaboration and confrontation (and the other tensions interlinked with it), the tensions related to the exercise of representation and the difficult reconciliation between several engagements. Indeed, coping with these tensions may involve great emotional difficulties that could lead to a withdrawal from public participation. However, this research also draws attention to the capacity of these tensions to be productive and to bring the practice of public participation closer to its ideals.

Keyphrases: Collaboration, Organizational tensions, Public participation, Citizen participation, Neighborhood committee, Organizational communication, Representation
La capoeira : une ethnographie de pratiques d'amateurs.es dans une école de Montréal

Capoeira is an ancient Afro-Brazilian practice that reveals various elements and rituals. Analyzing it far from its roots, either Africa or Brazil, seemed interesting and sparked my curiosity about the topic. Mainly inspired by the cultural studies movement, I explore capoeira in Montreal as a cultural practice, and I analyze how people practise it in a specific Montreal school. Leaving the cultural studies background behind, I propose the analysis of the concept of amateur developed by Antoine Hennion (2004), to understand the attachment process between the "capoeiristas" and the teachers with the capoeira itself. My research is based on an ethnographic study that took place from November 2016 to January 2017. During these three months, I participated in and observed about twenty courses of capoeira. In addition to these observations, I met informally with the members of the capoeira school who allowed me to take notes during our encounters. The content I gathered form the material from which I built my analysis, highlighting the complexity of capoeira and the different elements that it constitutes.

Keyphrases: Capoeira, Cultural Studies, Amateur, Attachment, Power relations, Ethnography
"On fait ça en public" : engagement, interface, interactivité chez Moment Factory

Montreal-based company Moment Factory produces multimedia projects that aim at bringing collective experience in the digital sphere, by creating unforgettable memories and emotions for their final users. To achieve that objective, they put together hybrid environments, both natural and digital, to be experienced by the users along a somewhat predefined emotional pattern. The present study delves into the design process of Moment Factory’s projects by way of two distinct experiences: a research phase in the offices of the company, as well as an exploratory user experience of Foresta Lumina, a tangible embodiment of the hybrid environments previously mentioned. What is the source of user engagement in the projects? How can the designers influence the emotional path of the users without interfering with their interactive freedom inside the hybrid environments? What are these hybrid environments, and how do they influence user experience and user engagement? These questions, and several other, have guided this study and found avenues towards further reflection through the work of authors such as Brenda Laurel, Jonathan Steuer, Thierry Bardini and Jon Anderson. Their notions of interface, presence and augmented presence, user, affordances, agent and actant, and finally postnatural outtakes were crucial in acquiring a better understanding of Moment Factory and their projects. The reflective pathways opened in my analysis point towards theories of the postnatural to conceive the mediated natural environments created by Moment Factory. The structures (forests, rocks, plains, bridges, urban squares, etc.) are modified by their digital mediation, and the result of this mutation is an augmented entity, not solely natural or solely digital, but a hybrid construct with an augmented, unique, postnatural identity.

Keyphrases: Affordances, Postnatural, User Experience, Augmented presence, Interactivity, Presence, Moment Factory, Engagement, Interface, Foresta Lumina
Every revolution has a soundtrack : étude des contributions de cinq artistes rap activistes au mouvement social Black Lives Matter

This master’s thesis aims to explore how social activism is shaped by rap artists involved within the Black Lives Matter movement. Firstly, considering the social movement as a participatory and democratic conversation on race, I study the conditions of articulation of the artistic practices to social activism from the point of view of five rap artists. The analysis of patterns of regularities and singularities, which circulate through the artists’ discourse, allows a problematization of different social and citizen-lead modes of activism through the arts. The research shows that citizen involvement and participation, which are at the heart of creative, imaginative and expressive processes, function as efficient means for education, individual and collective empowerment and conscientization, and social liberation. Secondly, the theoretical and epistemological perspectives that orient this master’s thesis stem from decolonial, black feminist and feminist research. Such a standpoint allows an in-depth look at the power relations that organize and shape trajectories of artists and members of black communities in the United States. Based on the specific points of view of the artists as well as their comments and testimonies on their experiences of power, I analyze mechanisms and strategies of colonial power that contributes to hold in place and reproduce the system of power called white supremacy. Inputs from the artists offer some significant insights into a critical reconceptualiation of colonial power and a redefinition of political issues such as participatory democracy and critical education.

Keyphrases: Rap, Race, Empowerment, Black Lives Matter, Activism, Participatory democracy, Hip hop, Raptivism, Coloniality, Colonial power, White supremacy, Decolonization
Les dispositifs communicationnels qui font exister et font parler des peuples isolés d’Amazonie Brésilienne : une approche constitutive

In the Brazilian Amazon region, we find indigenous peoples that do not keep a regular contact with outsiders (national or other indigenous societies), which makes it hard to learn more about their lifestyles, habits and characteristics. Despite this situation of incommunicability, some organisations study these tribes in order, as they claim, to understand and protect them. The Brazilian government as well as non-governmental organisations, with the support of anthropologists, indeed try to guarantee the protection of these isolated people’s territories to prevent threats from foreign interests that look for resources from the Amazon. This territorial protection falls within the framework of indigenous policies that allow the monitoring of Amazonian areas, but forbids the establishment of contacts with the peoples who live in isolation.   For this research, I focused on the work of these organisations. I therefore tried to understand how these organisations work by showing how they establish the existence of these peoples. In order to understand and analyse the activities of these organizations, I conducted an ethnographic study in Brasilia and in the Brazilian Amazon region. This enabled me to identify and analyse three communication devices. First, there is the device that consists of collecting the testimony of the peoples that live close to the isolated people or live with them for a given period. Then there are the things that the isolated leave behind them and that these organizations collect and study to better understand their way of life. Finally, the third device is based on utilitarian objects that these organizations leave in the forest for the isolated peoples. These three devices constitute the way by which these isolated peoples are made to exist and speak by these organizations.

Keyphrases: tradition orale, organisations, indigenism, isolation, Brazilian Amazon region, oral tradition, organisations work, devices
Je vlog donc je suis : analyse multimodale de la performance des vloggers gais, lesbiennes et bisexuel.les

Video blogs, or “vlogs” as they’ve come to be known, have experienced an incredible increase in popularity over the last few years. Offering us an intimate insight into their lives, vloggers create a particular relationship with their audience acting sometimes as a friend and other times as a mentor. This research uses a symbolic interactionist perspective, as well as concepts and tools from multimodal analysis and cultural studies to analyse the profiles and videos of 4 vloggers who identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual.  This paper will discuss the importance of sexual identity and the ways it is performed in the vlogs, how different modes are used in the process of sense-making, and the relationship between vloggers and their audiences.

Keyphrases: LGBT, Modes, Vlog, Performing, Symbolic interactionism, Intimacy
Journarlisme : les journalistes face aux attentes des réalités mixtes

JournARlisme is a creative research master thesis in a webdocumentary form. You can access the webdocumentary via this link: www.journarlisme.ca . Its objective is to present exploratory research on the expectations and needs of journalists with regard to emerging technology known as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). It questions the technological promise of these two technologies in in the constantly changing profession that is journalism and it does so by giving voice to the pioneering journalists or storytellers in the non-fiction narratives that use AR or/and VR. The methodology used for the production of this dissertation is based mainly on research creation, especially on creation as research, and the grounded theory.

Keyphrases: RA, Technologies, Journalism, AR, Promise, Webdocumentary, Mixed realities
Étude de la spéciation et de la biodisponibilité du samarium en présence de matière organique naturelle avec l'algue verte Chlamydomonas reinhardtii

As technological interest for rare earth elements (REE) is growing, it is becoming more important to assess their potential environmental impact. Thus, the present study focuses on the speciation and bioavailability of these metallic elements, concepts at the center of which is the free ion, the metal species considered as the best predictor of metal bioavailability. According to the currently used toxicity models, the complexation of metals by organic ligands should reduce the free ion concentration and thus, decrease its bioavailability for aquatic organisms. However, recent studies have shown higher levels of REE internalization than predicted by the models in the presence of simple organic ligands. Thus, it seemed necessary to evaluate the influence of natural organic matter (NOM), composed of complex organic ligands, on the speciation and bioavailability of REE. In this study, samarium (Sm), a lanthanide of intermediate atomic weight, and the unicellular green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii were used. The free ion concentration was experimentally measured on a cation exchange resin (IET) in dynamic mode and modeled by thermodynamic calculations. Short-term biouptake experiments were used to determine the internalization flux of Sm in algae. The effect of 4 types of NOM, of different origins and composition, was evaluated. The results clearly show that the presence of NOM induces a significant decrease in the internalization fluxes of Sm and that humic acids appear to be responsible for stronger complexation than fulvic acids. The results also suggest that the experimentally measured free ion concentrations allow a better prediction of the Sm internalization than the total or modeled concentrations with the existing equilibrium constants used in thermodynamic calculations.

Keyphrases: samarium, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, Bioavailability, Biouptake, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, Ion exchange resin
Synthesis of 1,2-methano-tetrahydrofuran derivatives and 1´,2´-methano-2´,3´-dideoxynucleosides as potential antivirals

Starting from the commercially available and widely used (S)-4-hydroxymethyl- butyrolactone, the stereocontrolled synthesis of bicyclic 1,2-methano-1-subtituted-4-hydroxymethyl-tetrahydrofurans was accomplished using a tin-mediated cyclopropanation strategy reported by the Hanessian group. As a part of a collaboration with the SGC of Toronto, some of the 1,2-methano-1-substituted-4-hydroxymethyl-tetrahydrofurans were tested against a panel of histone methyltransferases.   In the second chapter, a short synthesis of three constrained nucleosides analogues, 1´,2´-methano-2´,3´-dideoxypseudouridine (C-nucleoside); 1´,2´-methano-2´,3´-dideoxyuridine and 1´,2´-methano-2´,3´-dideoxycytidine and their corresponding aryloxyphosphoramidate-prodrugs was achieved using the tin-mediated cyclopropanation strategy. The biological testing of the modified analogues as antiviral agents was performed by Merck in Rahway, NY, USA. None of the compounds showed activity against HIV, RSV and Herpes.

Keyphrases: Tin-mediated cyclopropanation, Nucleosides analogues, Phosphoramidates, Antiviral agents, 1,2-Methano-1-substituted-4-hydroxymethyl-tetrahydrofurans, Constrained nucleosides, 1´,2´-methano-2´,3´-dideoxyuridine, Phosphoramidates, 1,2-Methano-1-substituted-4-hydroxymethyl-tetrahydrofuranes, Nucléosides contraints
Fonctionnalisation d'électrodes par greffage électrochimique et assemblage de dispositifs électrochromiques à base de triphénylamines

A series of triphenylamines (TPA) derivatives were synthesized. They were characterized by cyclic voltammetry, absorption spectroscopy and spectroelectrochemistry. The triphenylamines served as a reference library to evaluate the spectroscopic and electrochomic properties. The library could be used to identify compounds exhibiting desireable properties for use in electrochromic devices. Thderivatives were electrochemically grafted on ITO substrates by diazonium salt reduction. The electrochemically grafted compound was studied by Secondary ion mass spectrometry (TOF-SIMS) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) measurements. The coated substrates underwent component exchanges of the reversible azomethine bond formation. The component exchange was monitored in situ by square wave voltametry and confirmed by TOF-SIMS and XPS. Several exchange cycles were done as a proof-of-concept. Electrochemically grafted ITO substrates also allowed covalently bonded polymer electrodeposition. Different surface morphologies are due to the disposition of carbon chains present in the polymer’s framework. Film morphologies were studied by profilometry and atomic force microscopy and their cyclic voltammetry response was recorded.

Keyphrases: Electrochemical grafting, Multicomponent exchange, Azomethine bond, Triphenylamine, Electrochromism
Heterogeneous Structural Organization of Polystyrene Fibers Prepared by Electrospinning

Electrospinning is a common technique used for preparing fibers with diameters ranging from a few micrometers down to hundreds of nanometers from an entangled polymeric solution in a volatile solvent. Electrospun fibers are formed under the influence of large stretching forces, therefore contributing to extremely fast solvent evaporation, high molecular orientation and out-of-equilibrium structure. These materials have been shown to exhibit distinct properties when compared to bulk materials. In this work, the thermal behavior of polystyrene (PS) fibers electrospun from different solvents as well as using three molecular weights and different concentrations was studied using temperature modulated differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). A detailed analysis of the PS/CHCl3 system revealed the presence of two phases within PS fibers with a secondary phase being less dense than the normal phase. The observations were correlated to the previously proposed model of core-shell chain organization with a partially disentangled thin shell and a bulk entangled core. Additional spectroscopic measurements by atomic force microscopy infrared spectroscopy (AFM-IR) at the single fiber scale demonstrated that IR bands associated with partial disentanglement in chains are located mainly at the edge of the fiber. Different solvents, tetrahydrofuran (THF), methyl ethyl ketone (MEK) and dimethylformamide (DMF) having different boiling points were used to electrospin PS fibers that featured two-phase behavior at all molecular weights and concentrations. The morphology of PS fibers electrospun from different solvents was also studied. Moreover, the thermal annealing of PS fibers under multiple conditions was performed that shed light on the unusual thermal behavior and a better understanding of the two-phase organization of the PS fibers. Finally, these results were correlated with the core-shell model for the chain organization within fibers and the hypotheses of this model were revised.

Keyphrases: Electrospinning, Polymer fibers, Polystyrene, Morphology, Thermal behavior, Annealing
Odd-Even Effects in Electroactive Self-Assembled Monolayers

Odd-even effect in the redox-induced molecular reorientations that occur in electroactive molecular films were investigated using surface plasmon resonance (SPR) coupled with cyclic voltammetry. Experiments were conducted on self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of ferrocenylalkanethiolates on gold (FcCnSAu) with n = 6-16. SPR was used to follow in situ and real time the electrochemical oxidation and reduction of the FcCnSAu SAMs. An increase in the resonance angle was observed upon the oxidation of the SAM-bound ferrocene to ferrocenium due to an untilting of the Fc+CnS molecules which resulted in a film thickening of ~0.2 nm. An odd-even variation of the resonance angle shift was observed, which originated from a difference in the dielectric constants of FcCnSAu SAMs with an odd (SAModd) versus even (SAMeven) number of methylenes. Cyclic voltammetry (CV) was used to characterize the oxidation of the ferrocene group in the presence of sodium perchlorate, and to investigate odd-even effects in the electron transfer and ion pairing reactions. The peak splitting observed in CV was attributed to different packing structures of the SAM related to the polycrystalline nature of the thermally evaporated, gold thin films and annealed gold beads used as the substrates. The apparent redox potential of SAMeven is higher than that of SAModd, which implies that it is harder to oxidize the surface-tethered ferrocenes for even chain lengths. This corroborates theoretical predictions that the van der Waals interactions between the even FcCnS chains, and therefore the SAMeven packing energy, are more favorable. This work supports a general understanding of the structure-property relationships in ferrocene-terminated SAMs to guide their use as charge transport and storage elements in electronic and electrochemical devices.

Keyphrases: Self-assembled monolayers, Ferrocenylalkanethiolates, Electrochemistry, Surface plasmon resonance, Dielectric properties, Molecular reorientation