Considering the surge in e-learning growth over the last decade and the proliferation of mobile devices in the Bring Your Own Device generation, this paper reviews selected use cases of Bluetooth beacons in educational situations. We review the contribution of Bluetooth beacons to a mixed pedagogy that uses digital and physical learning spaces, and we discuss the pilot deployment of Bluetooth beacons at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, to enhance physical learning spaces. Our work represents one of the first deployments of Bluetooth beacons in a university teaching and learning capacity and provides a starting point for others attempting to utilise beacon-enabled location-based services to enhance learner experiences. The widespread adoption of beacon technology in educational institutions has not yet occurred, and the most common usage of beacon transmitters and systems in education is for attendance-taking and dissemination of teaching material. Mobile applications are constantly being developed to utilise the location-based services provided by beacons to enhance student learning and effectiveness. This paper also discusses the sustainability benefits of beacon systems, especially in the contexts of smart campus and smart city development.

Previous research on university students’ academic performance indicates that students’ seating locations can be an indicator of their academic performance. However, previous research on the relationship between university students’ seating locations and their academic performance is mixed, and there is a lack of research about whether students’ academic discipline moderates this relationship. This study addresses this gap in the literature through a study of 182 university students in Hong Kong. Biglan categorization was used to classify disciplines into soft (a low degree of consensus) and hard fields (a high degree of consensus). The results revealed that students from soft fields who sat at the front of a class performed better than their counterparts who sat at the back, while the performance of students from hard fields was not significantly influenced by their seating location. This article’s findings suggest that classroom seating arrangements should be tailored to academic disciplines to maximize their efficacy and that universities should redesign classroom layouts to extend the experience of sitting at the front of a class to all students.

For the role of utilitarianism in the ethics of war and peace, Shaw suggests there is a Utilitarian War Principle (UWP) and argues that the principles of the just war theory should be treated as intermediate principles that are subordinated to UWP. He also argues that the state should be the primary legitimate authority to wage war and holder of the right of national defense. I argue that the utilitarian approach should be specifically linked with contingent pacifism, a new understanding of pacifism from within the just war tradition, and the utilitarian contingent pacifism only endorses individual self-defense but not national defense. This finding is not only theoretically important but has practical implications for the debate on Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution. Utilitarian contingent pacifism supports the idealist position that Article 9 is morally significant because it makes Japan a pioneer of the new kind of pacifism.