Beyond the backchannel: tweeting patterns after two educational conferences

Mathematics teachers are using Twitter as a backchannel at conferences. Understanding whether teachers are using Twitter differently at traditional conferences like the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) Annual as compared to new conference models like TwitterMathCamp (TMC) is important. Tweets surrounding the 2015 NCTM Annual and TMC2015 were collected and analyzed to determine the differences in tweeting behavior of the mathematics teachers. Our results showed teachers use Twitter in common ways, despite the attention placed on social media at new conferences.     

Communities of practice in higher education: professional learning in an academic career

This article focuses on the life history of a university academic, and the ways in which he learned in different communities of practice during his career. This account raises questions about the applicability of situated learning theory to a knowledge-based organisation, and argues that both the external context and the individuals within the community impinge on learning. It suggests that the role of academic staff developers may vary depending on the CoP and should include developing networks, facilitation, providing relevant expertise, improving harmony within CoPs and harnessing the benefits of internationally dispersed CoPs.     

Re-integrating academic development and academic language and learning: a call to reason

This paper argues for the re-integration of academic development (AD) and a academic language and learning (ALL) practitioners in Australian higher education. This argument is made as universities aim to develop internationally recognised, inter-disciplinary and standards-based curricula against the backdrop of international comparative education (e.g., Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), the Australian Qualifications Framework and a quality emphasis on English language standards (e.g., Tertiary Education Quality and Assessment Agency). Drawing on Rowland's argument that professional life in the academy has become fragmented across five fault lines ([2002]. Overcoming fragmentation in professional life: The challenge for academic development. Higher Education Quarterly, 56(1), 52–64), I propose a sixth: the pedagogical fault line between language and learning which I argue is institutionally manifest in the historical bifurcation of AD and ALL practitioners in the academy. This paper traces the historical separation of these two fields of practice in Australian higher education in order to disturb the present distinction and show how it is more an accident of history than the result of sound pedagogical decision-making. The paper argues that in the current educational context, it is timely to consider a re-integration of these two aspects of the academic field. It is suggested that such a move will create research and teaching connections that develop synergies in educational development that are able to work with language and learning simultaneously.     

Learning to read: a professional learning journey

This article reports on a study that investigated a professional development initiative in Australia to address a decline in reading comprehension scores in the middle and upper years of Primary school. It describes the professional learning journey of a middle primary teacher and his literacy coach over a period of 12 months as they worked to improve the teacher’s knowledge and skills to explicitly teach reading comprehension. A series of classroom observations and interviews at the beginning, middle and end of the school year were analysed for the kinds of reading skills taught and the nature of the instruction. The data suggest that there were significant changes in the teacher’s pedagogical repertoires and practices and an observed improvement in the student’s understandings of different comprehension knowledge, skills and strategies.     

从职业经理人到企业家

人们普遍认为职业经理人是指在企业里担任中高层管理人员,有一定的专业知识与技术背景,并把管理作为终身职业的人。而企业家是指创立新型企业,拥有企业所有权的老板。许多人仍然对企业家与职业经理人概念不清,尤其是对国营企业或其他类型企业中担任总经理,带领企业走出困境,并快速成长的人不知道用什么称呼。 职业经理人的英文直译是profes-     

Reconceptualising academic work as professional practice: implications for academic development

Despite increasing research and scholarship in the area of academic development in recent years, it remains an under-theorised field of endeavour. The paper proposes that academic developers take a view on what constitutes academic work and see it as a form of professional practice. It discusses the features of practice theory that illuminate professional practice and identifies three foci for the application of these ideas within academic development: practice development, fostering learning-conducive work and deliberately locating activity within practice. It also suggests that academic development be viewed as a practice and points to features within its own traditions on which to build.     

Bayesian approaches to associative learning: From passive to active learning

Traditional associationist models represent an organism's knowledge state by a single strength of association on each associative link. Bayesian models instead represent knowledge by a distribution of graded degrees of belief over a range of candidate hypotheses. Many traditional associationist models assume that the learner is passive, adjusting strengths of association only in reaction to stimuli delivered by the environment. Bayesian models, on the other hand, can describe how the learner should actively probe the environment to learn optimally. The first part of this article reviews two Bayesian accounts of backward blocking, a phenomenon that is challenging for many traditional theories. The broad Bayesian framework, in which these models reside, is also selectively reviewed. The second part focuses on two formalizations of optimal active learning: maximizing either the expected information gain or the probability gain. New analyses of optimal active learning by a Kalman filter and by a noisy-logic gate show that these two Bayesian models make different predictions for some environments. The Kalman filter predictions are disconfirmed in at least one case.     

From Behind the Pupil's Desk to the Teacher's Desk: A qualitative study of student teachers' professional learning in Hong Kong

This paper presents a qualitative study of student teachers' school-based learning in a teacher education program for secondary school teachers in Hong Kong. Learning to teach is examined through the lens of a personal-professional conceptualization of learning. An in-depth study of two cases of student teachers' professional learning is reported. Research methods used include interviewing, tape-recording supervisory meetings, field observation and document analysis. Through an inquiry into the individual's interaction with pre-training influences, the teacher education program and the teaching practice context in the two cases, this study extends our understanding of student teachers' professional learning in terms of the formation of the teaching self and the process of framing in the action and socio-professional contexts of teaching practice.     

No time to think: policy,pedagogy and professional learning

In this study, we seek to illuminate the effects of the global policy convergence in education through a close study of its enactment within an Australian Teacher Education course. Building on an examination of the changing priorities of a cohort of pre-service teachers over a short space of time, we argue that the enactment of New Public Management approaches to the governance of teaching in Australia is having adverse effects on the professional learning of new teachers, defeating the policy goals. Previous studies have investigated the affective impact of current global policy formations on teachers. Building on that work, this study considers the impacts that the teacher policy emphasis on ‘performance’ has had on professional learning processes, which are understood with reference to Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory. The study is undertaken using an interpretative phenomenographic approach and informed by the related methods of discursive psychology, which positions discourse as a discursive practice to achieve specific goals in specific contexts.     

论全党的团结统一及在思想上建党的实现——从遵义会议到党的七大

注重在思想上建党,保持党的团结和统一,是党能够战胜一切困难的重要原因。从遵义会议到党的七大,党逐步形成以毛泽东为核心的稳定的领导集体,有步骤地纠正自己过去所犯的错误,适时推进马克思主义的中国化,最后经过整风运动,清算了党的历史上的各种错误思想,为党的团结统一奠定了坚实的组织基础、实践基础、理论基础和思想基础。党的七大将毛泽东思想确立为全党的指导思想并在此基础上实现了全党的高度团结和统一,为党领导中国革命取得胜利提供了根本保证。     

From learning to labour to learning for precarity

A demand on national economies in the 1970s was that they should begin to increase their labour market flexibility, which came to mean transferring risks and insecurity onto workers. Education was one way to prepare future workers for this new situation. The present article examines this preparation of learning for precarity some 40 years on. It is based on long-term ethnographic research in the Swedish upper-secondary school sector in particular kinds of educational programmes that have been devised and promoted as a means of integrating ‘lost pupils’ into either academic or vocational studies. The findings show this is not what is developing in practice in these programmes.     

From learning community to community learning: pedagogy,technology and interactivity

The authors of this article discuss three pedagogical approaches, learning community, community of practice and community learning, and analyse their significance for knowledge acquisition and construction in higher education. The authors also explore the roles of technology in creating adequate environments for educators to implement teaching practices supported by these approaches and explain, through an illustrative course example, how technology and teaching methods can be used together to promote interaction among learners and help them achieve course goals.

De la communauté apprenante à l’apprentissage communautaire: la pédagogie’la technologie et l’interactivité

Les auteurs de cet article examinent trois approches pédagogiques:la communauté apprenante, la communauté de pratique et l’apprentissage communautaire et analysent leur signification pour l’acquisition et la construction des connaissances dans l’enseignement supérieur. Les auteurs étudient aussi le rôle de la technologie pour créer les environnements adéquats permettant aux éducateurs de mettre en place des pratiques d’enseignement reposant sur ces approches et ils expliquent au moyen d’un exemple de cours significatif,comment la technologie et les méthodes d’enseignement peuvent être utilisées ensemble pour favoriser l’interaction chez les apprenants et les aider à atteindre les objectifs du cours.

Von der lernenden Gemeinde zum gemeinsamen Lernen: Pädagogik, Technik und Interaktivität

Die Autoren dieses Artikels erörtern drei pädagogische Ansätze: Lerngemeinschaft, Übungsgemeinschaft und lernende Gemeinschaft. Sie analysieren ihre Bedeutung für Wissenserwerb und Aufbau einer höheren Ausbildung. Die Autoren erklären außerdem die Rolle der Technik beim Schaffen von adäquaten Umgebungen für Pädagogen, damit diese von diesen Ansätzen unterstützte Lehrübungen durchführen und durch ein illustratives Kursbeispiel erklären, wie Technologie und Lehrmethoden zusammen verwendet werden können, um Interaktion unter Lernern zu fördern und ihnen zu helfen, Kursziele zu erreichen.