Personal learning environments: design and use / Los entornos personales de aprendizaje en la educación superior: del diseño al uso

Abstract

This study focuses on the uses that two groups of higher education students make of technological resources offered by an institution to build their own personal learning environments. The main thesis is that these uses depend on the techno-pedagogical design of the teaching and learning process in which the technological resources are framed. In order to explore and illustrate this thesis two instructional sequences have been analysed. Both use the same technological design, the Elgg platform, which allows users to select and organize a set of resources or widgets according to their interests and needs. The results show that in both cases the uses that students make of technology are related to the characteristics and requirements of the particular techno-pedagogical designs. We conclude that the key is not to offer technological resources to the students so they can build their own personal learning environments, but to design activities that attract and induce them to build these personal environments and to guide and support the process of construction.     

Scaling up comprehensive sexuality education in Nigeria: from national policy to nationwide application

Nigeria is one of few countries that reports having translated national policies on school-based comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) into near-nationwide implementation. We analysed data using the World Health Organization-ExpandNet framework, which provides a systematic structure for planning and managing the scaling up of health innovations. We examined how Nigeria's nationwide programme was designed and executed. Since 2002, Nigeria has developed a well thought through strategy to scale up CSE. Crucial attributes that facilitated the scaling up included technical consensus about the innovation and clarity about its components, dissection of a complex intervention into manageable components for implementation by organisations with complementary expertise, strong political leadership and championship in concert with advocacy and technical support from non-governmental organisations, proactive and energetic involvement of community stakeholders, effective programme management, and improvements to the information management system to ensure on-track implementation and mid-course corrections to keep stakeholders, including funders, informed and engaged. Challenges included programmatic values, competing priorities for available human resources and a lack of predictable funding for sustaining a rapid scale-up effort. Despite some weaknesses, implementation has largely proceeded according to plan. The lessons learned from Nigeria's experience can and should be used in other settings to achieve wide-scale coverage.     

Technology use and mathematics teaching: teacher change as discursive identity work

Teacher change towards developing competences for technology use in mathematics teaching has been the focus of current educational reforms worldwide. However, a considerable amount of research denotes the extent to which teachers resist a full integration of technology in mathematics classrooms. The present paper is based on an ethnographic study and focuses on how mathematics teachers – as they participate in an intensive training course – perform identity work whilst collectively articulating meanings concerning the potential of technology-based mathematics learning. By means of discourse theory, we analyse how they try to fix meaning as they engage and interact with varied discourses of ‘change’. Our findings indicate that mathematics teachers' attempts to articulate meaning are organised around discourses that concern directly societal and learning issues of technology use in mathematics teaching.     

In the physics class: university physics students’ enactment of class and gender in the context of laboratory work

This article explores how the doing of social class and gender can intersect with the learning of science, through case studies of two male, working-class university students’ constitutions of identities as physics students. In doing so, I challenge the taken-for-granted notion that male physics students have an unproblematic relation to their chosen discipline, and nuance the picture of how working-class students relate to higher education by the explicit focus on one disciplinary culture. Working from the perspective of situated learning theory, the interviews with the two male students were analysed for how they negotiated the practice of the physics student laboratory and their own classed and gendered participation in this practice. By drawing on the heterogeneity of the practice of physics the two students were able to use the practical and technological aspects of physics as a gateway into the discipline. However, this is not to say that their participation in physics was completely frictionless. The students were both engaged in a continuous negotiation of how skills they had learned to value in the background may or may not be compatible with the ones they perceived to be valued in the university physicist community.     

Gender performativity in physics: affordances or only constraints?

In this forum we engage in a dialogue with Allison Gonsalves’s paper ‘“Physics and the girly girl—there is a contradiction somewhere”: Doctoral students’ positioning around discourses of gender and competence in physics’. In her paper Gonsalves uses a sociocultural approach to examine women doctoral students’ stories about becoming physicists. In doing so her paper focuses on how discourses of masculinity and femininity can create available and unavailable positions for the women students. In this dialogue we do a parallel reading of two of the student narratives presented by Gonsalves, using Judith Butler’s (1990) concept of discursive agency as a means to more explicitly bring the affordances for women identity constitution offered by their localized physicist context to the fore, rather focusing on its, often more visible, constraints.     

A note on the construction of test panels for the spectral imaging of paintings

The construction and examination of test panels is an ad hoc procedure, necessary for every spectral imaging study of paintings. Despite the common features, almost every scientific team follows a different way of construction. Furthermore, many of these approaches are not adequately documented in the relevant papers. Failure to use common language and practice leads to confusion about properties of materials and paint layers that have been overall examined by the scientists, as well as the validity of the results and their exploitation in several conservation applications. The present theoretical approach points out the need for common protocols for the construction of test panels and draws general principles as a flow chart on which they should be based.