The CoVis Project: Building a Large-Scale Science Education Testbed*

This paper describes the construction and research program of the Learning Through Collaborative Visualization (CoVis) Project, a testbed for exploring science education reform with telecommunications technology. The CoVis testbed is contrasted with other forms of educational research in an “ecology of paradigms,” which argues that testbeds are in fact a new setting for research with different requirements and challenges for the researcher. Two extended examples of telecommunications research are provided as examples of the kind of research that testbeds are well suited to explore. The first example is the evolution of videoconferencing in the CoVis testbed. The second example is the design and development of a networked groupware application called the Collaboratory Notebook.     

Changing academic identities in changing academic workplaces: learning from academics’ everyday professional writing practices

In this article we examine issues of academic identity through the lens of academics’ everyday workplace writing, offering a complementary perspective to those already evident in the higher education research literature. Motivated by an interest in the relationship between routine writing and aspects of professional practice, we draw on data from interviews with 30 academics across three different universities. Our discussion is illustrated with excerpts from interview data, and is organised around three emerging themes: ‘reconstructing academic identities in a shifting academic workplace’, ‘considering new articulations of disciplinarity’, and ‘moving on from the golden age’. We conclude that the reconstruction of academic identities, through engagement with established and emerging workplace documents, may well be enabling academics to build new identities within the changing university.     

中美大对比:在哪儿幸福更容易?

在中国涌现"出国热"的那几年,我们的父辈以及我们都在向往着国外的福利、教育和生活环境。有时候梦见自己身处国外都会是一件乐事,值得人们茶余饭后聊上半天。长大以后,随着国外的YouTube、Twitter和国内各类视频网站以及微博客的兴起,我们越来越多地了解到国外也有贫民窟、国外也有经济危机和失业、国外也有腐败和民主上的不完善,而更可怕的是,国外还有允许携带私人枪支的国民……出国,真的有那么好吗?在这篇文章里,一个地地道道的纽约人将向你叙述一个他自己总结出的结论:在中国,要幸福,并不需要太多。     

Computer laboratory workshops as learning environments for university business statistics: validation of questionnaires

Learning Environments Research - Research on learning environments at the higher-education level has been quite sparse compared with studies at other educational levels. Because statistics is...     

Gender differences in science achievement: Do school effects make a difference?

The problem of the underrepresentation of girls in science in Australian schools is often attributed to their poor performance. Yet the role of both the home and the school in affecting female science achievement is rarely examined empirically. The comprehensiveness of the Second International Science Study database provided an excellent opportunity to investigate the presence of gender differences in science achievement. Although previous studies of gender differences in science achievement have relied on methodology that has not adequately accounted for the school effects, this study used the design effect and hierarchical linear modeling (multilevel analysis) to explore whether there were significant gender differences. The relative contribution of schools to student achievement was examined, and school-level differences were found to contribute significantly toward explaining variations in student performance. Although statistically significant sex differences were found in physics achievement for 10-year-old, 14-year-old, and year-12 students, school effects were much more powerful in explaining student differences (9–19%) when compared with gender (3%).     

The Discourses of Social Justice in Education

What the existing organization of schooling presupposes...is that in consumption terms, the world consists of equally powerful individual actors. Such, of course, is not the case in a hierarchically ordered capitalist system, where labour and capital, and indeed different forms of both, have differential access to resources enabling them to consume. By largely intervening only in provisional relations, the state fails to recognize the central dynamic of education ‐‐ that provision and consumption are not coterminous. In essence, state intervention does not go far enough. (Lynch, 1989, p.127)