我们时代的教育

教育是当今世界的一个主要问题。尽管许多问题最先是从西方国家表现出来的,不过现在几乎已是人类普遍的问题:为什么孩子去倾听如此困难,--特别是男孩们?为什么许多孩子被赶出学校?为什么青少年自杀和吸毒率如此之高?是什么导致了学校暴力?我们能对上述问题一言蔽之:教育是否与我们时代的真正需求相匹配?比起以前,我们更需要发现一种新的与自     

What university teachers teach and how they teach it

In this article we make three related arguments. The first isthat different teachers have different intentions concerning whatstudents will learn and consequently in their teaching they constitutethe topic or subject to be taught quite differently. The second is thata teacher's intentions concerning what it is that students should learnis closely aligned with a teacher's expectation of how students learnand how they can be helped to learn through teaching. The third is thatwhen teachers focus specifically on the teaching of a particular topic,within a specific context, there is a close relationship between theirintentions and their teaching practice. In this article we explore thesearguments through an empirical study which considers the different waysin which 26 university teachers intended to constitute a subject ortopic for their students to study, how they then taught the subject andsubsequently how consistent were their intentions and their practice.The analysis shows that when the context of teaching and learning istightly defined there is a clear relationship between a teacher'sintention and their practice. In particular, university teachers whoadopt more conceptual change and student-focussed approaches to teachingconstitute objects of study which are more relational and focus on thestudent's knowledge. Approaches which are more information transmissionand teacher-focussed constitute objects of study which are moremulti-structural and have a focus on knowledge which is as constitutedas being external to the student.     

Race-related service and faculty of color: Conceptualizing critical agency in academe

Based on a qualitative study of sixteen faculty of color at aprivate research university, this article argues that service,though significantly presenting obstacles to the promotion andretention of faculty of color, actually may set the stage fora critical agency that resists and redefines academic structuresthat hinder faculty success. The construct of `service,' therefore,presents the opportunity for theorizing the interplay of humanagency and social structures. The article suggests that facultymay seek to redefine oppressive structures through service, thus,exercising an agency that emerges from the very structures thatconstrain it. Faculty of color, in particular, may engage inservice to promote the success of racial minorities in the academyand elsewhere. Thus, service, especially that which seeks tofurther social justice, contributes to the redefinition of theacademy and society at large.     

Reconstruction and virtual model of the Schickard calculator

Exhibition of objects such as paintings or historical artefacts often involves a common problem: the objects presented are unique, delicate and, therefore, very valuable. On the other hand, these objects should be made accessible to scholars and educators. We present an application of modern 3D computer graphics in the field of reconstructing ancient scientific instruments. The first-four-species calculator of Wilhelm Schickard is made accessible to the public in the World Wide Web using Java 3D.     

Putting Students at the Centre in Education Reform

Education reform cannot succeed and should not proceedwithout much more direct involvement of students inall its aspects. This paper develops a set ofarguments for a sustained and meaningful role forstudents in defining, shaping, managing andimplementing reform, and outlines some ways in whichsuch involvement might occur. The arguments are bothorganizational and educational in nature, as are theproposed strategies for increasing the student role inthe reform and improvement process.     

Integrated dynamic wet spinning of core-sheath hydrogel fibers for optical-to-brain/tissue communications

Hydrogel optical light-guides have received substantial interest for applications such as deep-tissue biosensors, optogenetic stimulation and photomedicine due to their biocompatibility, (micro)structure control and tissue-like Young''s modulus. However, despite recent developments, large-scale fabrication with a continuous synthetic methodology, which could produce core-sheath hydrogel fibers with the desired optical and mechanical properties suitable for deep-tissue applications, has yet to be achieved. In this study, we report a versatile concept of integrated light-triggered dynamic wet spinning capable of continuously producing core-sheath hydrogel optical fibers with tunable fiber diameters, and mechanical and optical propagation properties. Furthermore, this concept also exhibited versatility for various kinds of core-sheath functional fibers. The wet spinning synthetic procedure and fabrication process were optimized with the rational design of the core/sheath material interface compatibility [core = poly(ethylene glycol diacrylate-co-acrylamide); sheath = Ca-alginate], optical transparency, refractive index and spinning solution viscosity. The resulting hydrogel optical fibers exhibited desirable low optical attenuation (0.18 ± 0.01 dB cm⁻¹ with 650 nm laser light), excellent biocompatibility and tissue-like Young''s modulus (<2.60 MPa). The optical waveguide hydrogel fibers were successfully employed for deep-tissue cancer therapy and brain optogenetic stimulation, confirming that they could serve as an efficient versatile tool for diverse deep-tissue therapy and brain optogenetic applications.     

How French counsellors treat school violence: An adult-centered approach

This article explores characteristics of school violence inFrance and the privileged means by which school counsellors can address this increasinglywidespread problem. In the first section, the status of counsellors in theFrench schools is outlined, and it is shown that counselling activities are reallyonly undertaken for students in junior high or high school. Two importantcharacteristics of the French view of school violence are: The experts in psychology takelittle interest in problems of school violence; and adults, rather than students,are seen as the primary victims. In this context, counsellors try to reduceschool violence primarily through training and reflecting with school staff. Severalempirical arguments suggest, in effect, that the adults' perceptions of the students is adetermining factor in the social regulation of school violence. This violence consistsmostly of incivilities that are only slightly reprehensible but oftenunbearable for certain teachers. Depending on whether the school staff try to understandthe incivilities or can only see them as pure savagery, they either try to controlthem through education or they lose confidence in their professional mission.The goal of counsellors is both to help the personnel develop theircapacities and motivate them to analyze the students' behavior, and to engender a senseof team spirit.     

A Bayesian Framework for XML Information Retrieval: Searching and Learning with the INEX Collection

Most recent document standards like XML rely on structured representations. On the other hand, current information retrieval systems have been developed for flat document representations and cannot be easily extended to cope with more complex document types. The design of such systems is still an open problem. We present a new model for structured document retrieval which allows computing scores of document parts. This model is based on Bayesian networks whose conditional probabilities are learnt from a labelled collection of structured documents—which is composed of documents, queries and their associated assessments. Training these models is a complex machine learning task and is not standard. This is the focus of the paper: we propose here to train the structured Bayesian Network model using a cross-entropy training criterion. Results are presented on the INEX corpus of XML documents.