Involving a village: student teachers' sense of belonging in their school-based placement

Educating a student on teaching placement involves a ‘village’, just as it takes a whole ‘village’ to raise a child. Creating a ‘village’ around each student teacher gives them greater agency, a sense of belonging and being valued as a member of that professional ‘village’. Participating students, teachers and lecturers share their perceptions of experiences in the one-day school-based placement that student teachers are required to undertake in a University of Waikato distance programme. Opportunities, relationships and a sense of inclusion are identified as influencing characteristics, “the all important human infrastructure that provides the opportunity for learners to succeed” (Campbell-Gibson, 1997 Campbell-Gibson, C. 1997. Teaching/learning at a distance: A paradigm shift in progress. Distance Education in North America, 1: 6–8.  [Google Scholar], p. 8) rather than any modern technologies. Findings indicate that where the school acted as the ‘village of learning’, the perceived suitability of the placement as a site for learning teaching was conceptualised through a developed sense of belonging, accomplishment and inclusion. It is argued that greater effort should be made by initial teacher education providers to locate such ‘villages’ for student teacher placements.     

Digital Technologies for Book Publishing

This paper is based on an Australian government-funded research project looking at the implications of digitization for the book publishing industry, which was originally completed in 2008 and later extended to cover up to the present day. Although Australian-based the project and subsequent research has wider implications for application elsewhere. The paper initially provides a snapshot of Australian book publishing in a global context, and then summarizes our findings on the current and potential future impact of digital technologies. The original research employed an interpretive research paradigm, using a mixed methodology design, including an online survey of book publishers and the conduct of 14 case studies. The extension of the original research project led to its being given a more global dimension. In reporting this new research, the paper discusses in detail the diverse range of technologies, their limitations and the risks and opportunities they offer to the book publishing industry. This includes insights into the business as well as technical issues confronting the industry.     

The Hopkins gasolene-engine dynamometer and speedometer

It is not ordinarily a simple operation to determine the power continuously delivered by an internal combustion engine. The apparatus here described is designed to reduce the operation to the simplicity of reading the horsepower from a dial and esentially consists of a current meter whose readings are proportional to the product of the speed of rotation and the temperature of the gases within the cylinder.     

The Big Deal — ten years on

This paper describes the highlights of an exploratory deep log analysis of journal usage on OhioLINK, conducted as part of the MaxData project. OhioLINK, the original ‘Big Deal’, provides a single digital platform of nearly 6,000 full‐text journals for more than 600,000 people in Ohio and the investigation aimed to assess it after approximately 10 years. The data was generated from an SPSS analysis of the raw (unprocessed) server logs for June 2004 to December 2004. Approximately 1,215,000 items were viewed on campus in October 2004 and 1,894,000 items viewed off campus between June and December 2004. There are a number of usage analyses including: demand and activity; number and name of journal; date of publication; subject/discipline of journal and method of searching/navigating.     

High reliability of performance of well-trained rowers on a rowing ergometer.

High retest reliability is desirable in tests used to monitor athletic performance, but the reliability of many popular tests has not been established. The aim of this study was to determine the reliability of performance of a 2000-m time-trial lasting approximately 7 min performed on a Concept II rowing ergometer. Eight well-trained rowers (peak oxygen uptake 61+/-5 ml x kg(-1) x min(-1); mean +/- standard deviation) performed the time-trials on three occasions at 3-day intervals. Mean power (313+/-38 W in trial 1) improved by 2.3% (95% confidence interval 0.1 to 4.5%) in trial 2 and by a further 0.9% (-1.4 to 3.3%) in trial 3. The variability of performance for individual rowers expressed as a coefficient of variation for mean power was 2.0% (1.3 to 3.1%), and the retest correlation was 0.96 (0.87 to 0.99). Variability and changes in performance expressed as time to complete the test were approximately one-third those of mean power, apparently because simulated velocity is proportional to the cube root of power on this ergometer. Such high reliability makes this combination of ergometer, athlete and test protocol very suitable for monitoring rowing performance and for investigating factors that affect performance in short, high-intensity endurance events.