Information systems management: The need for a post-modern approach

This paper proposes a post-modern way of thinking about the development and the management of information systems and especially information systems development. The paper proposes a framework for a co-evolutionary or co-creation approach to information systems development and management incorporating all the main stakeholders.     

Individual Development Plans in the Swedish Comprehensive School: Supporting High Quality Learning and Equity,or Rote Learning and Social Reproduction?

In Swedish compulsory school, individual development plans (IDPs) are mandatory for all students up to 6th grade. The purpose is to summarize and facilitate pupils’ learning and tune instruction to national standards. In this study, 233 IDPs drawn up for 5th grade pupils were analyzed with focus on qualities that have been found to impact students’ learning and learner identities. The results show that the IDPs rarely display the qualities that would make them effective as tools for enhancing students’ learning, and that there is a gender difference in the quality of the documents, as well as differences regarding the pupils’ academic background.     

The Leaking Pipeline: Women Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers in Australia

This paper explores the leaking pipeline in women's participation rates from Bachelor to postgraduate research programmes. In examining projects at two Australian universities to identify and implement strategies to improve women's participation in research higher degrees, it focuses on three points of leakagebetween Bachelor and Bachelor with Honours degree programmes, Bachelor degree with Honours and postgraduate research programmes, and completion of postgraduate research and taking up a postdoctoral position, and the links between them. It examines three important consequences of women not undertaking or completing postgraduate research: entering academia at lower levels or in casual positions, often while doing postgraduate research part-time; tending to focus on teaching rather than research; and, due to under-representation at middle levels, not achieving a critical mass in senior academia. The paper suggests ways in which university policy may impact on women's participation in postgraduate research programmes through implementation of university-wide and departmental policies encompassing the strategies identified in these studies.     

Tertiary education in the Noughties: the student perspective

The psychodynamics of learning and teaching at a time of changing funding arrangements and priorities are explored and discussed through students’ accounts of their experience of university. The contextual, organizational and socio‐political characteristics implicated in these psychodynamic processes are considered. Among the psychodynamic issues that emerged from students’ accounts were organizational distancing, expressed in the physical and symbolic distance between students and teachers as well as a perceived distance between lecturers and their teaching responsibilities, and transference evident in the students’ struggle between dependence and independence.     

The relationship between learner control of CAI and locus of control among hispanic students

This study investigated achievement and motivation effects related to locus of control (internal and external) and three levels of learner control (no control, moderate control, and high control). The 101 seventh-grade and eighth-grade Hispanic subjects were classified as internal or external based on locus of control (loc) scores, blocked by sex and grade, then randomly assigned to the three levels of learner control in separate versions of a CAI instructional program in science. Internalloc subjects did not choose more en route practice than externals and did not perform better under high learner control. Theloc results raise questions about the usefulness of locus of control as it relates to instruction, at least with populations similar to the present one.