The JISC's FAIR Programme: disclosing and sharing institutional assets

An account is given of the work of the FAIR programme in developing and supporting projects in the sharing of digitally stored institutional assets within the higher and further education sectors in the United Kingdom.     

Making friends in the ‘electronic student lounge’

An important characteristic of computer conferencing in the context of distance teaching is that there is no requirement for all participants to interact at the same time. Individual users can participate at times which suit them. In an educational context, computer conferencing can provide for a variety of interactions between students, and between students and teaching staff. The .’electronic student lounge’ is a conference for socialising, for making friends, and for forming special interest groups. The 1989 extramural telecommunications (EXTEL) project at Massey University, New Zealand, provided a group of Computer Science students with such a facility. The project was based on an innovative, cheap, easy‐to‐use electronic messaging system developed at Massey.

This paper describes the EXTEL project, including the messaging system employed and the data gathering methods used to evaluate it. An analysis is presented of a sample of the more than 2000 messages exchanged over the trial period. The results of surveys of the participating students both before and after the trial are also presented. A significant proportion of the interactions were found to consist of ‘general chat’ thus supporting the notion that this type of facility helps reduce the isolation often experienced in distance teaching.     

Overshadowing and stimulus intensity

Two experiments on conditioned suppression in rats examined overshadowing between visual and auditory components of a compound conditioned stimulus. In the first experiment, when one component was markedly more salient than the other, the more salient overshadowed the less salient, but the latter, although acquiring significant associative strength, did not overshadow the former. When the two components were of approximately equal salience, each overshadowed the other. In the second experiment, reciprocal overshadowing was again observed between two equally salient stimuli, but only when their absolute intensities were relatively low. The failure to observe reciprocal overshadowing under all conditions raises problems for those theories of stimulus selection which assume that stimuli compete for some strictly limited resource. It was suggested, instead, that overshadowing might occur when animals fail to learn to attend to, or actually learn to ignore, stimuli that are not uniquely successful predictors of reinforcement.     

越战纪念墙

由抛光的黑色花岗岩建成的越战纪念墙位于美国华盛顿国家公园里。三角形的墙长246.75英尺,顶角为125度12分,顶点高10.1英尺。墙上刻着58191个在越战中牺牲的人的名字,被人们称作“巨大的墓碑”。     

Snapshots of uncertainty: A new tool for the indentification of students' conceptions of scientific phenomena

In preparation for an experiment to investigate the effectiveness of teaching conservation principles, we showed a large number of Grade 8 students two cubes of exactly the same size but with very different masses, and two other cubes of very different sizes but with the same mass (confirmed using scales). Students were then asked to predict the extent of the water level rise which would occur if each cube of each pair were to be placed in similar beakers of water and submerged. Initially almost all predicted on the basis of mass being the significant factor. A teaching sequence followed in which students interacted with different objects and measured water displacement. Following this they were retested on the same task and many now predicted that the rise of water level would depend only on the volume of the object being submerged. On the other hand some still stated that only mass would be important, and others believed a balance between the two would be the determining factor.     

Payback time? Discourses of lack,debt and the moral regulation of teacher education

This paper analyses recent policy and discourse in the UK lifelong learning sector to identify a tension in discourse which positions teacher educators as essential to the knowledge economy while simultaneously insisting on the deficits they represent. Drawing on critical analyses from Friedrich Nietzsche, Maurizio Lazzarato and Gilles Deleuze, I challenge altruistic views of professional motivation and situate individual professionalism under a construction of an indebted subject. Examining recent attempts to redefine professional standards in the sector, I argue that teachers are positioned as subject to homogenisation and ethically indebted to a higher ideal. Ethical commitments to adult learning, I suggest, are a cost-effective instrument of social control because of their imbrication in this discourse of irredeemable moral debt to the sector. Responses to this situation, I argue, are likely to include forms of professional mobility which undermine it.     

‘They are able to play football in South Africa’: Austria’s ‘little Wunderteam’ on tour in 1936

From the end of the nineteenth century South Africa had become a popular touring destination for British and colonial sports teams. Tours in the popular sport of cricket, football and rugby were very popular. These tours tested local opposition against foreign competition, brought in revenue to local and national sports associations and contributed to the development of a white South African identity. Austrian football teams were extensive travellers and popular attractions around the world. Prior to the Second World War Austrian football was highly regarded and was able to compete and hold its own against English and Scottish clubs and representative teams. This article considers an unusual tour by a combined Viennese football team to South Africa in 1936. We consider the preparations for the tour, the different playing styles and the way in which the visitors were received around the country. At the broader political level, the tour was important as leading South African politicians and Austrian diplomats attended matches and functions while on tour. This can be understood in the context of both countries attempting to flex their political identity and muscle in light of more dominant neighbours and colonial masters.     

New media,new panics

ABSTRACT

When Stuart Hall and his Birmingham School colleagues argued that media technologies were essential to the production of moral panics, they focused on the relationship between mass media and the state. Because new technologies have altered our cultures of ostracism and punishment, we offer a revised analysis of this relationship that examines the role of online shaming in current moral panics. Not only do we analyze the new technological affordances of digital media, we argue that our current shaming culture is symptomatic of a deep-seated political disenfranchisement that leaves subjects grasping to “do something.” Contributing to a social media-driven panic culture that punishes and ostracizes deviants thus stands in for meaningful political participation. Ultimately, we argue that the evolving orientation to public life fostered by these new technologies has created a culture of shaming whereby citizens often prosecute their own discrete moral panics amid the more sustained sense of political crisis that characterizes contemporary life.     

A Protocol for computer mediated education across the internet

Changes in the workplace have had an impact on methods of training and education. There is a growing need for flexible methods of course delivery. The economics of courseware development highlight a need for more efficient use of courseware, pointing to geographically distributed Computer Mediated Education as a cost-effective way of sharing these development costs.
Object-orientation is a software development paradigm that is making sweeping changes to the information technology industry. An object- oriented extension to electronic mail is proposed as a protocol for facilitating distributed Computer Mediated Education applications. The use of electronic mail allows use of the Internet as a transport medium. A protocol has been devised for a loosely coupled, distributed, Computer Mediated Education system using electronic mail to transport course material (encapsulated as objects) from one workstation to another. Each workstation uses an object-oriented environment with the ability to dynamically incorporate new courseware objects at run time. A prototype system has been developed to illustrate the feasibility of the protocol.