Implementing information technology at the Border Technikon in South Africa

The mission of Border Technikon in South Africa is to provide the best vocational and career education to students of all racial and cultural backgrounds in the East London area. The staff believes that an important component of this mission includes giving students marketable skills for the information age. Therefore, in 1996, the Technikon undertook an extensive program to implement new information technologies that would help fulfill the institution's mission. Implementing information technology at academic institutions in developing countries must address a special set of problems, some of which are technology gaps, educational deficits, and lack of adequate facilities. This paper describes some of the more unique problems the Technikon encountered, and a few solutions. During 1996, she served as a Senior Librarian at Border Technikon, East London, South Africa, under the Educators for Africa Program of the International Foundation of Education and Self-Help.     

Master of “Complex and Ambiguous Phenomena”: The ERL’s Role in a Library Service Platform Migration

ABSTRACT

Library Services Platforms (LSPs) offer academic libraries the ability to integrate the management of print and electronic resources in one centralized platform. This article will examine the role of electronic resources librarians (ERLs) in a large-scale, consortial LSP implementation relative to NASIG’s Core Competencies for Electronic Resources Librarians. The speakers, Conor Cote and Kirsten Ostergaard, hail from Montana, where the Treasure State Academic Information and Library Services Consortium, comprised of seventeen academic libraries, is implementing Ex Libris’s Alma LSP in conjunction with the Primo discovery layer. The aim of this presentation and article is to examine how the skills and competencies of an ERL can be leveraged for an effective and minimally disruptive LSP implementation.     

Another failure to replicate Lynn's estimate of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans

In his comment on our literature review of data on the performance of sub-Saharan Africans on Raven's Progressive Matrices, Lynn (this issue) criticized our selection of samples of primary and secondary school students. On the basis of the samples he deemed representative, Lynn concluded that the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans stands at 67 when compared to UK norms after a correction of the Flynn Effect. We criticize his methods for being unsystematic. Here we select only those samples that were based on stratified or clustered random sampling and were deemed representative by the original authors. We again fail to replicate Lynn's low estimate of the average IQ of Africans. We argue that these scores are hard to interpret in terms of latent cognitive variables such as g because of the psychometric incomparability we established and because the Flynn Effect has yet to take hold in sub-Saharan Africa.     

What’s Wrong with a Little Swinging? Indian Clubs as a Tool of Suppression and Rebellion in Post-Rebellion India

Though the practice of swinging weighted clubs for gymnastic exercise has a centuries long history in India, the latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed the exercise practice grow in political significance. In the years following the 1857 Indian Rebellion, both Hindu nationalists and British army officials undertook the practice with differing intent. Within the martial context, a differentiated style of British club swinging was used to reform supposedly weak and effeminate Hindus, a practice the Hindu physical culture movement sought to render useless through the promotion of heavy club swinging. In first examining the clubs’ origins and British appropriation, the paper explores how two club swinging traditions existed in India in post-1857. Following this, the paper demonstrates how the British army sought to control Hindu bodies through club swinging and how the Hindu physical culture movement concurrently sought to rebuild Hindu bodies capable of defeating British athletes through heavy club swinging. Regarding the latter, focus is given to the wrestling tours of Buttan Singh and Ghulam Muhammad in early twentieth-century Britain. Such tours were used to prove Hindu manliness as constructed through the club exercise.     

A Note on Measuring the Economic Impact of Institutions of Higher Education

Universities and other institutions of higher education are frequently asked to justify, in economic terms, the allocation of state monies toward their programs. These institutions have often responded by conducting economic impact studies. The traditional approach to economic impact views increases in expenditures by a university as a means to create new jobs within the state and to expand the state's economic base. Recent studies have employed a new approach that also accounts for increases in the state's skill base as part of the economic impact. Although the skill-base approach yields favorable results for higher education, recent applications of the technique fail to consider fully the effects of migration on a university's economic impact and, thus, substantially overestimate the impact. Researchers are well advised to avoid the skill-base approach and to utilize the traditional economic-base approach, which produces more reliable estimates of local economic impact. Moreover, states and universities are cautioned not to place the debate over education financing exclusively in the realm of economic impact, since there are other reasons to provide publicly funded higher education.     

Experience of Induction in One Local Education Authority

From September 1999 the UK government's arrangements for induction of newly qualified teachers (NQTs) would be supported formally by experienced colleagues throughout their first year in teaching. The competence and progress of new teachers was to be monitored, supported and assessed against induction standards, with reports being prepared and sent to the Local Education Authority (LEA) at three points during the year. Should an NQT fail to meet the expectations described in the induction standards at the end of their first year then these new colleagues would be unable to continue teaching. The Teacher Training Agency, following details supplied by the DfEE, offered guidance on the ways in which this process should be carried through. This article examines the support provided by experienced teachers in one local authority to consider if it offers an initiation into the teaching profession, a socialisation into the current practices of particular schools or a check on basic classroom competence. It raises issues about the current focus on the practicalities of teaching and suggests new recruits may need a more robust induction to their professional role.