Public Library Services for Veterans: Selected Brief Case Studies

Public libraries across the country design and deliver programs for military veterans and their families, often collaborating with other organizations and agencies. The examples were assembled from both general and specialized interviews with librarians, and literature and Internet searches, with summaries of programs assembled and written by multiple researchers. The specific limitations on the listing in this article are clearly outlined in the first section. Overall, however, the article provides a good introductory overview of what’s going on in veteran’s programs and services in America’s public libraries in over seventy libraries in forty states. We hope this list of what public libraries have organized or are doing will supply other public librarians with ideas on how to provide new services or enhance their existing ones.     

Children's chants

Language acquisition is for young children interacting with the language spoken around them. Children learn quite a bit of language by imitation, by repeating the various language forms they hear. It is not enough for children just to hear language; they must also interact with it. When we think of the methods used in teaching high school or college students a second language, we can then understand why interacting in communication is important for young children. One cannot speak Spanish fluently just by reading a Spanish grammar book; one must speak Spanish in order to speak it fluently.Penella Barker teaches in the New York City Public Schools. Pictures taken of Class K-164 by Ms. Loraine Sherod in Manhattan.     

Public service reform in education: why is progress so slow?

This case study examines why public‐sector reform in education often fails to deliver expected performance gains. Longitudinal evidence from a secondary comprehensive located in a former coalfield is used to identify constraints that frustrate government policies. Although the head and senior staff at Norcross School adopted transformational, distributed modes of leadership and implemented a rigorous target‐setting regime, the expected increase in effectiveness has not materialised. This disappointment is explained in relation to the flawed assumptions of the result‐driven effectiveness agenda, the resistance arising from continuing structural inequalities in society, and the hyperactive complexity of New Labour’s approach to managing public services. The study concludes that as the assessment regime in England provides an unreliable picture of student progress, there is no stable basis for judging the success of reform, particularly when perceived improvements in student experience are qualitative in nature.     

一个标准能适合所有的项目吗:开放教育的选择

基于支持全英开放教育资源项目(英国开放教育资源项目,简称UKOER项目)的经验,本文将探讨该项目开展过程中所涌现出的各种不同的开放教育资源描述方法,及其对资源共享、工作流程计划、资源聚集观的影响.由于UKOUER项目包括个人层面的项目、学科层面的项目和院校层面的项目,而这三种类型的项目又有各自不同的特点,显然难以用一种技术或者描述性的解决方案来适合所有的项目.因此,目前这些项目只提供有限的描述性信息,包括项目标签、作者、题目、日期、链接地址、文件格式、文件大小、权限,以及一些附加信息,包括语言、学科分类、关键词、标签、评论和描述.所有项目可以自由选择编码、存储和分享上述信息的方法.本文通过大量的例证介绍了项目的描述方法,其中还包括工作流程和所作出的尝试.我们将考虑所选择的工具(资源库、Web2.0应用、虚拟学习环境)与标准选择的关系,以及本地需求和更广泛社区需求之间的关系.我们会考虑这些选择对资源传播和发现的影响,例如,资源描述对大量开放教育资源的发现服务的影响.     

Youths with migration backgrounds and their experiences of physical education: an examination of three cases

While understanding young people has never been easy, migration trends make it increasingly difficult. Many classrooms have become culturally heterogeneous and teachers are often faced with pupils with diverse linguistic and cultural heritages. Current scholarship suggests that as a discipline, physical education has not adapted to this diversity. In fact, commentators have suggested that physical education alienates pupils from minority groups and that traditional practices work to maintain cultural difference. The broad objective of this paper is to provide insights into how physical education intersects with biographies shaped by migration. Drawing from a case study investigation, this paper presents interview data from three youths with migration backgrounds living in a German-speaking region of Switzerland. The cases were selected because they highlight various ways in which physical education (PE) comes to make sense for adolescents. The key arguments that we develop are that ethnicity often works at an implicit level in PE, that young people experience the effects of migration backgrounds in diverse ways, and that migrants themselves support official educational discourses that work to disadvantage people with migration backgrounds. A key implication is that in a cultural milieu in which generalisations are normal and sometimes considered desirable, both researchers and practitioners need to be wary of racialising discourses. As an alternative, it is suggested that focusing on individual processes can improve the conceptualisation and implementation of physical education pedagogies.     

A Practical Introduction to Authoring for Computer-Assisted Instruction. Part 7: Graphic support

Images provide a useful method of presenting information to an audience. In a learning situation the use of pictorial forms can offer a high-bandwidth mechanism for the transfer of information between an instructor and a student. This paper discusses some ways of providing graphic support in a computer-based learning environment and describes some approaches to the provision of authoring facilities that utilize this technique.     

Meeting needs assessment challenges: Applying the performance pyramid in the U.S. Army

This article describes an application of the Performance Pyramid, a needs assessment framework that supports a holistic view of an organization allowing assessors to identify how organizational culture may affect performance. We illustrate use of the Performance Pyramid for a needs assessment with human systems integration practitioners in the U.S. Army. We describe how the Performance Pyramid guided our methods, data collection, and results interpretation and discuss advantages and disadvantages of the methodology.     

Book Publishing

The Oxford University Press and the Spread of Learning: An Illustrated History, by Nicolas Barker (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1978 —$25.00)

The Oxford University Press: An Informal History, by Peter Sutcliffe (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1978—$15.00)

Mary Hill and Wendell Cochran's Into Print: A Practical Guide to Writing, Illustrating, and Publishing (Los Altos, Calif.: William Kaufmann, Inc., 1977—$12.00/6.951)

Stanley Rice's Book Design: Systematic Aspects (274 pp., $17.50)

Stanley Rice's Book Design: Text Format Models (215 pp., $17.50)

John Y. Cole, ed. The Library of Congress in Perspective: A Volume Based on the Reports of the 1976 Librarian's Task Force and A visory Groups (New York: R.R. Bowker, 1978—$21.95)

Literary Market Place: 1978 Edition (New York: R.R. Bowker, 1978— $22.50, paper)