A Practical Way of Structuring Teaching for Learning

Over recent years there has been a convergence of ideas about how students learn. This is useful information for developing teaching methods that make effective learning more likely. An attempt to put this into practice in an introductory education subject is described in detail. It involved making decisions about issues that are common to different approaches to teaching in higher education. These included the way activities were structured, how experiences were used, the sorts of choices students could exercise and how learning was distributed. It is argued that learning in higher education depends on the balance that is struck in terms of these and related decisions.     

Five have a gender-ful time: Blyton,sexism, and the infamous five

Enid Blyton (1897–1968) remains a publishing phenomenon. No British writer for children, other than Roald Dahl, has been commercially so successful—and like Dahl she has attracted endless controversy. Since the 1950s, the literary qualities of her work and the correctness of her social attitudes have been assaulted by critics, librarians, and educationists; not all of these attacks have been based on close discussions of the books themselves. In the article which follows, David Rudd (who is working on a doctoral thesis on Blyton), reexamines a Blyton series which retains its extraordinary popularity to the present day: The Famous Five. David Rudd is a tutor librarian/senior lecturer at Bolton Institute of Higher Education in the North West of England, where he teaches a course on children's literature. His master's degree was based on the work of Roald Dahl and led to a book,A Communication Studies Approach to Children's Literature, Sheffield, Pavic Press, 1991.     

Russian National Electronic Children's Library

ABSTRACT

The Russian State Children's Library (RGDB) is the largest children's library in the world and has been serving as a cultural and educational center for more than 45 years. Important aspects of RGDB's activities are the development of electronic resources and setting up the library site for distant users. The National Electronic Children's Library in Russia is a specialized digital collection of publications about children and for children. This article focuses on these aspects and the future steps of the project.     

THE MEDIUM IS NOT THE MESSAGE: IMPROVING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATIONAL AID TO PAPUA NEW GUINEA STUDENTS

Australia, like many developed countries expends a proportion of its budget in assisting lesser developed countries (LDC) in educational enterprises. Such efforts may have muted results if Australian educators assume that overseas students eventually adapt to their teaching. This paper argues that institutions which accept overseas students into their courses are obliged professionally to cater for students’ learning problems particularly, if the language of instruction is not the mother tongue. Often these problems have their genesis in the LDC because students are educated in a language in which their teachers’ themselves lack facility. Moreover, in the Papua New Guinea context the learning problems with English are associated with a lack of equivalence between the concepts in the academic discourse and the students’ existing conceptual framework. Learning problems in English are more about concept acquisition than translation.     

A causality analysis of the link between higher education and economic development

The aim of this article is to shed light on the relationship between higher education and economic development by means of econometric tools designed to evaluate the existence and direction of causality: cointegration and Granger-causality tests. The results show a significant causality from national higher educational effort (proxied by the number of students per capita, i.e. not engaged in productive activities) to economic development for four countries: Sweden (1910–1986), United Kingdom (1919–1987), Japan (1885–1975) and France (1899–1986). However, such a causality link has not been found for Italy (1885–1986) or Australia (1906–1986). This suggests that this relationship is indeed not mechanistic as already pointed out by some social scientists.     

Has Cinderella Become so Fragmented That She Can No Longer Identify her Area of Expertise

The question addressed by this article is whether lecturers delivering HEBCs in FECs in England perceive their institutions to be fragmented, i.e. has Cinderella lost her identity via the demands and pressures placed upon her by the UK government and other stakeholders? The research adopts a qualitative approach, where 26 interviews were conducted in FECs in the Yorkshire and Humber regions. The findings, although not surprising, were quite candid and indicated that there may be some role conflict, as management seemed to prioritise funding over everything else, including the well-being of their employees.