An Education Grounded in Biology: Interdisciplinary and Ethical Considerations

ABSTRACT—Work in the new area of Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) raises epistemological and ethical issues. With respect to epistemology, the norms of the component disciplines must be honored and the resulting amalgam must be more than a mere sum of the parts. With respect to ethics, the roles of scientist, educator, and practitioner each raise ethical dilemmas and the MBE worker must be cognizant of each set of dilemmas and the possible strains among them. Only if both of these spheres are confronted can good work be achieved in MBE.     

走向全球：开放与远程教育所面临的危险与前景

过去十年以来,电子学习、远程学习技术,以及精细化的教学设计、方法和支持服务等的发展表明,这些创新革新了高等教育的国际化阶段.而且,全球化正在驱动国际经济、社会、政治、文化、政治生活等相互关联的方方面面,这又进一步表明电子学习(或者是远程、混合学习、分布式学习或过几周又会有新的术语)已经创造了一个新的世界.确实,这只是刚刚开始(Olcott,2008,2008a).本文将探讨国际化、跨境高等教育、远程学习等一系列问题,有些评论可能会引起争论、有争议的.但生活就是这样!而且,这些评论直接针对学院和大学的校长.这又是为什么呢?就像杜鲁门所说的"责任到此,不能再推."     

Challenging experiences faced by beginning casual teachers: here one day and gone the next!

The Educational Alumni Support Project (EdASP) indicated that there is an urgent need for the teaching profession to support casual beginning teachers (CBTs). The EdASP that was carried out at the University of New England provided online support for primary and secondary beginning teachers, yet the majority of postings were submitted by CBTs. In general, these casual teachers experienced feelings of alienation, culture shock, a lack of school and systemic support, and are often not considered part of the school community by staff or students. The analysis of postings by CBTs provides further insight into the difficulties they face, as well as reveals or reinforces strategies that could effectively facilitate their teaching. Many of these findings are not new, yet the call to aid casuals continues to be overlooked. This need for support is both professional and pragmatic. Ethically, education – a nurturing profession – should support its novices. In addition, the transition period from pre‐service to professional teacher has significant implications for teacher educators plus the potential retention of teachers.     

The emergence of entrepreneurship as an academic field: A personal essay on institutional entrepreneurship

The academic field of entrepreneurship research has grown from groups of isolated scholars doing research on small businesses to an international community of departments, institutes, and foundations promoting research on new and high-growth firms. Growth has produced increasingly systematic and interconnected knowledge and growing numbers of knowledge producers and knowledge users share core concepts, principles, and research methods, and a handful of highly cited scholars have emerged as thought leaders within research subfields. The field is increasingly formalized and anchored in a small set of intellectual bases, although there are also some signs of differentiation and fragmentation. Using an institutional theory perspective and drawing upon my experience in the field, I explore six forces creating the institutional infrastructure. First, social networking mechanisms have created a social structure facilitating connections between researchers. Second, publication opportunities have increased dramatically. Third, training and mentoring has moved to a collective rather than individual apprenticeship model. Fourth, major foundations and many other smaller funding sources have changed the scale and scope of entrepreneurship research. Fifth, new mechanisms have emerged that recognize and reward individual scholarship, reinforcing the identity of entrepreneurship research as a field and attracting new scholars into it. Sixth, globalizing forces have affected all of these trends. I conclude with some thoughts about the consequences of these developments with regard to the giving of practical and timely advice to entrepreneurs, the effects of American hegemony on choices of research topics and methods, and the possible loss of theoretical eclecticism.     

Patently Obvious: The place for patents in information literacy in the sciences

Patents are an underutilized source of scientific information, particularly in the life and health sciences. Patents and patent applications usually contain the first disclosure of new technologies and processes and serve to link theory with practice, providing ‘real world’ examples of the application of scientific research. Increasingly, scientific discoveries are reported first in the patent literature, rather than in academic journals. To ensure that science students have the skills that match the information resources they will use as professionals, patent searching must become part of their information literacy instruction. This article will discuss how valuable the patent literature can be to students, and how to incorporate patent searching into library instruction. By way of illustration, a case study will document how students in one class, Biochemistry 561, were introduced to patents.     

The technological trigger: Fostering educational revolution

While we live in an Information Society, information technology has barely penetrated the classroom. Not only does it make no sense for every aspect of our lives save education to be enriched by appropriate technologies (e.g., computers, video discs, interactive systems), this technology has the potential to trigger an educational revolution much in the way that the Gutenberg press triggered a revolution 500 years ago. Technology alone cannot fix our ailing educational system. Yet it can be the thin edge of the wedge in giving us the capacity to provide an educational experience that stimulates the student (and the teacher), opens myriad worlds of information, and conforms to what we believe to be best teaching and learning practices.