Audiographics in transition: changing technologies and patterns of usage

This paper discusses the development and use of an audiographics program, Electronic Classroom®, at all levels of Australian education and analyses the manner in which the rapid improvements in computing performance have allowed the technology to meet the needs of users from new areas of the curriculum; illustrates the usage of the product in a variety of educational settings by pointing to a number of case studies; discusses the educational strategies used by teachers in their use of audiographics and makes conclusions on the role of audiographics in education.     

Introducing the Creative Learning Principles: Instructional Tasks Used to Promote Rhizomatic Learning Through Creativity

ABSTRACT

Proving a child has been adequately educated is manifest through assessments evaluating the recall of facts or the deciphering of codes. How this information is taught and learned is the issue. Webb's depth of knowledge (DOK) and Bloom's taxonomy are cognitive models that drive instruction in today's classrooms. According to these models, creativity is a higher-order learning process. Although creativity has gained a renewed prominence in theoretic academic arenas, on the battleground of the typical classroom, creativity takes a back seat to instructional strategies with the goal of successful standardization of knowledge. Creativity, however, is the cornerstone of arts instruction. Creative learning principles (CLPs) is a system of instructional tasks developed in the arts and used to facilitate the metacognitive act of learning through creativity to solve problems. This article discusses how the CLPs create rhizomatic learning by facilitating connections between art and other disciplines and how they are used in planning.     

Multisectoral partnerships in e-learning: A potential force for improved human capital development in the Asia Pacific

Since their inception, a dominant characteristic of higher education institutions has been their reliance on the advantages conferred by geographic and political boundaries. However, emerging technologies and growing consumer power are challenging the status quo. The application of Internet-based information and communication technologies in education—e-learning—is now making it possible for education to transcend space, time, and political boundaries. In e-learning, content and mode of delivery are increasingly defined by external groups: students as well as employers. The emergence of e-learning is weakening the dominance of traditional providers of higher and continuing education—nonprofit colleges and universities—and they are being challenged by a proliferation of alternative institutions and providers with the skills and attitudes required to succeed in the new educational marketplace. Partnerships will allow traditional suppliers and intermediaries to contribute from their respective comparative advantages. In a common emerging model, traditional universities provide the intellectual capital, content, and content support; evaluate student performance; and award appropriate degree credit or certification. Intermediaries contribute in such areas as hardware and software provision, instructional design for the Web, website and communication for maintenance, record keeping, teacher training, and technical support for courseware development and marketing. Although this trend is not yet well advanced in the Asia Pacific Region, there are already a few pioneers, and interest is strong and growing among the major stakeholder groups—traditional academic institutions, traditional students, emerging intermediaries, professionals with a need for continuing education, and private sector corporations with the need to provide educational opportunities for their workforce. The Asia Pacific Regional Technology Centre (APRTC) is an example of an emerging intermediary organization. Its primary focus is on providing continuing educational opportunities for agricultural professionals throughout the Asia Pacific. It relies almost exclusively on e-learning for educational delivery and carries out its work through multisectoral partnerships. Initial experience indicates that the approach works in the region and is cost effective and that all partners and the clients can and do benefit from the collaboration.     

Parental Plurilingual Capital in a Monolingual Context: Investigating Strengths to Support Young Children in Early Childhood Settings

Parents who are plurilingual have a portfolio of assets they can use to support the language development of their children. This portfolio of assets is positioned as a strength that parents bring into their partnership with early childhood educators. However, not all parents who are plurilingual have the same assets in their language portfolios. Our study, using case studies of parents who have multiple languages and a desire to raise their children with more than one language, demonstrates that previous parental experiences with multiple languages, and intra-familial support for multiple languages combine to impact on parental language strengths and the expectations parents have of early childhood professionals. To build effective partnerships with parents, early childhood professionals need to understand the assets in parental language portfolios.     

Development of Preterm and Full-Term Infant Ability on AB, Recall Memory, Transparent Barrier Detour, and Means-End Tasks

10 preterm and 10 full-term infants were tested longitudinally from 28 to 60 weeks of age on a modified version of the AB task, a nonreaching AB task, a Barrier Detour task, a Means-End task, and Perseveration in the Means-End task. Results show that age-corrected (age since conception) premature infants tolerated longer delays than full-term infants on the modified and nonreaching AB tasks. However, when compared by chronological age (age since birth), there were no group differences on either the reaching or nonreaching AB task. No group differences were found on Barrier Detour, Means-End, or Perseveration in either the age-corrected or chronological age comparisons. The results suggest that the function that mediates modified AB performance is one of memory and not of perseveration or means-end ability. Further, these findings suggest that current proposals about brain development based on single samples of infants may be tenuous. Finally, the results of this study suggest that development of the brain structure(s) that mediate modified AB performance is strongly influenced by experience in the postnatal environment.     

Convergence of observer ratings and student perceptions of reform practices in sixth-grade mathematics classrooms

As part of a research project examining relationships between instructional practices and student cognitive and social outcomes in middle-school mathematics classes, external observers and students reported perceptions of teachers’ instructional practices. The extent to which students in classrooms identified by external raters as reform-oriented actually perceive instruction in ways aligned with reform principles has not been established. A 25-item observation protocol aligned with the reform practices called for in the Standards of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) was used to develop a quantitative profile of instructional practices across two lessons in each of 28 classes of 15 participating teachers. Students in each of the observed classes completed a 49-item survey of their perceptions of instructional practices. As items for both the observation protocol and Student Survey were designed to measure alignment with the same dimensions of reform practice, the convergence of these two data sets was examined as a means to confirm the observation ratings. The findings show moderately strong correlations between ratings of external observers and perceptions of sixth-grade students across three dimensions (pedagogy, tasks and mathematical interactions) of reform-oriented teacher practice in mathematics classrooms. Implications of these findings for future research are discussed. The research in this article was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant REC 0125868. The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of NSF. The research was also supported by the Roysters’ Fellowship to Mark Ellis from the Graduate School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.