Thorns on My Tongue

How might we bear witness to the fluidity and fragility of identity work that takes place during classroom discussion? How do teachers and pupils play with the personal politics of positioning during our everyday interactions? The piece that follows is written as a story almost entirely in everyday dialogue. It takes a methodological turn towards narrative imagining in order to develop an approach that explores the performance of projected, received and contested identity positions during an English lesson. A brief discussion of some of the issues raised and of what informed the process of writing serves as an epilogue to the story.     

The exercise of the object: issues in resource reusability and reuse

What is to be captured and how it is to be reused are issues that currently dominate a learning object discourse constructed around the potential for technology to enable learning resource management through the collection and reuse and learning objects. Efficiency and quality gains are promised for institutions that engage with the learning object economy. This account of the issues surrounding current conceptions of the reusability and reuse of learning resources questions whether object‐based resource reuse can simultaneously achieve gains in both areas, and whether a learning object economy will sustain institutional development and diversity for those HEIs that participate in it.     

The Course Experience Questionnaire: Altering question format and phrasing could improve the CEQ's effectiveness

Two studies considered whether the Course Experience Questionnaire's (CEQ) question format was the most appropriate for the CEQ's purpose. In the first, comparisons were made against two alternative but minimalist variations on the standard format. None of three tests showed the standard format to be superior. In the second, students reported the thinking used in deciding their responses on a sample of specific CEQ questions. Those reports uniformly showed responses to be decided by the recall of particular, concrete and personal experiences prompted by a question, and not by the overviewing implicitly assumed by the standard format. The implications drawn are that the systematic trialing of alternative question forms could well result in improved performance of the CEQ as an instrument, and that those alternative forms should probably be constrained to those directly prompting the recall of personal experience, but in more guided fashion than seems presently to occur.     

STUDENT NEEDS IN AN ERA OF MASS HIGHER EDUCATION 1

The article gives an overview of higher education in Europe and North America from the student revolts of 1968 to the present, stressing its massification and its diversification. Economic insecurity, the author suggests, has made students forgo the radicalism of the late 1960's; however, the poor conditions in which students must study should serve as a warning to the public authorities. The growing complexity of the educational process, including the links between education and future employment and employability, are such that the services of student advisors and counsellors are needed at all levels. Their services will become as important as those provided by the teachers themselves.

     

New methods for an old debate: Utilizing reader response to investigate the relationship between collaboration and quality in academic journal articles

There has been a longstanding debate about the merits of collaborative research, with most studies focusing on the citation advantage of such research. However, citation studies provide only one lens on the issues. New methods of inquiry are necessary to incorporate other audiences of scholarly literature. Reader response surveys were used to evaluate the quality of collaborative versus single-authored research. Graduate students in three sections of the same library and information science course during the 2010 academic year used surveys to rate each week's assigned readings according to overall quality, usefulness for class discussion, and enjoyability. Students voted whether to keep each article in the reading list for the following semester. Data were analyzed to compare results for single-author versus multi-author works. Multi-author works were favored over single-author. These findings provide another layer of empirical support for the benefits of collaborative research and inform both scientometricians and educators.     

Perception,communication and educational research: A transactional view

Summary We have not presented a transactional theory, since, so far as we know, there is no one such theory to present. Instead, we have outlined some transactional viewpoints which we consider potentially useful in audiovisual communication, learning resources development, and research in these areas. We have suggested some implications and advantages of transactional assumptions.     

Learning about the educational uses of the internet by producing an educational web site in an interdisciplinary and virtual team

ABSTRACT

In this paper we describe the use of an interactive software package designed to raise issues and questions about the role of information technology within the primary classroom and to highlight the partnership aspects inherent within a teacher tutor/mentor approach to the supervision of school placements. Data were collected from a variety of people concerned in the exercise: teacher tutors, university liaison tutors and student teachers. These data concerned not only the efficacy of the materials themselves, but also the effect or impact of the exercise upon the school placement experience. A number of issues emerged from our exploration into this exercise revealing attitudes towards information technology in education. These concerned ownership of learning and questions of expertise, access to partnership and co‐professionality, staff and student attitudes towards information technology and towards partnership and implications for the future. Our data suggest that learning becomes powerful when the learner takes ownership. Information technology can enable the shift towards creator and is a powerful means of achieving that.     

Investigation of angiogenesis genes with anterior cruciate ligament rupture risk in a South African population

The angiogenesis-signalling pathway is a physiological response after mechanical loading to promote matrix remodelling and thereby maintain tissue homeostasis. Studies have shown increased expression of angiogenic molecules in response to loading and in ruptured ligaments. Recently, polymorphisms within the vascular endothelial growth factor A (VEGFA) and kinase insert-domain receptor (KDR) genes were associated with risk of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) ruptures and Achilles tendinopathy in Caucasian study groups. A case-control genetic association study was conducted on 100 controls and 98 participants with surgically-diagnosed ACL ruptures; of which 51 participants reported non-contact mechanism of injury (NON). All participants were genotyped for five functional polymorphisms: VEGFA (rs699947, rs1570360, rs2010963) and KDR (rs2071559, rs1870377). Haplotypes were inferred. In the male participants, the KDR rs2071559 AG genotype was significantly over-represented (P = 0.048, OR: 1.90, 95% CI: 1.00–3.59) in the controls. Furthermore, the GG genotype was significantly under-represented in the male controls compared to the male ACL group (P = 0.018, OR: 2.77, 95% CI: 1.17–6.55) and the male NON subgroup (P = 0.013, OR: 3.26, 95% CI: 1.24–8.58). Haplotype analysis implicated the KDR gene in all participants and in male participants separately. Collectively, these results implicate the angiogenesis-signalling pathway as a potentially key biological pathway contributing to ACL injury susceptibility.