Statewide Initiative to Embed Consumer Health Librarians in Public Libraries: A Case Study

In 2004 a collaborative, statewide outreach project in Delaware was undertaken where consumer health librarians were embedded in public libraries. In order to explore the effect of the embedded librarians on the quality of health information provision, unobtrusive reference visits were made to half of the public libraries in the state. The query “Do vaccines cause autism?” was posed to library staff; resources provided were recorded. In 67 percent of visits, public library staff provided authoritative health information resources. It appears the embedded librarians had a positive residual effect on the provision of authoritative health resources for addressing an ambiguous query.     

Initial-link duration and acquisition of preference in concurrent chains

Initial-link response allocation in concurrent chains becomes less extreme as the absolute duration of the initial links increases (Fantino, 1969). The present study asked whether initial-link duration affected how quickly response allocation reached asymptote (i.e., acquisition of preference). Six pigeons were trained on a concurrent-chains procedure in which the terminal links were fixed-interval (FI) 8 sec FI 16 sec or FI 16 sec FI 8 sec and were reversed every 20 sessions. Across conditions, all possible combinations of transitions between variable-interval (VI) 8-sec (short) and VI 24-sec (long) initial-link schedules were studied. Overall, the rate of acquisition was faster when the durations of the initial links preceding the reversal were short rather than long, and when the durations of the initial links following the reversal were long rather than short. By contrast, initial-link duration had no effect on acquisition or asymptotic measures of temporal control of terminal-link responding. These results support the core principle of delay-reduction theory (Fantino, 1969) that the impact of a conditioned reinforcer varies directly with initial-link duration, but also suggest that temporal learning during the terminal links proceeds independently of initial-link duration. nt]mis|These data were presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Behavior Analysis, Boston, May 2004.     

Using autobiographical queer life narratives of teachers to connect personal,political and pedagogical spaces

Autobiographical queer life narratives are communicative spaces where queer teachers take up personal issues of being, becoming, and belonging in contextual and relational analyses of their situated experiences. In this work w/e consider the challenges and risks involved in this research, which, when shared and probed in classroom spaces, is a dangerous exposition of the queer self. With these challenges and risks in mind, w/e examine how our narratives provide fugitive knowledge to inform a pedagogy of ‘resist-stance’ that recognizes, respects, and engages queer identity, difference, history and culture. W/e provide examples of this pedagogy, discussing teaching strategies currently being used to connect the personal, the political and the pedagogical in classroom spaces. W/e also speak of the difficulties of living out this pedagogy as transformative teaching to transgress queer erasure in hetero-normative educational practice.     

Analysing the professional development of teaching and learning from a political ethics of care perspective

This paper uses Tronto's political ethics of care as a normative framework to evaluate a model of teaching and learning professional development. This framework identifies five integrated moral elements of care – attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness and trust. This paper explicates on each of these elements to evaluate the piloting and implementation of a teaching and learning professional development model at a South African higher education institution. The political ethics of care was found to be a useful normative framework for a group of higher educators to reflect on the process of engaging in teaching and learning professional development in that it revealed the importance of differential power relations, the importance of working collaboratively and being attentive to the needs of both caregivers and care receivers.     

Mentoring partnerships in a community technology centre: A constructionist approach for fostering equitable service learning

Mentoring programmes have gained increasing popularity in institutions of higher education to support undergraduates in community service or outreach efforts. Many of these programmes partner mentors with inner‐city youth, providing assistance in underserved communities while mentors gain experiences that connect theory and practice. Here we report on two years of fieldwork in a Community Technology Centre that created mentoring partnerships in which 36 liberal arts undergraduates engaged with local youth to design, create, and build technology projects involving graphics, video, music, and animation. We analysed over 200 field notes, which described their mentoring interactions over eight weeks and conducted exit interviews about their mentoring experiences. Our results indicate that mentors participated not just as more knowledgeable peers but also as facilitators, advisors, observers and, most importantly, as learners in this process. In the interviews, nearly all mentors reviewed assumptions about their own learning and mentoring, in addition to reflections about social issues. We discuss the importance of these findings for conceptualising mentoring as a partnership by creating more equitable interactions in service learning initiatives. We also address the role of constructionist activities in facilitating learning opportunities for both mentors and mentees.     

The influences of guiding cues on motor skill autonomy in rats

How does the effectiveness of guiding cues influence the development of motor skill autonomy? We utilized two sets of guiding cues (lights vs. reversed-lights conditions) that differed in their effectiveness to control a left–right leverpress sequence in rats. We separately measured the development of stimulus control by panel lights on guiding-cues trials and the development of stimulus control by practice cues on no-cue probe trials within the same sessions. Accuracy in the presence of the guiding cues was acquired faster in the lights condition than in the reversed-lights condition, but subjects in the reversed-lights condition were more able to complete the skill autonomously than those in the lights condition. Throughout acquisition, control by guiding cues and practice cues developed at the same rate in the reversed-lights condition, but control by practice cues (autonomy) developed at a slower rate than did control by guiding cues in the lights condition. At the end of training, subjects that had been exposed to the reversed-lights condition displayed higher levels of autonomy than did those exposed to the lights condition. The less effective guiding cue (reversed-lights) produced greater levels of autonomy than did the more effective cue (lights), even though control by this guiding cue developed more slowly. Thus, guiding your child by the hand too much may reduce his or her ability to complete the task independently. We discuss the similarity to prompt dependence in children with learning disabilities and transfer of stimulus control.     

Lenguaje y rendimiento escolar: Un estudio predictivo

La incidencia de las competencias lingüistícas del escolar sobre las adquisiciones escolares en las demás áreas del currículum es una realidad que todos los maestros pueden comprobar día a día. En este trabajo se investiga esa incidencia, medida a través de la variable fracaso escolar, y sus resultados podrían permitir extraer algunos principios de intervención educativa precoz en algunos aspectos del lenguaje cruciales para la escolaridad posterior.     

Coming to Content Management: Inventing Infrastructure for Organizational Knowledge Work

Two project profiles depict content management as inquiry-driven practice. The first profile reflects on a project for a national professional organization that began with a deceptively simple request to improve the organization's website, but ended with recommendations that ran to the very core mission of the organization. The second profile focuses on an organization's current authoring practices and tools in order to prepare for a significant change: allowing users to develop and organize content.     

A One-year Case Study: Understanding the Rich Potential of Project-based Learning in a Virtual Reality Class for High School Students

This paper presents a qualitative case analysis of a new and unique, high school, student-directed, project-based learning (PBL), virtual reality (VR) class. In order to create projects, students learned, on an independent basis, how to program an industrial-level VR machine. A constraint was that students were required to produce at least one educational application of VR. This study incorporated in-depth classroom observations, interviews with students, analyses of student projects, and surveys of parents and teachers to examine the social and learning processes in the class, and the nature of content learning represented in student projects. The results demonstrated that PBL can be effective even with minimal teacher guidance. The findings substantiate an educational approach rich with promise, for at least some students, that deserves considerable additional study to maximize its powerful potentials for independent and peer-mentored learning.