A Model for Peer Review in Instructional Design

Although many professions practice some type of formal peer review, similar support for increasing the quality and efficiency of instructional design products is largely informal. Most designers develop solutions in professional eommunilies-of-practice, but formal design methodologies ordained by many corporations and instructional design schools do not account for the strong influence these communities have on design decisions. This paper describes an instructional design review process that is modeled after a widely accepted practice among software developers in which peers offer feedback through “structured walkthroughs.” The instructional design review helps the practitioner develop stronger designs more quickly. provides a means to scaffold the novice designer in the vagaries of the workplace, and improves organizational memory. An artifact of a design review as well as guidelines and success factors are presented. The paper provides a summary of a formal peer review structure that has been developed and tested over the past three years at a major corporation.     

Specific tackling situations affect the biomechanical demands experienced by rugby union players

Tackling in Rugby Union is an open skill which can involve high-speed collisions and is the match event associated with the greatest proportion of injuries. This study aimed to analyse the biomechanics of rugby tackling under three conditions: from a stationary position, with dominant and non-dominant shoulder, and moving forward, with dominant shoulder. A specially devised contact simulator, a 50-kg punch bag instrumented with pressure sensors, was translated towards the tackler (n = 15) to evaluate the effect of laterality and tackling approach on the external loads absorbed by the tackler, on head and trunk motion, and on trunk muscle activities. Peak impact force was substantially higher in the stationary dominant (2.84 ± 0.74 kN) than in the stationary non-dominant condition (2.44 ± 0.64 kN), but lower than in the moving condition (3.40 ± 0.86 kN). Muscle activation started on average 300 ms before impact, with higher activation for impact-side trapezius and non-impact-side erector spinae and gluteus maximus muscles. Players’ technique for non-dominant-side tackles was less compliant with current coaching recommendations in terms of cervical motion (more neck flexion and lateral bending in the stationary non-dominant condition) and players could benefit from specific coaching focus on non-dominant-side tackles.     

Together for a Better Multicultural Society

I propose that educators construct pedagogical responses to youth in schools in ways that consider classrooms to be the result of and the boardroom for complex global flows. Youth's production of individual and collective identities wherein flows are apprehended, discarded, combined, and recombined, rages against purifying processes of neocolonial classrooms.     

The learning worker,organizations and democracy

A current turn of interest in notions of the ‘learning economy’ and the ‘learning society’ is fuelling discussions on promoting education, training and learning in contemporary organizations and workplaces. Although the education of workers has been variously theorized and practised throughout the 20th century, the current debates are marked by a prevailing economic perspective that places emphasis on constructing ‘learning organizations’ and on ‘human resource’ learning in service of organizational strategies for innovation and competitive advantage in economic activities. Critics point out that economic and managerial models scarcely attend to the human subjectivity of the learner‐worker and the worker's diverse learning interests. Broader socio‐cultural ends of worker learning such as lifelong human development and participatory citizenship in democratic society are very often overlooked. This article offers a critical discussion of current conceptions of learning organizations and learning workers. It argues that the prevailing focus on techno‐economic imperatives and of obscured managerial elite interests in organizations currently circumscribe and delimit learning in production organizations. It proposes that a more comprehensive approach to learning in organizations attends explicitly to the needs and interests of workers as learning persons. Taking a longer view, it proposes that organizational and worker learning may generate not only improved work practices but may regenerate links between lifelong learning, societal democratic citizenship and civilized organizations.