Computers in Engineering Education in Ghana

This paper looks at the areas where the computer is used in Ghana and determines the future of the computer industry in the country. It then outlines plans through which engineers can be trained to meet these challenges in the country.     

The Training of the Engineer through Effective Laboratory Work

The performance of laboratory experiments play a significant role in the training of engineers. When incomplete guidelines on how to perform the experiments are given, the student fails to develop the initiative and creativity needed by the professional engineer. Students have however benefitted more from such laboratory exercises when they were given a few guidelines and had to design the experiment themselves in small groups. The improvement in their initiative and creativity has been seen in their final year projects. They are also able to meet more of the challenges facing them outside the walls of the university.     

Evaluating the evidence for implicit perceptual learning: a re-analysis of Farrow and Abernethy (2002)

I present a re-analysis of the data from Farrow and Abernethy's (2002) study of implicit perceptual training in tennis. I argue that there are several weaknesses and mistakes in the original analysis, which, when rectified, lead to a fundamentally different set of conclusions to those given in the original paper. Specifically, there are significant group differences in anticipatory performance before the intervention that make subsequent between-group comparisons at specific occlusion points problematic. Second, in contrast to what is reported in the original paper, the explicit learning intervention resulted in a significant improvement in performance. In addition, a comparison of the effects of the different interventions indicates that the placebo group demonstrated the largest mean improvement in anticipation for the four occlusion points up to racquet-ball impact. Third, the non-significant change in performance over a 32-day retention period indicates that any improvements in performance were retained, not lost, over this period of time. Following a re-analysis of the original data, I conclude that Farrow and Abernethy's study provides no evidence that an implicit perceptual training paradigm improves anticipatory performance more than either an explicit learning paradigm or, indeed, an intervention involving mere observation of tennis matches.     

Lifelong Earning: working-class women and lifelong learning

This article argues that despite the rhetoric that surrounds lifelong learning, barriers to participation for working-class women are too often ignored or made invisible. Starting from a critique of current policies and practices of lifelong learning that are based in instrumentalism and individualism, the article addresses the diversities of working-class women's multiple identities and considers some of the (apparent) wider benefits of learning for working-class women. The article concludes that many working-class women are trapped in a cycle of lifelong earning that centres on low-paid, low-status jobs. What they learn is that, in a learning society that remains driven by market forces based in inequalities of gender, race and class, there is no political escape.