Was Kennzeichnet hermeneutische Forschung?

Zun?chst wird über die INterpretation eines antiken Reliefs, der so genannten „sinnenden Athena“, ein Zugang zur Bildungskonfiguration in der klassischen griechischen Antike gesucht. An diesem Beispiel einer historischen Rekonstruktion werden dann fünf Merkmale herausgearbeitet, die hermeneutische Forschung in der P?dagogik kennzeichnen: 1. szientistische Verfahren, 2. Kulturanalysen, 3. ein Methodenverst7;andnis des Anteilnehmens am Forschungsgegenstand, 4. Vertrautsein mit dem Forschungsfeld und 5. Ideologiekrritik.     

Autonomism: A defence of structural privilege?

Christian Bay will respond to the interchanges by Jan Narveson and Larry Haworth (see pp. 60–75 of this issue) in a forthcoming issue ofInterchange.     

Output-sensitive autocompletion search

We consider the following autocompletion search scenario: imagine a user of a search engine typing a query; then with every keystroke display those completions of the last query word that would lead to the best hits, and also display the best such hits. The following problem is at the core of this feature: for a fixed document collection, given a set D of documents, and an alphabetical range W of words, compute the set of all word-in-document pairs (w, d) from the collection such that w ∈ W and d ∈ D. We present a new data structure with the help of which such autocompletion queries can be processed, on the average, in time linear in the input plus output size, independent of the size of the underlying document collection. At the same time, our data structure uses no more space than an inverted index. Actual query processing times on a large test collection correlate almost perfectly with our theoretical bound.

On Kristjánsson on Aristotelian character education

I pursue three of the many lines of thought that were raised in my mind by Kristjánsson’s engaging book. In the first section, I try to get clearer on what exactly Aristotelian character education (ACE) is, and suggest areas where I hope the view is developed in more detail. In the second and longest section, I draw some lessons from social psychology about the pervasive role of what I call ‘Surprising Dispositions,’ and invite Kristjánsson to take up the difficult challenge of clarifying how ACE would help to address their influence on our thought and action. Finally, in section three I consider whether there is any robust empirical support for ACE, and if not, where that leaves us.     

Relevance feedback and cross-language information retrieval

This paper presents a study of relevance feedback in a cross-language information retrieval environment. We have performed an experiment in which Portuguese speakers are asked to judge the relevance of English documents; documents hand-translated to Portuguese and documents automatically translated to Portuguese. The goals of the experiment were to answer two questions (i) how well can native Portuguese searchers recognise relevant documents written in English, compared to documents that are hand translated and automatically translated to Portuguese; and (ii) what is the impact of misjudged documents on the performance improvement that can be achieved by relevance feedback. Surprisingly, the results show that machine translation is as effective as hand translation in aiding users to assess relevance in the experiment. In addition, the impact of misjudged documents on the performance of RF is overall just moderate, and varies greatly for different query topics.     

User-innovators and “local” information: The case of mountain biking

In a study of innovations developed by mountain bikers, we find that user-innovators almost always utilize “local” information - information already in their possession or generated by themselves - both to determine the need for and to develop the solutions for their innovations. We argue that this finding fits the economic incentives operating on users. Local need information will in general be the most relevant to user-innovators, since the bulk of their innovation-related rewards typically come from in-house use. User-innovators will increasingly tend to rely on local solution information as the stickiness of non-local solution information rises. When user-innovators do rely on local information, it may be possible to predict the general nature of the innovations they might develop.     

Die Öffnung des Schulsystems: Fakt oder Fiktion?

Opening up educational paths and especially decoupling educational courses and final school qualifications are seen as important aspects of the modernization of Swiss education. The study presented here investigates to what extent this de-linking actually took place in the case of the Swiss canton Freiburg. 525 pupils from German-speaking schools were observed in their progress from the end of primary school (year 6) to the transfer into the upper secondary level Gymnasium (year 10) or into alternative educational routes. Indeed, almost half of the young people, who went to the Gymnasium, previously studied at a middle-level general secondary school and not the preparatory Progymnasium; a strong indication of decoupling. Furthermore, the study shows that entry into the upper secondary level Gymnasium is still possible for pupils despite weak performance at primary level. Irrespective of the evidence for an opening of the education system, the findings also show that attending a Progymnasium has a significant effect on school biographies. The chance of transferring into the upper secondary level Gymnasium is twice as high for graduates, who attended a Progymnasium, as for comparative pupils, who did not. Additionally, a privileged social background correlates with a high chance of entry into the upper secondary level Gymnasium.     

Die FHStG-Novelle BGBl I 2007/89 – Fachhochschul-Recht aus trüber Quelle?

Die Novelle BGBl I 2007/89 des FHStG führte zu einigen wesentlichen ?nderungen im Fachhochschul-Studienrecht. Sie brachte einerseits die Etablierung einer Studierendenvertretung im Fachhochschul-Bereich sowie andererseits Vorgaben für die (arbeitsrechtliche) Stellung von Lehrbeauftragten. Im folgenden Beitrag werden diese beiden Neuerungen dargestellt und einer kritischen Betrachtung unterzogen, wobei sich – dies sei vorweggenommen – einige Punkte als durchaus problematisch und daher verbesserungswürdig erweisen.