Effectiveness of a liaison program in meeting information needs of college of pharmacy faculty

This article describes the creation and implementation of focus groups to evaluate the effectiveness of a health sciences library's liaison program of the College of Pharmacy faculty and to better understand the faculty's information needs in order to design new and improved library services. The liaison services support the teaching and research needs of faculty and students through literature research, classroom teaching, and an extensive library collection of pharmacy literature. Focus group results demonstrated a high level of satisfaction with library liaison services and collections. Opportunities exist for expanded interaction with graduate students and greater marketing of library services to increase faculty awareness of specific library programs.     

Teaching to trust: How a virtual archives and preservation curriculum laboratory creates a global education community?

Building virtual archives and preservation curriculum laboratories centered around born-digital and digitized records is a collaborative project currently underway between Simmons College (US) and Mid-Sweden University. In this virtual environment, issues of trust are central to the process, in terms of the both archival curriculum and the collaborative education process itself. The article describes the project, the collaboration, and offers a range of scenarios that demonstrate how the laboratories work within curriculum.     

Algorithms: avoiding the implementation of institutional biases

ABSTRACT

Computer algorithms, the logic and code that power automated decision-making programs, increasingly dominate many aspects of modern society. There are already many examples of institutional biases – including ideological bias, racism, sexism, ableism – being solidified in algorithms, causing harm to already underprivileged populations. This article explores library-specific and society-wide examples as well as efforts to prevent the implementation of these biases in the future.     

Talent Development: A Guide for Practice and Research Within Sport

The transformation of talented youngsters into senior world-beaters is a topic of interest for practitioners and researchers alike. Unfortunately there is a dearth of research to guide the optimization of this process. Accordingly, this paper offers an overview of key themes apparent in the literature that have relevance to the effective development of talent. The five key generic features that emerge consistently include long-term aims and methods; wide ranging coherent messages and support; emphasis on appropriate development rather than early selection; individualized and ongoing development; and finally, integrated, holistic, and systematic development. In addition to the review, exemplars of current worldwide practice are used to further highlight both the need and direction for further research and more broad education of an effective talent development model.     

School Teachers’ Experiences of Science Curriculum Reform

We examine teachers’ experiences of a major reform of the school science curriculum for 14–16-year olds in England. This statutory reform enhances the range of available science courses and emphasises the teaching of socio-scientific issues and the nature of science, alongside the teaching of canonical science knowledge. This paper examines teachers’ experiences of the reform and the factors that condition these experiences. A designed sample of 22 teachers discussed their experiences of the reform within a semi-structured interview. Our analysis considers how the external and internal structures within which teachers work interact with the personal characteristics of teachers to condition their experiences of the curriculum reform. In many cases, personal/internal/external contexts of teachers’ work align, resulting in an overall working context that is supportive of teacher change. However, in other cases, tensions within these contexts result in barriers to change. We also explore cases in which external curriculum reform has stimulated the development of new contexts for teachers’ work. We argue that curriculum reformers need to recognise the inevitability of multiple teaching goals within a highly differentiated department and school workplace. We also show how experiences of curriculum reform can extend beyond the learning of new knowledge and associated pedagogies to involve challenges to teachers’ professional identities. We argue for the extended use of teacher role models within local communities of practice to support such ‘identity work’.     

Effects of network treatments on perceptions of a political campaign film: Can rhetorical criticism make a difference?

Presented here are the findings from a quasi‐experimental comparison of three network treatments of “A New Beginning,” a campaign film that aroused considerable controversy when the Republicans substituted it for a speech at the 1984 Republican National Convention as a way of getting the networks to air it. Of paramount interest in the study were the effects on viewers of one network's critical preview of the film. Of the three major networks, only NBC elected to air the entire film, but they preceded its showing with a commentary on the film that was far more critical than those by CBS and ABC. Surprisingly, Ss predisposed toward Ronald Reagan did not derogate the NBC treatment of the film, but neither did NBC's criticisms adversely affect perceptions of the film. To the contrary, ratings of the film and network treatments of the film were highest for NBC viewers. The findings are discussed with a view toward assessing the uses and limitations of rhetorical criticism in television coverage of political campaigns.     

Peers on Socrates and Plato

There is more to be said about two of the topics Chris Peers addresses in his article Freud, Plato and Irigaray: A morpho-logic of teaching and learning (2012, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 44, 760–774), namely the Socratic method of teaching and Plato’s stance with regard to women and feminism. My purpose in this article is to continue Peers’s discussion of these two topics.