Student Drivers and the Fiduciary Duty of School Boards

Following E.D.G. v. Hammer, Canadian law has held that school boards, although they have a fiduciary duty to their students, do not guarantee the safety of their students from the acts of their employees. The scope of that fiduciary duty is narrow, restricted to a board acting with disloyalty, in bad faith, or in a conflict of interest to its students, which causes them injury. This paper takes the position that the scope of that duty should include cases where a school board’s policy allows students to use their own cars to drive fellow students to school-sponsored functions.     

Design Principles for Distributed Knowledge Building Processes

In this paper we explore various interpretations of the term distributed cognition, then turn our attention to communities grounded in the practice of collaborative knowledge building. We discuss CSILE (Computer-Supported Intentional Learning Environments), a technology designed to support contributions to a communal database. Shared responsibility for this community resource extends to aspects of school practice typically handled exclusively by teachers, and engagement in improving and connecting the contents of the database makes the process of knowledge building self-sustaining. We discuss knowledge building communities involving students and teachers, and end with discussion of design principles for distributed knowledge building processes.     

Evaluating Academic Challenge Beyond the NSSE

The authors investigated student and faculty perceptions of academic challenge at their institution, based on early administrations of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). This analysis revealed that the NSSE did not fully capture many meanings of academic challenge held by these faculty and students. This study led to a proposal for the development of an internal assessment approach using a modification of the NSSE and other scale items on academic challenge and student engagement. The authors discuss several implications of this study for academic scholarship and for institutional policy concerning the assessment of academic challenge.All authors except Jim Purcell are at Georgia College and State University. Stephen L. Payne received his Ph.D. in Management from Arizona State University. He is an Associate Professor of Management and has broad research interests in areas related to ethics and education. Karynne L. M. Kleine is an Associate Professor of Middle Grades Education and has an Ed.D. from the University of Maine in science studies. Her interests are intellectual development for teacher preparation and the history and philosophy of science education. Jim Purcell received his Ed.D. from the University of Alabama, is currently the Executive Director of State System Research for the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, and concentrates on issues of student retention and graduation. Ginger Rudesal Carter is an Associate Professor of Mass Communication with a Ph.D. from the University of Southern Mississippi. Her interests include research on oral history, the media, and issues relating to the student press.     

Knowledge management implementation in the school context: case studies on knowledge leadership,storytelling, and taxonomy

Teachers and school administrators in Hong Kong have had to cope with more work and performance pressure as they strive to implement educational reforms aimed at deepening students’ life-long learning skills. Management systems, which save time and transfer ideas, experiences, and knowledge more efficiently could help schools meet reform goals and relieve the occupational stress that inevitably accompanies change and progress. This paper explores the effect of knowledge management (KM) for school development by reviewing three cases selected from a school improvement project entitled “Knowledge Management and Primary School Development”. The project was launched specifically to determine if KM practices can assist educators to cope with added pressures and rise to the challenges of education reforms. The case studies illustrate three separate approaches to incorporating KM systems. Problems faced by these case-schools included declining school competitiveness, time-consuming data storage and retrieval practices, and hierarchical communication structures that stunted feedback from the teachers who are on the front line of educational reform. Interviews were conducted with school principals, middle managers, and teachers. The results show that the core KM strategies of personalization and codification can be adopted to improve school development. Knowledge leadership, knowledge sharing culture, and knowledge management system support were identified as success factors for schools to implement KM.     

The intersection of cognitive and sociocultural factors in the development of reading comprehension among immigrant students

The present paper synthesizes the international research literature on the educational achievement of immigrant and minority language students by articulating three propositions for which there is strong empirical evidence: (a) print access and literacy engagement play a key role in promoting reading comprehension; (b) the development of bilingual students?? L1 proficiency plays a positive role in L2 academic development; and (c) societal power relations play a direct causal role in promoting school failure among students from subordinated communities. This interpretation of the empirical evidence is contrasted with the conclusions of recent North American and European reviews. For example, the comprehensive review of literacy development among minority students conducted in the United States by the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth acknowledged the legitimacy of bilingual education as a policy option but said very little about the role of literacy engagement in promoting reading comprehension. By contrast, various reports of the Programme for International Student Achievement (PISA) conducted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) highlighted the importance of reading engagement for reading achievement but discounted bilingual education as a feasible or realistic policy option. The instructional implications of the present review include the need for educators to promote print access and literacy engagement, teach for cross-lingual transfer, and affirm students?? identities in classroom interactions.     

Government Information Networks - Mapping Electronic Governance cases through Public Administration concepts

Facing economic pressure, social tensions, global competition and low public confidence, governments can no longer afford to address increasingly complex and interdependent public goals alone or step back and rely on the markets. Instead, they have to work through networks of state and non-state actors to organize existing resources, knowledge and capabilities in the pursuit of public goals. The new paradigm increasingly relies on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to connect actors to the network and to build, manage and sustain relationships between them. We refer to such ICT-enabled networks as Government Information Networks. This article serves as an introduction to the current issue of Government Information Quarterly on Government Information Networks. The issue comprises twelve cases of such networks selected from the papers submitted to the 5th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, ICEGOV2010, held in Beijing, China, October 2010. The article also presents a conceptual framework for public administration networks, and applies the framework to describe, analyze and compare the cases, thus relating the volume to the Public Administration literature.     

发泡聚乙烯醇（PVOH）吸液性能研究

在恒温恒湿条件下对发泡聚乙烯醇（PVOH）试样吸收水、酒精的特性进行了测试分析．结果表明：发泡PVOH试样在承受一定压力的情况下吸水性能略有降低;试样被压缩至8000N后平衡吸水量明显升高;试样自然吸收酒精量约为自然吸水量的5．2倍;吸收酒精后,试样尺寸约增加了20％;压缩至8000N后,再做吸酒精试验,其平衡吸酒精量基本不变,且达到吸收平衡的时间缩短．     

‘Behind the teacher's back’: an ethnographic study of deaf people's schooling experiences in the Republic of Ireland

Historically, the valuing of deaf children's voices on their own schooling has been underrepresented in educational policies, curriculum frameworks and discursive practices and, in particular, in the debates and controversies surrounding oralism and Irish Sign Language in deaf education in Ireland. This article discusses children's everyday lived experiences of oralism and Irish Sign Language using ethnographic interviews and observational methods. The data yielded narrative understandings of how deaf children's schooling experiences served as a cauldron for the development of time, space and relational domains for individual and collective self-expression, cultural production and reproduction of the secret lore and understandings of Irish Sign Language and development of a hidden curriculum of sign language in a policy and practice context dominated by oralism. This paper concludes with recommendations for the development of a sign bilingual curriculum across the full scope and sequence of schooling in Ireland.