Transforming engagement: a case study of building intrinsic motivation in a child with autism

This longitudinal case study of a 10‐year‐old girl with autism and severe communication impairment measures the impact of the MORE (Means, Opportunities, Reasons and Expectations) approach to enhancing engagement and communication. Through detailed observation of video data over a period of 28 months, engagement behaviours including interaction with adults and following adult directions increased, while resistant behaviours such as kicking, hitting and pushing adults away decreased. Fluctuation between different ‘states’ demonstrated that the frequency and duration of engagement was influenced by the MORE approach and an emphasis on developing intrinsic motivation. In order to enable further efficacy research, core features of the intervention and the changes in engagement over time are described.     

Edulabs AGIRE project – evaluation of ICT integration in teaching strategies

The AGIRE project, under the Edulab concept, aims to promote the adoption of innovative teaching practices. This paper reports the support strategies used to evaluate the teacher practices at the end of a teacher training course (TTC) and analyse its impact on teacher technology integration, using a design-based methodology. Teachers’ initial perception was gathered using an online questionnaire comprising ICT personal and professional competencies. The questionnaire results and the classroom observations showed that the majority of teachers were at the level of ICT adoption, before attending the TTC, reaching the adaptation level of integration of ICT, after the TTC. A variety of teaching strategies (flipped classroom, collaborative work, …) and technologies (interactive white boards, tablets, videos, …) were explored. The results sustain the thesis that, with proper support, ICT can be integrated in educational contexts in an innovative way and contribute to the development of teachers’ digital literacy.     

EFL teachers’ perceptions of English language policy at the elementary level in Taiwan

Due in large part to the trends towards economic globalization, English has become the most widely disseminated and ubiquitous international language. The purpose of the study was to investigate what Taiwan’s EFL teachers at the elementary level believe about the policy of English as a compulsory subject and how they perceive the benefits and obstacles of the policy’s implementation. Ten elementary English teachers in Tainan City and its suburban areas participated in this study. Data were collected through teachers’ interviews, classroom observation and document analysis. Results found that all ten teachers agreed with the policy for English as a compulsory subject at the elementary level. They observed both positive and negative sides of this top‐down policy. Classroom observation and interview data revealed that EFL teachers had to plan their English classes with the constraints on a large class of students with mixed levels of proficiency, limited teaching hours and resources. Parents’ expectations of and attitudes towards English learning also became an obstacle.     

Globalization and the freedom of knowledge

This article considers the transmission of knowledge in higher education. It takes the metaphor of the music industry that pre‐selects the music people can buy. The sales potential is the leading principle in the selection process. Often the small producer is excluded because his or her music is not of commercial interest. The end‐customer does not know what he or she is missing because he or she has never heard the music. It is to be feared that a similar market principle will also influence the selection of knowledge and affect the capacity of higher education institutions to freely generate and transmit new knowledge. The globalization of higher education risks homogenizing the cultural traditions of the non‐Western world through a process of Western cultural domination. On the other hand, the Internet, via open source software like LINUX, might serve to democratize higher education and allow greater grassroots input.     

Developing a communal identity as beginning teachers of mathematics: Emergence of an online community of practice

The aim of this study is to investigate how a community of practice focused on becoming a teacher of secondary school mathematics emerged during a pre-service teacher education programme and was sustained after students graduated and began their first year of full-time teaching in schools. Bulletin board discussions of one pre-service cohort are analysed in terms of Wenger’s (1998) three defining features of a community of practice: mutual engagement of participants, negotiation of a joint enterprise, and development of a shared repertoire for creating meaning. Emergence of the online community was associated with our own role in facilitating professional dialogue, the voluntary and unstructured nature of participation, initial face-to-face interaction that created familiarity and trust, and the convenience of using email rather than logging on to a website. The study shows that the emergent design of the community contributed to its sustainability in allowing the pre-service and beginning teachers to define their own professional goals and values.

The cooking teacher: investigating gender stereotypes in a Korean kindergarten

This article discusses some findings from a small‐scale investigation of children's gendered beliefs and behaviours in a Korean kindergarten which was attempting to challenge gender stereotyping through the anti‐bias intervention of a ‘cooking curriculum’. A sample of 14 children, some with ‘working’ mothers and some with ‘housewife’ mothers, was observed for two months, and informally interviewed on several occasions. The children's mothers were also interviewed. The findings are situated in the context of the changing, but still traditional, culture of Korean society, as well as in the contexts of early childhood education and theories of gender acquisition. They confirm that, although children are highly likely to reproduce the beliefs current in their home environment, they are open to reconstructing these views when actively challenged to consider alternatives, either by the school curriculum or by engaging in debate with a researcher or practitioner. The nature of the ‘alternative’ views available may however be problematic.     

Hyperactive Grey Objects

Previous papers on grey literature by the authors have described (1) the need for formal metadata to allow machine understanding and therefore scalable operations; (2) the enhancement of repositories of grey (and other) e-publications by linking with CRIS (Current Research Information Systems); (3) the use of the research process to collect metadata incrementally reducing the threshold barrier for end-users and improving quality in an ambient GRIDs environment. This paper takes the development one step further and proposes “intelligent” grey objects. The hypothesis is in 2 parts: (1) that the use of passive catalogs of metadata does not scale (a) in a highly distributed environment with millions of nodes and (b) with vastly increased volumes of R&D output grey publications with associated metadata; (2) that a new paradigm is required that (a) integrates grey with white literature and other R&D outputs such as software, data, products and patents (b) in a self-managing, self-optimizing way and that this paradigm manages automatically curation, provenance digital rights, trust, security and privacy. Concerning (1) existing repositories provide catalogs; harvesting takes increasing time ensuring non-currency. The end-user expends much manual effort/intelligence to utilize the results. The elapsed time of (1) the network (2) the centralized (or centrally controlled distributed) catalog server searches (3) end-user intervention becomes unacceptable. Concerning (2) there is no paradigm currently known to the authors that satisfies the requirement. Our proposal is outlined below. Hyperactive combines both hyperlinking and active properties of a (grey) object. Hyperlinking implies multimedia components linked to form the object and also external links to other resources. The term active implies that objects do not lie passively in a repository to be retrieved by end-users. They “get a life” and the object moves through the network knowing where it is going. A hyperactive grey object is wrapped by its (incrementally recorded) formal metadata and an associated (software) agent. It moves through process steps such as initial concept, authoring, reviewing and depositing in a repository. The workflow is based on the rules and information in the corporate data repository with which the agent interacts. Once the object is deposited, the agent associated with it actively pushes the object to the end-users (or systems) whose metadata indicate interest or an obligation in a workflowed process. The agents check the object and user (or system) metadata for rights, privacy, security parameters, and for any charges and assure compatibility. Alternatively the object can be found passively by end-user or system agents. The object can also associate itself with other objects forming relationships utilising metadata or content. Declared relationships include references and citations; workflowed relationships include versions and also links to corporate information and research datasets and software; inferenced relationships are discovered relationships such as between documents by different authors developed from an earlier idea of a third author. Components of this paradigm have been implemented to some extent. The challenge is implementing—respecting part two of the hypothesis—the integration architecture. This surely is harnessing the power of grey.