From Gothenburg to Everywhere: Bonfires of Revolutionary Learning

Learn the simplest things. For you Whose time has come. It is never too late! - Bertolt Brecht, "Praise of Learning" Living social reality is always faster than any attempt to document it. Documentation will always remain inevitably partial.     

Stakeholder relationships in higher education

The purpose of this study is to develop a stakeholder map to describe the most important stakeholders and the process of stakeholder relationships in higher education. According to the perspective of the balanced scorecard, the classification of stakeholders integrates stakeholders into strategic management. Stakeholder maps are essential in quality assurance, because higher education institutions must identify the most important stakeholders to collect feedback from the stakeholder relationships and improve their processes. This study describes stakeholder collaboration using the process flow of stakeholder relationships. The results of the study can be used in quality audits to describe how stakeholders are involved in a meaningful manner in the development of activities.     

Neuromuscular fatigue induced by an isotonic heavy-resistance loading protocol in knee extensors

Abstract

The main aim of this study was to assess neuromuscular fatigue during a typical high-load, low-repetition loading protocol. Muscle stimulations were used to assess maximum voluntary contraction, resting single- and double-pulse twitch characteristics, and superimposed double-pulse twitch force (used to calculate voluntary activation) before and after an acute knee extension loading protocol. In our participants, who had previous resistance training experience, the mean voluntary activation level was 96.2% in an unfatigued state. Maximum voluntary contraction (?11.8%), resting double-pulse twitch force (?10.6%), and voluntary activation (?2.1%) were markedly decreased as a consequence of loading (P < 0.05). In addition, although potentiated twitch characteristics were observed during the loading protocol, this was short-lived, as fatigue surpassed the potentiation mechanisms. Our results show that both central and peripheral mechanisms contributed to neuromuscular fatigue during the present loading protocol.     

Educational generations and the futures of adult education: a Nordic experience

In this study of the meanings of education and learning in people's lives, educational generations in Finland were investigated. The analysis is based on Karl Mannheim's concept and theory of social generation. This approach resulted in the differentiation of four educational cohorts living in contemporary Finnish society, three of which provided distinct core life experiences and educational experiences for analysis. These are: the war generation with scant education (born before 1935); the generation of structural change with growing educational opportunities (born 1936–55) and the welfare generation with many educational choices (born after 1955). This article, reviews the characteristics of these generations, and analyses the dynamics of their educational courses and experiences. It is concluded that their core experiences of education can be summarized in two basic narratives: the narrative of national culture and that of economic structural change. Finally, it is argued that such generational change reflects the more general rationalization of Western culture and society. Based on this argumentation, the future of adult education based on the application of Weberian social theory and its conceptions of material and formal rationality are considered.     

The prevalence of publicly stimulated innovations –A comparison of Finland and Sweden, 1970–2013

While the role played by the state in stimulating innovation in the private sector has been a prevalent interest in innovation research, studies analysing the impacts of public interventions have usually focused on individual policies, programs or projects. Public stimulation is hence often studied from a relatively restricted and temporarily confined perspective, leaving a macro-level and longer-term perspective unrecognized. This article provides further evidence on the matter by examining how many innovations in Finland and Sweden have been publicly stimulated through funding or research collaboration, over a period of more than four decades (1970–2013). Our main source is a new innovation database constructed following the Literature Based Innovation Output (LBIO) method, which gathers the most significant innovations of both countries for the study period, totalling approximately 4100 Swedish and 2600 Finnish innovations. Our results indicate that the public sector has played a very prominent role in stimulating private innovation in both countries, and with an increasing trend. This is especially true for Finland, where 35–55% of the innovations of the period have been stimulated by public funding and 25–65% by collaboration with public research. In Sweden, the share of publicly stimulated innovations has been somewhat lower and erratic, but has increased over time.     

Strategy and Quality Maps in Higher Education

The purpose of this study is to investigate the integration of strategic management and quality assurance in higher education. The study presents how the value chain can be described in the strategy and quality maps, which are, respectively graphical representations of the strategic plan and the quality assurance system. The quality map is a new concept that explicitly takes into account the environment, strategic planning and the quality cycle of the institution. The quality map helps the management of the higher education institution present an overview of the quality assurance system to external evaluators, members of the organization, students and other stakeholders.     

Curricular Reform,Constantly Changing Values and Consequences for Teacher Education

In many European countries revised notions of learning and the dynamic nature of knowledge have brought about changes in teaching in primary education. The new views of learning, together with profound social changes, have similarly created pressures for curricular reform. This paper examines the repercussions of extensive curricular reform for teacher education, especially with respect to what can be done to develop teachers’ didactic skills and capabilities for curricular planning. The latter calls for profound skills and a sensitivity in following the changes taking place in society, and also the ability to discuss the values towards which the concrete goals of the teaching should be directed. In order to convey such skills successfully, teacher education itself should clarify its position on its didactics and its philosophy. Didactics should not be simply a matter of communicating facts, but rather the emphasis in this respect should be shifted towards philosophical content, leading to the skills of independent thinking.     

How do Finnish children express care and justice in comic strips and written narratives?

This case study explored how children’s moral expressions like love and violence differ according to the mode of narrative, comic strips or written narratives. Sixteen third-grade children from a primary school in Finland took part in the study. Children’s moral expressions were divided into justice and care. Reading frequency of fairy tales and linguistic and artistic abilities were also assessed in order to make a more in-depth interpretation of elements that underlie these different moral voices. The data for four of the children are presented in detail as the basis for the discussion. Children expressed their morality more strongly in comic strips—potentially offering a more sophisticated method for examining how children express their morality.     

The missing base molecules in atmospheric acid–base nucleation

Transformation of low-volatility gaseous precursors to new particles affects aerosol number concentration, cloud formation and hence the climate. The clustering of acid and base molecules is a major mechanism driving fast nucleation and initial growth of new particles in the atmosphere. However, the acid–base cluster composition, measured using state-of-the-art mass spectrometers, cannot explain the measured high formation rate of new particles. Here we present strong evidence for the existence of base molecules such as amines in the smallest atmospheric sulfuric acid clusters prior to their detection by mass spectrometers. We demonstrate that forming (H₂SO₄)₁(amine)₁ is the rate-limiting step in atmospheric H₂SO₄-amine nucleation and the uptake of (H₂SO₄)₁(amine)₁ is a major pathway for the initial growth of H₂SO₄ clusters. The proposed mechanism is very consistent with measured new particle formation in urban Beijing, in which dimethylamine is the key base for H₂SO₄ nucleation while other bases such as ammonia may contribute to the growth of larger clusters. Our findings further underline the fact that strong amines, even at low concentrations and when undetected in the smallest clusters, can be crucial to particle formation in the planetary boundary layer.     

Simple Semantics in Topic Detection and Tracking

Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT) is a research initiative that aims at techniques to organize news documents in terms of news events. We propose a method that incorporates simple semantics into TDT by splitting the term space into groups of terms that have the meaning of the same type. Such a group can be associated with an external ontology. This ontology is used to determine the similarity of two terms in the given group. We extract proper names, locations, temporal expressions and normal terms into distinct sub-vectors of the document representation. Measuring the similarity of two documents is conducted by comparing a pair of their corresponding sub-vectors at a time. We use a simple perceptron to optimize the relative emphasis of each semantic class in the tracking and detection decisions. The results suggest that the spatial and the temporal similarity measures need to be improved. Especially the vagueness of spatial and temporal terms needs to be addressed.