Stealing From the Rich to Entertain the Poor?: A Survey of Literature on the Ethics of Digital Piracy

The backlash against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)/Protect IP Act (PIPA) legislation brings to light a battle that has been raging between Hollywood and Silicon Valley ever since technology made it easy to illegally copy and distribute copyrighted material. Many studies have been done on digital pirates in order to create a demographic, psychological, and ethical profile of them. This article compares these studies and examines the assumption that many of them are based on; namely, that digital piracy is always unethical or criminal in today's world. It also discusses alternative delivery methods that have been used by content creators and the implications for the future.     

Technology and Quality in Educational Scholarly Communication

ABSTRACT

The move to electronic forms of communication has changed the way educational research is communicated. In particular, it has led to an increased reliance on journals. This change has been more precipitous than one might expect. As journals become a larger proportion of the body of current scholarship, authors and readers seek new methods of determining and communicating journal quality. Methods that have worked for researchers in the sciences are not directly transferable to the education discipline. This paper examines existing tools and looks for new methods of assessing quality in journal publishing. This article was developed from a paper presented at the Society for Information Technology in Teacher Education (SITE) conference in Spring 2007.     

征服我心的故事

She Conquered My Heart with Her Stories In a hot,airless room in Africa,surrounded bycustoms officials,I filled out forms to get a resi-dency permit. “Where did you meet your spouse?”Thatwash’t hard.Neither was filling in my educationalqualifications. But the next question had me     

Personal Learning Planning: Can Tutoring Improve Pupils' Learning?

This article explores the impact of a Personal Learning Planning (PLP) initiative on pupils' understanding of, and confidence in, learning. The cornerstone of the initiative was a one–to–one, or small group, discussion between Year 9 students and their class tutor. This resulted in a written personal learning plan. The benefits and weaknesses of the initiative are discussed and the interrelationships between action planning, one–to–one tutoring and learning are explored.     

Shaping Literacy in the Secondary School: Policy, Practice and Agency in the Age of the National Literacy Strategy

This article examines the definitions of literacy in operation in secondary schools, and the relationship between official literacy policy and the practices of the agents responsible for implementing this policy. We trace the history of national 'policy' back to the Language Across the Curriculum movement of the 1970s as it provides an illustrative point of comparison with the first five years of the National Literacy Strategy. Drawing on empirical data which illuminate the views, perceptions and practices of key agents on a number of levels, we critically review the concept of 'school literacy' promoted in government policy, defining it as 'school–centric literacy' and question its ability to facilitate participation in the practices associated with the media and technological literacies which are increasingly a feature of school life. There is evidence of some unplanned effects of the current national policy but also that levels of agency, for literacy teachers in particular, may be rapidly diminishing.     

Adiposity,physical activity and neuromuscular performance in children

We investigated the associations of body fat percentage (BF%), objectively assessed moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) and different types of physical activity assessed by a questionnaire with neuromuscular performance. The participants were 404 children aged 6–8 years. BF% was assessed using dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry and physical activity by combined heart rate and movement sensing and a questionnaire. The results of 50-m shuttle run, 15-m sprint run, hand grip strength, standing long jump, sit-up, modified flamingo balance, box-and-block and sit-and-reach tests were used as measures of neuromuscular performance. Children who had a combination of higher BF% and lower levels of physical activity had the poorest performance in 50-m shuttle run, 15-m sprint run and standing long jump tests. Higher BF% was associated with slower 50-m shuttle run and 15-m sprint times, shorter distance jumped in standing long jump test, fewer sit-ups, more errors in balance test and less cubes moved in box-and-block test. Higher levels of physical activity and particularly MVPA assessed objectively by combined accelerometer and heart rate monitor were related to shorter 50-m shuttle run and 15-m sprint times. In conclusion, higher BF% and lower levels of physical activity and particularly the combination of these two factors were associated with worse neuromuscular performance.     

The word shape hypothesis re‐examined: evidence for an external feature advantage in visual word recognition

This study investigates the relative roles of internal and external letter features in word recognition. In Experiment 1 the efficacy of outer word fragments (words with all their horizontal internal features removed) was compared with inner word fragments (words with their outer features removed) as primes in a forward masking paradigm. These forward masked primes were followed by a word to be read aloud. Outer word primes presented for longer durations produced significantly faster naming responses than inner primes. Outer parts of words appear to provide more relevant information for lexical access at an earlier stage than inner fragments. In Experiment 2 words with only external features were named correctly on 96% of occasions compared with 52% of words with only their inner features presented. This indicates much greater information content in the periphery of a word (despite having a reduced area of print available: 45% compared to 55%). Multiple regression analyses controlling for ‘guessability’ (from data in Experiment 2) still produced significantly faster reaction times in the outer relative to the inner priming condition for longer prime durations. These experiments demonstrate that first, the most informative letter features are concentrated in the peripheral region of words; and second, even controlling for this effect, readers appear to have a bias towards analysing outer features of a word before inner features.