Strengthening professional expertise: Mentoring in knowledge transfer,the cataloguers’ perspective

Abstract

University libraries provide support for institutions to achieve their objectives. To realise these objectives, universities allocate considerable funds for the library’s development and provision of needed resources that support teaching/research activities. This is for the simple reason that a university’s excellence is synonymous with the effectiveness of its library services. Hence, there is a need for continuous training and retraining for retention of librarians who manage the libraries to achieve the university’s objectives. Of the few on-the-job training models, mentoring as a Continuing Professional Development programme for librarians in a university library has often been overlooked. This study surveys the uses of mentoring in knowledge transfer for cataloguing, managerial, and research skills development for cataloguers in Nigerian academic libraries. The findings show that mentoring as a tool for knowledge transfer influences cataloguers and their skills development. The result indicates that mentoring in knowledge transfer has a moderate to strong correlation with skills development, and it improves catalouers’ proficiency and overall development.     

Career Mobility of High-Flying Women Academics: A study at selected universities in Malaysia

This study aims to investigate the relationship between past experience and the career mobility of 31 high-flying female academics from eight established Malaysian universities. Based on data gathered from in-depth interviews, it is discerned that the respondents' career mobility at the exploration stage is influenced by early exposure to learning, experience in secondary schools (especially at boarding schools), first-degree experience, and personal qualities. On the other hand, respondents' career mobility during the establishment and maintenance stages is attributed to graduate study experience, career centrality, family support, uniqueness of academic role, health consciousness and adherence to religiosity.     

Anatomy education environment measurement inventory: A valid tool to measure the anatomy learning environment

Students' perceptions of the education environment influence their learning. Ever since the major medical curriculum reform, anatomy education has undergone several changes in terms of its curriculum, teaching modalities, learning resources, and assessment methods. By measuring students' perceptions concerning anatomy education environment, valuable information can be obtained to facilitate improvements in teaching and learning. Hence, it is important to use a valid inventory that specifically measures attributes of the anatomy education environment. In this study, a new 11‐factor, 132‐items Anatomy Education Environment Measurement Inventory (AEEMI) was developed using Delphi technique and was validated in a Malaysian public medical school. The inventory was found to have satisfactory content evidence (scale‐level content validity index [total] = 0.646); good response process evidence (scale‐level face validity index [total] = 0.867); and acceptable to high internal consistency, with the Raykov composite reliability estimates of the six factors are in the range of 0.604–0.876. The best fit model of the AEEMI is achieved with six domains and 25 items (X² = 415.67, P < 0.001, ChiSq/df = 1.63, RMSEA = 0.045, GFI = 0.905, CFI = 0.937, NFI = 0.854, TLI = 0.926). Hence, AEEMI was proven to have good psychometric properties, and thus could be used to measure the anatomy education environment in Malaysia. A concerted collaboration should be initiated toward developing a valid universal tool that, using the methods outlined in this study, measures the anatomy education environment across different institutions and countries. Anat Sci Educ 10: 423–432. © 2017 American Association of Anatomists.     

Delivering audiovisual content with MPEG-21-enabled cross-layer QoS adaptation

Future multimedia communication systems have to support the user‘s needs, the terminal capabilities, the content specification and the underlying networking technologies. The related protocols and applications must be designed from this integration perspective in a cross-layer centric manner. In this paper, we propose an implementation of a streaming service (e.g.,Television over IP service) with a unified QoS management concept that enables an IP driven integration of different system components (terminal, user, content, and network). The MPEG-21 framework is used to provide a common support for implementing and managing the end-to-end QoS. The main focus of this paper is on the architecture design, protocols specification and implementation evaluation. Performance evaluations using PSNR and SSIM objective video quality metrics show the benefit of the proposed MPEG-21-enabled cross-layer adaptation.     

An Investigation into a Digital Strategy for Industrial Design Education

As the number of digital natives increases and the range of digital design tools / media continues to expand, it is timely to examine the potential for an entirely digital industrial design process that can be employed in practice and education. Following a literature review, a draft Digital Industrial Design (DID) strategy that focuses on the core design activities of sketching, drawing, model making, and prototyping was generated. A paper‐based, theoretical model was established and presented to graduating students, academics and practitioners. The results indicated that, while graduating students were interested in employing an approach based entirely on digital methods, the majority had doubts about its capacity to replace conventional and hybrid methods. The removal of paper‐based sketching, the conventional hands‐on experience when model making, and the cost of digital tools were identified as primary concerns. Although academics believed that the future of industrial design programmes would become increasingly digital, it was identified that current programmes were failing to exploit the opportunities afforded by these technologies fully.     

Note on the expansion of higher education in Bahrain

This article deals with the development of higher education in Bahrain. The study includes the philosophy of the educational system which co-relates religious morals and cultural traditions with modern economics, technological and scientific developments. Empirical statistics show the growth of higher education in Bahrain since the late sixties. In 1968, the strength of staff and students was 3 and 18 respectively. This has grown to 469 staff members and 5633 students by 1987.     

THE EFFICACY OF A GREEN CHEMISTRY LABORATORY-BASED PEDAGOGY: CHANGES IN ENVIRONMENTAL VALUES OF MALAYSIA PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS

Every day, climate change due to greenhouse emissions, pollution and other environmental degradation appears to make the news. Rather than doing something about the environment, namely in the developing countries where populations frequently are less educated about the long-term impact of human actions, they tend to disregard these problems. There is therefore a need particularly in developing countries to increase the potential for understanding and acting in sustainable, environmentally friendly ways. In this paper, we report quantitative and qualitative results of shifts in environmental value orientations among 110 Malaysian pre-service chemistry teachers during their enrolment in a green chemistry course. We find that the pre-service teachers?? environmental value orientations become more ecocentric and less homocentric and egocentric. Ecocentrism and ecocentric values support the development of behaviours that will assist them and the students they teach in leading environmentally sustainable lifestyles. We conclude that our green chemistry course constitutes (a) a suitable context for supporting pre-service teachers in their development of ecocentric values and (b) an effort to educate the pre-service teachers in leading sustainable lifestyles.     

基于在线论坛师生有效互动的研究

在线论坛对整个远程开放学习环境价值的提升具有很大的潜力。研究、分析放大学四个院系所开设20多门课程的100多个在线论坛,目的是阐述在线论坛与其他教学方法相结合时所起的积极作用。使用探究社群模型来评估论坛内容的有效性,对社交场感、认知存在和教学存在进行检查。研究表明,在线论坛对马来西亚开放大学混合学习环境下的学习作出了重大贡献。     

ICT teacher training: Evidence for multilevel evaluation from a national initiative

This paper is one of a pair that re-examines the evidence from a national initiative to train all teachers in England to bring them up to the level of newly qualified teachers, who are required to know when to use and when not to use information and communication technologies (ICT) in their professional practice. Reanalysis of data gathered for the 2004 evaluation uncovers the complexity of such professional development. The effectiveness of contrasting approaches to ICT-related teacher training was analysed using the national survey of 496 trainees and experts' reports on 11 of the 47 training providers. multilevel evaluation of professional development was shown to be robust for ICT teacher training, including a significant correlation between the views of experts and those of teachers. The presence of the middle level of 'organisational support and change' emerged as a particularly discriminating factor, indicating that higher-quality teacher training supports change in the classroom and in the school. Therefore, we recommend that all five of Guskey's levels be consistently adopted for the evaluation of ICT teacher training, and that research should also adopt a multilevel model. A second paper delves deeper to describe and contrast the highest and lowest-rated approaches to ICT teacher training.     

Normal delivery induced stress alters glutathione peroxidase and TNF-α in elderly primigravidas mononuclear cells

To probe the glutathione peroxidase (GPx) activity coupled to ROS and TNF-α levels in younger versus elderly primigravidas. Monocytes were isolated from blood of young and elderly primigravidas after 12 hrs, 24 hrs and 14 days postpartum. Age-matched healthy female donors served as controls. Thereafter, the above monocytes were subjected to evaluation of GPx activity, levels of pro-inflammatory cytokine TNF-α and reactivity/specificity towards anti-TNF-α antibody. Suppression in GPx activity with simultaneous enhancement of TNF-α levels in monocytes was observed after 12 hrs and 24 hrs of spontaneous labor pain-induced maternal delivery through normal vaginal route. Conversely, an enhancement of GPx activity and decrease in TNF-α levels were observed on day 14 of postpartum, thereby indicating reversal of the impaired neutralizing mechanisms. The antioxidant network combating ROS was stronger in younger primigravidas. Capability of TNF-α and ROS suppression was somewhat lesser in elderly primigravidas even 14 days of postpartum via normal vaginal route. The capability of GPx activity enhancement with simultaneous suppression in ROS and TNF-α, decreases in elderly primigravidas. This may act as one of the important parameters leading to a variety of complications encountered by elderly primigravidas.