Cognitive Processes,ICT, and Education: A Critical Analysis

Information and communication technologies (ICT) have brought about renewed spaces for the societies of today, full of possibility and transformation. Bordering on the infinite, these spaces have generated new activities and behaviors. This technological scenario is now commonplace, an everyday reality that has taken root in our lives with remarkable speed. Now would therefore be an appropriate time to open up a line of inquiry into how this is shaping educational practice and how it is affecting our cognitive structures. We have chosen to conduct a review of relevant literature that will enable us to adopt a critical analysis to our subject: education and, above all, the learner, seen from the perspective of neuroscience and social analysis. However, the principal aim of this paper is to lay bare the disparities between research findings and current educational practices that use ICT.     

A Study of Prospective Primary Teachers’ Conceptions of Teaching And Learning School Geometry

There are two basic guiding referents in the present investigation: the teaching and learning of school-level geometry (basic concepts of Euclidian geometry and measure) and the analysis of the conceptions of prospective primary teachers in Spain. The work assumes that such conceptions appear and develop during school years, and that consequently, for the prospective teachers to learn to teach mathematics, account must be taken of the requirements that arise from these conceptions themselves and from the prospective teachers’ knowledge of school-level mathematics. The objective of the study was to describe and analyse prospective primary teachers’ conceptions of school-level geometry and it teaching and learning. To this end, we considered the hypothesis that the students’ memories and expectations provide information with which to characterize their conceptions of the field of geometry and its teaching/learning at the primary school level.     

Entrepreneurial Community College Presidents: An exploratory qualitative and quantitative study

Tertiary Education and Management - This study examined the entrepreneurial, nontraditional fundraising behaviors and activities of 23 community college presidents using interview and survey data....     

Integrating Public Art,Environmental Sustainability,and Education: Australia's ‘Creative Village’ Model

This paper will attempt to position the Creative Village project within the parameters of an international debate on public art, sustainability and education. It will begin with a brief history of the project and its community and arts origins, then examine its engagement with environmentally-responsive art and design, and finally its integrative educational paradigm. I will argue that the value and significance of the programme is that it has successfully bridged complex educational, design, community and environmental goals through having clear core values and a practice of flexible delivery.     

“When I Grow up I Would Like to Be …”: Factors Affecting Career Choice of Community Disability Workers in Southern Africa

The effectiveness of community based rehabilitation (CBR) programmes depends on the calibre of staff recruited and employed. Therefore, this study aimed to understand how the life experiences of community disability workers (CDWs) in Malawi, Botswana and South Africa influenced their choice of career. A life history approach was used to gather data from 16 CDWs, involving two interviews of each participant. Disability Studies postgraduate students conducted the interviews and analysed the data with academic staff, using thematic content analysis. It was found that lack of career guidance and information about community disability work affected participants’ initial choice of career. Some ended up in CBR because poor schooling prevented them from choosing other careers. Personal experience of disability and exposure to role models in rehabilitation motivated the career choice of some. The authors make recommendations including the selection of trainees with personal experience of disability and CDWs mentoring potential recruits.     

A philosophical and evolutionary approach to cyber-bullying: social networks and the disruption of sub-moralities

Cyber-bullying, and other issues related to violence being committed online in prosocial environments, are beginning to constitute an emergency worldwide. Institutions are particularly sensitive to the problem especially as far as teenagers are concerned inasmuch as, in cases of inter-teen episodes, the deterrent power of ordinary justice (i.e. threaten to sue) is not as effective as it is between adults. In order to develop the most suitable policies, institution should not be satisfied with statistics and sociological perspectives on the phenomenon, but rather seek a deep ethical understanding—also referring to the biological and evolutionary past of human beings. The aim of this paper is to show a way to fill this theoretical gap, offering some answers (and some questions too) that can illuminate future policy-oriented research and reflection. In order to do so, we will start by connecting our argument to evolutionary studies carried out in the past two decades, focusing on gossip as a tool for social assortment, thus endowed with a dual function: protect the group from free riders, intruders and bullies but also bully the deviant members. In the “Mediating gossip through social networks” section, we will see which aspects of gossip, vital for bullying, are co-opted by social network scenarios. A fundamental trait of human social life, that is the subdivision in smaller coalitions, or sub-groups, will be shown as missing in social networks (SN) dynamics—therefore constituting themselves as structurally violent. The “Why and how do social networks empower bullying?” section will deal with techno-ethical and epistemological concerns regarding how gossip, mediated by SN, manages to empower cyber-bullying. The “Self-gossip and self-mobbing in the light of the disruption of sub-moralities” section will characterize cyber-bullying as often sparked by self-gossip (soon degrading into self-mobbing) in a scenario where familiar sub-groups, which also mediate defense and mutual understanding, are disrupted. The “Discussion and conclusion” section will consist of a philosophical summary, divided in two parts: a pars destruens analyzing whether SN, in their actual configurations, are fit for being used by humans-like-us, and a pars construens examining the broad potential consequences of highly enforced regulation aimed at contrasting cyber-bullying.