Foreign and domestic news content of Chinese television

A sample from 10 weeks of the major Chinese national television news program was content analyzed; 559 news stories were coded according to duration, topic category, position in the newscast, and geographic origin. The 189 international stories clustered at the end of the broadcast and were significantly shorter than domestic stories. A plurality of domestic stories was from the capital, Beijing, and covered different topics than those that originated outside of China. Foreign and domestic stories were brief and provided little interpretation or background.     

Voices of reform from the classroom: teachers’ approaches to change

Abstract

This paper reports on case studies of three teachers managing an education reform focussed on assessment, during a busy period of curriculum change in an Australia state Participants attended multiple professional development opportunities including a number of state-wide, systemically-facilitated assessment workshops. The most significant finding to emerge, as narratives of change unfolded over a nine- month period, was the diversity of teachers’ approaches to change. All three were insightful about practices that required change and could identify personal and professional attributes that would assist their management of change. All teachers attended the same systemic workshops and all had access to the Education Department’s published literature about assessment. Yet they organised and implemented change in very different ways. Each teacher’s approach was based on personal assumptions about learners and learning, the reform they agreed to implement, and their preferred approaches to incorporating new assessment practices into their existing repertories. Approach taken was a major determinant of experience of change and thus is an aspect of change management important to inservice-providers, teachers and school leaders. The paper concludes with an overview of a PD package designed with the findings of this research project in mind.     

Constructive Interference: Wikis And Service Learning In The Technical Communication Classroom

Four service-learning projects were conducted in technical communication courses using wikis. Results confirm previous findings that wikis improve collaboration, help develop student expertise, and enact a “writing with the community” service-learning paradigm. However, wikis did not decenter the writing classroom as predicted by previous work. Instructors using wikis to scaffold client projects should calibrate standards for evaluation with students and client, and they may need to encourage clients to stay active on the wiki.