Unfolding lives in digital worlds: digikid teachers revisited

In this paper, I describe ongoing research exploring ways in which young teachers’ digital lives unfold inside and outside classrooms. I first interviewed teachers in 2006, and identified three different routes into digital worlds: serious solitary self‐taught, serious solitary school‐taught and playful social. A number of teachers agreed to be interviewed again in 2010. I outline ways in which I compare and contrast interviews over time, using analytic markers developed in ‘Inventing Adulthoods’, a Qualitative Longitudinal Research project. I also describe ways in which I set my analysis in Adam's concepts of time: ‘biographical time, generational time and historical time’. Case studies are outlined of three teachers, one serious solitary and two playful social. All three were language coordinators in 2006, and already experienced, innovative teachers of literacy. I argue that in 2010, the serious solitary teacher is able to bring new competences to the classroom, but fitting existing ways of teaching. In contrast, the playful social teachers bring new ways of knowing about digital worlds into classrooms, but these new ways are realised only if competences are recognised, communities are supportive and traditional ways of knowing about teaching and the curriculum do not block new ways of thinking.     

Action Learning: A Model for In-Service Teacher Education

Technology has changed the way the world functions on a day-to-day basis, but what about education? Education has been directly affected by the increase of technology in the United States. This change has not been well accepted by some members of the educational community, thus leaving the realm of education behind in the technology era. This article seeks to focus on the benefits of technology in the classroom as well as some of the issues that surround teachers and technology. The article also delves into the future of technology and education and provides some helpful tips for technology use in the classroom.     

Editorial

This paper centers on the process of conducting research on children’s social development through a partnership between university‐based researchers and teachers and students in an urban New England school district. It does so through the eyes of its first author, a second year graduate student who is negotiating the dual roles of researcher and teacher. In the process of investigating more about young children’s perceptions of teasing in conjunction with her research team, this student learns that theories about children’s social awareness developed in university settings virtually always require modification when examined in the real world. Ultimately, she concludes that the partnership between theorists and practitioners leads to a fine‐tuning of research protocols that elicit more complicated and variable responses from students, and that classroom climate factors, temporary or longstanding, may either facilitate or prevent effective data collection and analysis.     

Assessment literacy and student learning: the case for explicitly developing students ‘assessment literacy’

In this paper, we report on a study to quantify the impact on student learning and on student assessment literacy of a brief assessment literacy intervention. We first define ‘assessment literacy’ then report on the development and validation of an assessment literacy measurement instrument. Using a pseudo-experimental design, we quantified the impact of an assessment literacy-building intervention on students’ assessment literacy levels and on their subsequent performance on an assessment task. The intervention involved students in the experimental condition analysing, discussing and applying an assessment rubric to actual examples of student work that exemplified extremes of standards of performance on the task (e.g. poor, excellent). Results showed that such a procedure could be expected to impact positively on assessment literacy levels and on student performance (on a similar or related task). Regression analyses indicated that the greatest predictor of enhanced student marks (on the assessment task that was the subject of the experiment), was the development of their ability to judge standards of performance on student work created in response to a similar task. The intervention took just 50 minutes indicating a good educational return on the pedagogical investment.     

Americanization of Korean political advertising

This study explores televised political ads in the 1992 presidential election in the US and Korea to determine whether Korean political advertising follows American campaign styles—the findings are that it does. More specifically, the results demonstrated few differences between the two groups. However, some deep‐seated Korean cultural values still remain distinct in terms of negative advertising use and the category of ethical appeals. The conclusion is that the dominance of American campaign styles may be present in a global context beyond Western societies.     

Zooming in on infinitesimal 1–.9.. in a post-triumvirate era

The view of infinity as a metaphor, a basic premise of modern cognitive theory of embodied knowledge, suggests in particular that there may be alternative ways in which one could formalize mathematical ideas about infinity. We discuss the key ideas about infinitesimals via a proceptual analysis of the meaning of the ellipsis “...” in the real formula \(\hbox{.999\ldots = 1}\). Infinitesimal-enriched number systems accommodate quantities in the half-open interval [0,1) whose extended decimal expansion starts with an unlimited number of repeated digits 9. Do such quantities pose a challenge to the unital evaluation of the symbol “.999...”? We present some non-standard thoughts on the ambiguity of the ellipsis in the context of the cognitive concept of generic limit of B. Cornu and D. Tall. We analyze the vigorous debates among mathematicians concerning the idea of infinitesimals.