The Vertex Project: Children Creating and Populating 3D Virtual Worlds

This paper outlines early investigations and initial outcomes of The Vertex Project, a school‐based action research project currently underway at Middlesex University. The project aims to explore the potential of Shared 3D Virtual Environments as creative learning tools for children, and looks into the challenges facing their practical integration into the primary classroom. Working in partnership with three primary schools, the project sets out to investigate the teaching and learning possibilities offered by Internet based 3D virtual environments, placing particular emphasis on the opportunities provided by the active participation of children in the design and construction of their own virtual worlds, and in the creation of avatars with which to represent themselves within these spaces.     

Teachers in school sports: between the fields of education and sport?

According to the cultural sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, gaining access to a social space or a position within a social space requires a specific capital. For teachers, this is normally indicated by a valid teaching certificate with relevant subject knowledge. However, when no qualified teachers are available, which is the case for the subject of school sports in Sweden, other assets gain recognition. Drawing on Bourdieu's conceptual framework, this paper examined the conditions for school sports in Sweden, and based on questionnaires answered by 109 teachers, explored the competencies, education and backgrounds teachers in upper secondary school sports possess. The paper address the question: what valuable resources are required to become a teacher of school sports and gain recognition as symbolic capital? The results show that while school sports in Sweden are carried out through a school subject and thus regulated by the government, it is influenced by both the fields of education and sport. Furthermore, the questionnaire results show that a majority of the teachers are employed as coaches instead of teachers and that less than half of them (45%) have a teacher education background, while 95% have a coaching education background. However, the results also show that teachers assessed their competencies for teaching school sports as high, especially with regard to competencies in specific sport skills. In conclusion, this paper shows how coaching education and experience in competitive sports are an important resource required to become a teacher in school sports and is thus recognized as symbolic capital. Therefore, school sports cannot be viewed as a legitimate part of the field of education but can be viewed as a part of the field of sport.     

Teachers’ enactment of policy in classrooms: making students accountable through inscriptions from the curriculum in classroom interactions

The purpose of this paper is to examine the complex relationships between educational policy and classroom practice. By employing a sociocultural perspective, we examine formulations inscribed in socio-material artifacts about what students should learn and how they should engage with knowledge. We explore how these formulations are mobilized in instructional work and the implications this activity has for student participation. To address this issue, we analyzed video data of how teachers invoke competence aims from the national curriculum in their instructional work in six classrooms. The analytical procedures were derived from interaction analysis. The analysis focuses on how such formulations explicitly mediate social interaction as it unfolds on a micro level. The findings show that competence aims gain different functions as they are mobilized in classroom practice; in other words, they serve different purposes in teachers’ instructional work and anticipate different modes of student participation. In this study, the competence aims were (a) invoked as a source of authority, (b) translated into instructions, and (c) mobilized to obtain social order in the classroom. More rarely, the competence aims were used in meta-level discussions, where they functioned to reach agreements on how to pursue work toward joint goals. We discuss the implications of these ways of invoking competence aims for student participation.

     

Discussing disability ‐ an investigation into theories of disability

ABSTRACT

>In the contemporary debate on the theories of disability some writers have questioned able‐bodied people's ability to understand the experience of disability when they themselves lack this kind of experience. This paper questions this claim. An investigation into various conceptions and theories concerning disability will be elaborated and discussed. In the recent literature it has been stated that disability is socially created, and that disablism is an oppression because of disablist societies. Disability as a social creation has been promoted as the only fruitful perspective concerning disability. This conception will be challenged by arguing that its core argument might encourage a severe oppression of disabled people.     

Evaluating Groupware Support for Software Engineering Students

Software engineering tasks, during both development and maintenance, typically involve teamwork using computers. Team members rarely work on isolated computers. An underlying assumption of our research is that software engineering teams will work more effectively if adequately supported by network-based groupware technology. Experience of working with groupware and evaluating groupware systems will also give software engineering students a direct appreciation of the requirements of engineering such systems.     

Educating for the real world: an illustration of John Dewey’s principles of continuity and interaction

The principles of interaction and continuity (intersection between experience and education) form a major part of John Dewey’s philosophical discourse. According to Dewey, these principles determine the quality of educative experience for meaningful life‐long learning. In this article, I argue that nowhere is the relationship between experience and education better illustrated than in Carter G. Woodson’s work, The mis‐education of the Negro, and in Malcolm X’s intrinsic life experiences.     

Positioning in Market Space: The Evaluation of Swedish Universities' Online Brand Personalities

The paper extends Aaker's previous empirical work on brand personality by exploring whether Swedish Universities communicate distinctive brand personalities in cyberspace. Employing a multistage methodology, data are drawn from the English Web sites of 17 Swedish universities and analyzed by using a combination of computerized content and correspondence analyses. Results indicate that some universities appear to have clear brand personalities, others take on a new face with regard to the obvious personality one would have initially associated them with, while others fail to communicate their brand personalities in any distinct manner. While illustrating a powerful but simple and relatively inexpensive way for institutions for higher education and brand researchers to study communicated brand personalities, this study also highlights the growing importance of brand positioning issues in internationalization and globalization of higher educational institutions.     

Technology for all: turning a keyword into a school subject in post-war Sweden

The decades following the Second World War saw strong technological development and economic growth. They also saw ‘the advent of technology education’, a period of extensive curriculum development in this field. But what was done and why? In order to obtain a better understanding of the historical roots of technology education, in this study the mid-century school reforms in Sweden are examined and, more specifically, the birth of the new subject of Technology (Teknik) in compulsory schools. In this article, the political forces driving the introduction and shaping of this new subject are emphasised. In a time of rapid transformations of educational systems and labour markets, the term Teknik proved to be a useful concept for policy-makers and reform technocrats. However, the subject came to re-create the inequalities of the earlier differentiated school system, despite its presence within the framework of a school ‘for all’.