The situated aspect of creativity in communicative events: How do children design web pages together?

This paper looks at the collaborative construction of web pages in History by a Year-4 group of children in a primary school in the UK. The aim of this paper is to find out:

(a)

How did children interpret their involvement in this literacy practice?

(b)

How the construction of web pages was interactionally accomplished? and

(c)

How can creativity be identified in interaction?

Using an ethnographic approach to the study of communication, it is argued that the collective and creative construction of meaning can be understood in terms of relationships amongst components of communicative acts. The analysis of these components reveals how participants shape their utterances as they are engaged in the pursuit of shared goals in a situated activity system. It is argued that participants strive to become members of a community of practice designing web pages. Members of this community showed their understanding in relation to the way they interpreted the design rules for a multimodal text, the means for working together in collaboration and distributing roles, as well as their interpretation of what counts as historical knowledge. Also, in terms of creativity, participants managed to communicate and negotiate their intentions by using several figures of speech and language games, as well as contextually framing their positions as participants in a dialogue. That is, children and teacher demonstrated their creative abilities in a textual, contextual and critical level. It is concluded that creativity is not a gifted capacity; it is an everyday act which is interactionally accomplished in the context of social participation as members of a community. Members creatively display their intentions and negotiate new alternatives for the interpretation of actions in situated activity systems.     

The Contemporary Professoriate: Towards a Diversified or Segmented Profession?

On the empirical basis of six national studies (Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Denmark, Russia and South Africa), this paper examines the phenomenon of segmentation, defined as the solidification of deep hierarchies with little crossover between categories of institutions or individuals. The massification of higher education has brought about a great diversity of institutions and, concomitantly, stark differences among the professoriate. While the public sector has to some extent been able to protect its academic personnel, the for‐profit sector is moving towards an unstable professoriate, poorly paid, hired mostly on a per‐hour basis, and for whom sharing in academic governance is a distant dream. Some of this differentiation is emerging also within institutions and a new kind of academic who could be termed ‘just‐in‐time knowledge worker’ is on the rise.     

Policies for science, technology and innovation: Translating rationales into regional policies in a multi-level setting

Departing from a number of theoretical perspectives from which rationales for science, technology and innovation (STI) policy can be extracted, this paper discusses three questions. First, what rationales for public intervention can be derived from different economic theories, including theories usually associated with spatial dynamics and territorial relationships? Second, what policy instruments or policy-mixes can be associated with the various rationales? Third, what do these theories and associated rationales tell us about the territorial level or levels at which STI policies can usefully be designed and implemented?     

Extraction of complex index terms in non-English IR: A shallow parsing based approach

The performance of information retrieval systems is limited by the linguistic variation present in natural language texts. Word-level natural language processing techniques have been shown to be useful in reducing this variation. In this article, we summarize our work on the extension of these techniques for dealing with phrase-level variation in European languages, taking Spanish as a case in point. We propose the use of syntactic dependencies as complex index terms in an attempt to solve the problems deriving from both syntactic and morpho-syntactic variation and, in this way, to obtain more precise index terms. Such dependencies are obtained through a shallow parser based on cascades of finite-state transducers in order to reduce as far as possible the overhead due to this parsing process. The use of different sources of syntactic information, queries or documents, has been also studied, as has the restriction of the dependencies applied to those obtained from noun phrases. Our approaches have been tested using the CLEF corpus, obtaining consistent improvements with regard to classical word-level non-linguistic techniques. Results show, on the one hand, that syntactic information extracted from documents is more useful than that from queries. On the other hand, it has been demonstrated that by restricting dependencies to those corresponding to noun phrases, important reductions of storage and management costs can be achieved, albeit at the expense of a slight reduction in performance.     

Enseñar literatura,tal vez soñar

Se hace aquí una reflexión que, partiendo del sentido (la literatura no se enseña, se contagia), adopta un enfoque funcional y comunicativo. Frente a una literatura como objeto se opta por una literatura como medio. Frente a la memoria, la competencia. Enseñar a usar la lengua y la literatura más que enseñar lengua y literatura.     

The College Promise in Communities: Do Place-based Scholarships Affect Residential Mobility Patterns?

Research in Higher Education - Place-based scholarships within the College Promise movement reduce the cost of college for students in particular places and often include incentives for families to...     

Causal discourse and the teaching of history. How do teachers explain historical causality?

In this paper we aim to describe how secondary school teachers explain multicausal historical events. To that end, we recorded and analyzed seven classes on “The discovery and colonization of America”. The results show that secondary school teachers do not simply deal with history as a catalog of actions, characters and dates. On the contrary, historical contents are presented as a mesh of events and factors, explicitly or implicitly interwoven. In the discourse analysed, causal-conditional relationships are predominant, although some intentional and narrative elements are also integrated. The teachers asked some questions specifically aimed at involving students in causal reasoning. In spite of the fact that some students recalled a great deal of information, they were likely to describe the historical accounts without explaining why they were generated. Recall protocols contained many more narrative elements than causal ones. Most of the students only remembered and understood those causal relationships which had been signaled and supported verbally by teachers during the explanation. Implications for future research are discussed.