Stockholm Olympics at the Movies

This article is a contribution to the special issue on the Olympic Games in Stockholm in 1912 commissioned by Christian Widholm. The text discusses the 1912 Olympics as a major media event with a special focus on the production, distribution and reception of moving pictures     

INTERCULTURALISM,MULTICULTURALISM, AND THE STATE FUNDING AND REGULATION OF CONSERVATIVE RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS

In this essay, Bruce Maxwell, David Waddington, Kevin McDonough, Andrée‐Anne Cormier, and Marina Schwimmer compare two competing approaches to social integration policy, Multiculturalism and Interculturalism, from the perspective of the issue of the state funding and regulation of conservative religious schools. After identifying the key differences between Interculturalism and Multiculturalism, as well as their many similarities, the authors present an explanatory analysis of this intractable policy challenge. Conservative religious schooling, they argue, tests a conceptual tension inherent in Multiculturalism between respect for group diversity and autonomy, on the one hand, and the ideal of intercultural citizenship, on the other. Taking as a case study Québec's education system and, in particular, recent curricular innovations aimed at helping young people acquire the capabilities of intercultural citizenship, the authors illustrate how Interculturalism signals a compelling way forward in the effort to overcome the political dilemma of conservative religious schooling.     

Building resilient schools in Russia: effective policy strategies*

The article uses the framework of resiliency to examine the strategies of principals in schools working under challenging socio-economic conditions that show higher-than-expected educational results. We collected a unique set of data within the Russian ‘National monitoring of education markets and organisations’ programme. This work continues the study, begun in 2014, of the peculiarities of the functioning conditions, management and educational strategies of different groups of schools (urban, rural, implementing higher-level programmes, private, etc.), where authors supplement the economic indicators of school performance with socio-economic contextual factors. A contextualisation model was applied to distinguish the resilient schools studied and the socio-economic characteristics for each school. The typical strategies of principals of resilient schools are as follows: recruiting more successful students from other schools, the branding of the school, creating a culture of high expectations for staff and students, and a less bureaucratic management style.     

开放远程教育研究与文化及社区建设

开放和远程学习者通过运用通信技术与世界各地人士联系在一起,本文将从文化和社区的角度对这些联系进行探讨。文化和社区这两个概念对学生和教师的互动有着直接的影响,而这种影响在网上社区中尤其显著。一些研究者已经开始探讨通信技术,尤其是因特网技术对不同背景的学生所产生的巨大影响,然而,对于如何将有关文化、社区、社会存在和社会学习等不同主题结合在一起,进行整体研究,仍是我们面临的新课题。本文作者对这一课题的研究提出了建设性的意见。     

The Legitimation of Commercial Surrogacy in Russia

Commodification is becoming an increasingly common phenomenon in the modern world. A vivid example of the commodification of unique objects is commercial surrogacy services, which transform the status of motherhood from being a “woman’s social vocation” into a service whose end product is a human life that is valued in monetary terms. According to Igor Kopytoff, blurring the boundary between goods and unique objects can undermine the social order (Kopytoff 2006). However, gainful surrogacy has not in fact undermined the social order, which raises the question of how the functioning and legitimate existence of such a service can be assured in society. The authors of the present article have analyzed 14 interviews with employees at Moscow reproductive clinics and agencies that provide legal support services for surrogate mothers.¹ We demonstrate on the basis of this analysis that the way in which the child’s status is determined and the potential parents and surrogate mothers are selected as well as how the relations between the genetic parents and the surrogate mother are regulated confirm the notion of kinship that was pioneered in the Euro-American theory of David Schneider. This concept is based on the idea that kinship relations are determined primarily by the presence of a common genetic substance and only secondly by social relations that are based on specific patterns of behavior in the family (Schneider 1980). This implies that genetic kinship is of primary importance to how ideas about kinship relationships are developed, while at the same time it implies that ideas about gestational kinship are not believed to be as important. Thus, the belief of employees at clinics and agencies that the genetic link between parents and children predominates over the gestational relationship makes it possible to legitimize the practice of gainful surrogacy in general and certain aspects of the procedure by which the service is provided in particular by decommodifying the child so that he or she is no longer the object of a commercial transaction.     

Moral Foundations Theory and Moral Reasoning in Video Game Play: Using Real-Life Morality in a Game Context

Although research has indicated that moral decisions are made during video game play, less research has examined moral reasoning during play. Using a think-aloud protocol, participants’ decisions and reasoning were recorded during game play and coded as either strategic or moral. Players’ reasoning was also coded using Moral Foundations Theory. Results indicated an almost equal percentage of strategic and moral reasoning; the salience of several individual moral foundations predicted moral reasoning during play. Video game experience was positively related to the use of moral reasoning, which can be explained by relating reasoning to rational and experiential processing during game play.     

Examining distance education in Turkey

This article describes the distance education program at Anadolu University in Turkey and compares its problems and solutions with similar distance education programs in other Asian countries. A brief history is presented, enrollment figures are given and future directions are described. Conclusions suggest that open education is accomplishing the goals of the country's 1981 reforms and can continue to be helpful in the country's quest for modernization.     

汉语和格鲁吉亚语语音对比--对格鲁吉亚学生的汉语语音教学初探

本意在比较汉语与格鲁吉亚语语音系统并从格鲁吉亚语的语音特点出发审视格鲁吉亚鲁吉亚学生的汉语教学。本通过汉语与格鲁吉亚语语音的比较，认为格鲁吉亚学生学汉语语音的基本难点在于汉语元音和声调及少数辅音的发音上，指出了发音困难的原因，并提出了解决困难的办法。     

The bottlenosed dolphin’s (Tursiops truncatus) understanding of gestures as symbolic representations of its body parts

We assigned gestural symbols to nine body parts of a bottlenosed dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). The dolphin was first trained to touch any floating object it chose with the body part indicated by a gestural symbol. In Experiment 1, we tested the dolphin’s ability to now touchspecific gesturally referenced objects using specific gesturally referenced body parts. In Experiment 2, we tested its ability to either touch or toss gesturally referenced objects with gesturally referenced body parts or to simply display those body parts or shake them back and forth. The acts of touching, tossing, displaying, and shaking were each associated with specific gestures and appeared in random sequences within test sessions. The results demonstrated highly significant levels of performance throughout these tasks, including many successes on the first occasions of new body-part uses. These findings provided strong evidence that the gestural symbols we used for body parts were semantically processed and understood by the dolphin as representing those body parts.