Reflections on “teaching discrete skills to students with moderate mental retardation in small‐group instructional arrangements”

Several response‐prompting strategies exist for teaching students with disabilities (Wolery, Ault, & Doyle, 1992). With these strategies, prompts are provided to ensure that students perform the target behaviors in the presence of the target stimuli. However, to transfer stimulus control from the prompts to the target stimuli (i.e., to establish independent and appropriate responding), the prompts must be faded. Often, the various strategies differ on the manner in which prompts are faded.     

Shared Governance in the Modern University

A governance model is developed in which university governance is shared between the academic and governing bodies and is coordinated by the university executive. Viewing the university as a professional service organisation, and noting the importance of developing a flexible culture within a shifting, marketised external environment, it is argued that a degree of shared governance is necessary for the success of the modern university. Although the discussion is couched largely within the context and evolution of UK university governance over the past sixty years, it also draws on the US evidence and experience and the conclusions drawn are general.     

Poser,an Online Review Tool in Java

This paper presents an online reviewing tool, Poser, written in the Java programming language. Online quizzing tools have proliferated lately, but most are not so well-suited for reviewing. Poser's basic functionality is to provide students with a convenient, interactive way to review course materials in a question/answer format. Incorrect responses are corrected, along with an optional explanation. The program keeps usage statistics and information on responses to questions. Poser can be an important part of any course, because it gives students an easy way to test their understanding of the course materials from any Internet computer. We used Poser in two introductory Computer Science courses and gathered some formative data which was used to modify and evaluate the program. Over 100 students used the program and they answered over 38,000 questions while reviewing for their final exams. Student comments indicate that the program was very helpful. Overall, we feel that Po ser was a huge success and are planning a controlled study in the coming semesters to measure how much the use of the program facilitates student learning and understanding.     

Adult education as a technology of the self

Adult education has a long history of interest in the development and transformation of the self. As such it is useful to consider a range of adult education programs as belonging to and extending the lineage of ‘technologies of the self’ identified by Foucault (1988). In all such programmes, even the most individualistic, there are implicit or explicit theorizations concerning the nature of the self and the way the self relates to others or to society more generally. The purpose of this paper is to explore the postmodern critique of the dominant theorizations of the self in adult education: the psychological/humanistic and the sociological/critical; and to comment on the ‘solution’ proferred by a postmodern theorization. The postmodern critique is valuable in drawing attention to the difficulties of theorizing some kind of originary, core, true, stable, or ahistorical self. Nevertheless it is important to acknowledge that in many of the sites in which adult educators work, the pursuit of a coherent, continuous self is indispensable to transformative (and thereby resistant) adult education practice.     

Collaboration and partnership in question: knowledge,politics and practice

The paper provides a framework from which to critique orthodox assumptions about the processes of collaboration, especially in relation to the concepts of public space and power. Key issues are the private-public distinction and the metaphor of ‘public space’. The critique is rooted in alternatives to orthodox, Liberal humanist political perspectives in philosophy and draws on real examples of collaboration. Some of these are from my own experiences of a number of small-scale, policy-oriented, research projects and evaluations, both commissioned and university-originated. Suggestions are made about implications for the genesis of a politics of connection leading to collective actions.