Problems of Transferring Software

If we make a survey of the present state of the distribution of teaching media around the world, we can venture to say, after a first analysis, that ‘software is the least equally shared thing in this world’. This phenomenon generally remains unnoticed because not very obvious, for it is difficult to evaluate the capital of software, because the studies led for the past ten years in the educational field have brought to the fore the problems of how to deal with systems, of planning, mainly enhancing thereby the social and economical elements. The diagrams displaying the compared situations, as well as the markingout of the boundary between well-equipped and developing countries, have been established according to easily ‘measurable’ facts: the percentage of the national income devoted to education, the number of practising teachers, the equipments, the schooling rate, the school dropout rate, the growth rate.     

Transformation and contextualisation: conceptualising students’ conceptual understandings of threshold concepts in calculus

Research on student learning in higher education suggests that threshold concepts within various disciplines have the capacity to transform students’ understanding. The present study explores students’ understanding in relation to particular threshold concepts in mathematics—integral and limit—and tries to clarify in what sense developing an understanding of those threshold concepts involves a transformation of understanding in relation to ways of thinking in mathematics. Drawing on data collected in interviews with students taking a basic course on calculus the analysis offers an initial characterisation of students’ understandings as algorithmic. It then proceeds to construct a more fine-grained theoretical account for how these understandings develop in the course of the interview, suggesting that the transformative aspects of threshold concepts may be conceptualised in terms of shifts in students’ contextualisations allowing the development of conceptions at different levels of abstraction simultaneously interacting to shape students’ awareness of the ways of thinking and practising in the subject.     

Evaluating collaborative information-seeking interfaces with a search-oriented inspection method and re-framed information seeking theory

Despite the many implicit references to the social contexts of search within information seeking and retrieval research, there has been relatively little work that has specifically investigated the additional requirements for collaborative information-seeking interfaces. Here, we re-assess an existing analytical inspection framework, designed for individual information seeking, and then apply it to evaluate a recent collaborative information-seeking interface: SearchTogether. The framework was built upon two models of solitary information seeking, and so as part of the re-assessment we first re-frame the models for collaborative contexts. We re-frame a model of search tactics, providing revised definitions that consider known collaborators. We then re-frame a model of searcher profiles to analyse support for different group dynamics. After presenting an analysis of SearchTogether, we reflect on its accuracy, showing that the framework identified eight known truths, eight new insights, and no known-to-be-untrue insights into the design. We conclude that the framework: (a) can still be applied to collaborative information-seeking interfaces; (b) can successfully produce additional requirements for collaborative information-seeking interfaces; and (c) can successfully model different dynamics of collaborating searchers.     

Digital media as a reflective tool: creating appropriate spaces for students to become introspective

Global citizenship and competency development have become integral parts of political, economic and education discourses. This is particularly true in the USA, where higher education institutions are answering the global citizenship call through the promotion of short-term study abroad. Unfortunately, the ‘just do it’ analogy too often influences the ideology of study abroad, whereby simply providing students with an international experience is perceived to be sufficient in shaping global citizenship. Global citizenship, as an educational outcome, is optimally facilitated when educational experiences are married with appropriate pedagogy, including the shaping of subsequent understandings and actions with critical reflection. We postulate that reflective experiences can be further enhanced by meeting students on the platforms and forums where they live, communicate and already engage. Specifically, this communication, using the context of short-term study abroad programmes, will argue that: (1) critical reflection is an essential step to fostering global citizenship and (2) digital story telling (mobile pedagogy) can be a powerful tool for enriching the critical reflection process.