Contrasting computer input devices for teaching children with severe learning difficulties to read

Many teachers make the assumption that CAL systems which use a touch screen are more effective for children with severe learning difficulties than those which use a concept keyboard. These two experiments look at which is more effective in helping these children to maintain a previously acquired sight vocabulary, and to learn new sight words. It was predicted that the touch screen would prove more effective because it places fewer information processing demands on pupils. Surprisingly, no difference was found between the two systems.     

The positive purpose of remediation: Getting to the core of higher education

Mike Rose argues that remediation, despite its negative reputation, is both a historically appropriate function of higher education and intimately interconnected with its foundational concerns.     

Marxist state theory and state autonomy theory: the case of ‘race’ education in initial teacher education

Abstract

In recent times, there have been a number of critiques of Marxist and neo‐Marxist analyses of the state and education policy. These have drawn on postmodernist, ‘quasi‐postmodernist’ and state autonomy perspectives. While the postmodernist and ‘quasi‐postmodernist’ approaches have attracted critical response, to date, the state autonomy perspective has, to our knowledge, gone unchallenged. To address this theoretical lacuna, this paper analyses one writer's attempt, via an historical case study, to uphold state autonomy theory by detailing the ongoing relationship between one quasi‐state agency and the practice of ‘race’ education in initial teacher education. We argue that there are serious conceptual weaknesses in this latest attempt to apply state autonomy theory to educational policy analysis. The arguments in the case study under consideration are seriously compromised by a basically flawed hypothesis, a misrepresentation of contemporary (neo‐) Marxist education policy analysis and by a failure to look at ‘the big picture’.     

Making Sense in Art Lessons

Meaning in the arts has been explained in terms of the ‘linguistic/cognitive’ metaphor, that is as a product of a framework of conventions, rules and symbols, of shared conceptualisations with a clearly defined ‘conceptual space’. Sense in a work of art is dependent upon this framework and only by conventionalising pupils into it will they be able to communicate meaning. The problem is that the arts take their audience beyond the framework, beyond the boundaries of sense. The question then becomes how the arts continue to have meaning, paradoxically, to continue to make sense even though they have exceeded its boundaries. The solution to this problem, it is argued, lies in the way that the arts appeal directly to our uniquely human ability to reflect on commonly experienced feelings and to consequently transcend particular frameworks of meaning. Rather than meaning being subject to frameworks within which experience and artistic intention are seen to be made possible, I argue that experience has an autonomous presence in art, a presence that enables meaning to be communicated with spontaneity and immediacy.     

The StartwithXML Project: Understand the Point and Path to a Digital Workflow

To pursue emerging revenue opportunities in the most cost-efficient way (or sometimes to be able to pursue them at all), book publishers are going to have to adopt a StartwithXML workflow. That means their content needs to live in an XML-structured document from the earliest possible moment, which could be “inception”, and carry within it metadata about the document structure, the content itself, and the rights to all components. The tools exist to do this, but the organizational challenges of changing workflows and inventing new procedures are daunting. This project explores the business case and the implementation challenges, including case studies of companies who have already begun to work this way.