Derek Jarman: An Art Educator for Our Times?

Derek Jarman found his life's purpose in art. His significance for art educators today is his combination of low technology film‐making and his painterly vision. He provides a model for us today, in his incorporation of images from daily life into a series of vivid tableaux. Jarman created a huge database of images from which he constantly drew for both paintings and films. He was always writing down ideas and making drawings into a series of sketchbooks which provided him with the raw materials for his artistic products. Jarman's significance for this publication was that he united all aspects of his life into an aesthetic adventure. This included finding a signature as a gay artist who was also a passionate gardener. He also repudiated a literal or narrative structure and any idea of plot. This makes his work both difficult but rewarding.     

Social working memory: Memory for another rat's spatial choices can increase or decrease choice tendencies

In two experiments using a radial-arm maze, pairs of rats made choices among eight maze locations, each containing a large quantity of one of two food types. The choices made by 1 rat affected the choices made by the other rat. Under most conditions, visits by 1 rat increased the tendency of the other rat to subsequently choose that maze location. However, the effect depended on the quality of the food available in a particular location. When it was possible for the rats to observe each other on the maze arms and a rat had experienced that a location contained the less preferred food type, a previous visit to that location by the foraging partner decreased the tendency to visit that location. These effects are attributed to working memory for the spatial choices of another rat, and they indicate that memory produced by a rat’s own visit to a maze location is integrated with memory for the behavior of another rat to determine spatial choice     

ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES, ADDITIONAL FEE INCOME AND ACCESS AGREEMENTS: THEIR IMPACT ON WIDENING PARTICIPATION AND FAIR ACCESS

ABSTRACT:  This paper argues that the introduction of access agreements following the establishment of the Office for Fair Access (OFFA) has consolidated how English higher education institutions (HEIs) position themselves in the marketplace in relation to widening participation. However, the absence of a national bursary scheme has led to obfuscation rather than clarification from the perspective of the consumer. This paper analyses OFFA's 2008 monitoring report and a sample of twenty HEIs' original 2006 and revised or updated access agreements (2008) to draw conclusions about the impact of these agreements on notions of 'fair access' and widening participation. The authors conclude that, unsurprisingly in an increasingly market-driven system, institutions use access agreements primarily to promote enrolment to their own programmes rather than to promote system-wide objectives. As a consequence of this marketing focus, previous differences between pre-1992 and post-1992 institutions in relation to widening participation and fair access are perpetuated, leading to both confusion for consumers and an inequitable distribution of bursary and other support mechanisms for the poorest applicants to HE.     

Quality and relevance of domain-specific search: A case study in mental health

When searching for health information, results quality can be judged against available scientific evidence: Do search engines return advice consistent with evidence based medicine? We compared the performance of domain-specific health and depression search engines against a general-purpose engine (Google) on both relevance of results and quality of advice. Over 101 queries, to which the term ‘depression’ was added if not already present, Google returned more relevant results than those of the domain-specific engines. However, over the 50 treatment-related queries, Google returned 70 pages recommending for or against a well studied treatment, of which 19 strongly disagreed with the scientific evidence. A domain-specific index of 4 sites selected by domain experts was only wrong in 5 of 50 recommendations. Analysis suggests a tension between relevance and quality. Indexing more pages can give a greater number of relevant results, but selective inclusion can give better quality.     

Public library trends

Public libraries tend to be taken for granted. They can be found in nearly every community and are used by a substantial proportion of the population, particularly the young and the old. Yet the public library service, as it is today, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Despite their origins in the mid-19th century, the widespread network of public libraries is largely the product of the post-war welfare state. The demand for the service grew rapidly during the war and in the immediate post-war period. Provision to meet the demand was constrained initially by the competing demands for reconstruction, but by 1960 the service was ready to expand. The growth was consolidated by the 1964 Public Libraries and Museums Act and was given further emphasis by the 1962 Bourdillon standards (Ministry of Education, 1962). The Act and the standards provided the impetus for what might be described as the golden age of public libraries. This brief period was brought to an abrupt end by the economic crises of the mid-1970s and the subsequent downward pressure on public expenditure. The service managed to hold its own during the late 1970s and early 1980s but since then it has been in decline, with the rate of decline accelerating during the 1990s as new requirements and increasing costs stretched diminishing resources even further, to the point where the overall level of provision now falls well short of the basic standards that were considered to be essential in the early 1960s.     

Perspectives on pedagogical change: instructor and student experiences of a newly implemented undergraduate engineering dynamics curriculum*

Engineering education has been slow to adopt research-based educational innovations. Few prior works on such adoption have investigated the combined classroom experiences of instructors and students when such innovations are being implemented. Therefore, this work focuses on the lived experiences of an instructor and her students when adopting an active, blended, and collaborative learning environment, known as Freeform, in a second-year dynamics course. Weekly reflections from the instructor were processed alongside student interviews using Thematic Analysis to discern prominent themes in their perspectives for comparison and discussion. The results indicate that the instructor navigated internal tensions between her previous instructional preferences and the philosophy and resources of Freeform. Similarly, students had to adapt to this new philosophy and suite of resources that were uncommon for their institution. Ultimately, this work highlights the contextual natures of teaching and learning, and how situational factors can influence educational innovation.     

Using a college human sexuality course to combat homophobia

The present study seeks to identify factors among university students that may be associated with homophobic attitudes and whether homophobia may be reduced by educational interventions, such as knowledge-based curricula found in college sexuality courses. Participants were 128 undergraduate students attending a small, private university in the northwestern region of the United States. At the beginning and end of the fall semester 2004, survey packets consisting of a demographic questionnaire, the Sexual Opinion Survey, the Homophobia Scale, a sexual knowledge survey, and the Bem Sex Role Inventory were administered to students attending a human sexuality class and a comparison group of students enrolled in professional and social science introductory courses. Relative to the comparison group, homophobia levels significantly decreased over the course of the semester among students attending the sexuality class. The effect of attending the class on reducing homophobia was partially mediated by an increase in self-reported knowledge about sexual matters. Taken together, these results suggest that the knowledge-based curriculum of sexuality courses may play an important role in affecting broader attitudes about sexuality among college students, including attitudes about homosexuality.     

Schooling Quasi-Markets: Reconciling Economic and Sociological Analyses

We provide an economic assessment of the operation of schooling quasi-markets, re-interpreting the findings of the mainly sociologically-based empirical research. We find that economic analysis is complementary to that of sociology, providing further explanations for the failure of greater competition to increase the diversity of provision and challenge traditional school hierarchies.     

How young people respond to learning spaces outside school: A sociocultural perspective

This article focuses on educational enterprises outside the formal sector, such as museums, botanical gardens and interactive science centres. International research is drawn on to illuminate how design, culture, educational strategies and settings combine to affect the way in which young people respond to experiences on offer, leading to analysis of the impact of such settings in promoting learning, and the likely implications for those who staff such venues. Aikenhead’s concept of the educator as ‘culture broker’ is developed to suggest ways in which learning might be best supported. It envisages a shift from ‘delivery’ strategies targeted at large groups towards approaches which focus on what learners choose to know about using dialogue between children and ‘known and trusted people’. Analysis of observed responses in various settings is undertaken from a sociocultural perspective using the notion of communities of practice. Implications for the roles of education managers and their staff in further research are developed.     

Liveness, “Reality,” and the Mediated Habitus from Television to the Mobile Phone

Television's liveness has long been seen as one of its key features. This paper argues that “liveness” is not a textual feature, but a more fundamental category (in Durkheim's sense) that contributes to underlying conceptions of how media are involved in social organization through their provision of privileged access to central social “realities.” This ideological view of liveness (cf. Jane Feuer's early work) is then extended in two ways: first, to consider two new forms of “liveness” that do not involve television (online liveness via the Internet and “group liveness” via the mobile phone); and second, by connecting liveness with Bourdieu's concept of habitus, and thereby linking “liveness” (including in its extended senses) with other parts of the materialized system of classification through which we make sense of the everyday world.