Toward a reconceptualization of information seeking research: focus on the exchange of meaning

This paper reports the results of a preliminary study of interpersonal information seeking interactions between a user and a human information source. The study showed that users specify their information needs (uncertainty) largely in terms of what they know (certainty) during the interaction. The articulated certainty and uncertainty in the interaction can be classified as utterances focusing on either the topic (what the user is talking about) or comment (how that topic fits in with the user's situation or problem). We suggest that user studies in information seeking research should conceptually realign from an emphasis on user's uncertainty- and topic-based matching to the inclusion of user's certainty and comment dimensions in order to develop a more linguistically robust, multi-dimensional approach to matching for information retrieval.     

Teachers' Work and Schooling in Bali

This study addresses educational reform in Indonesia with reference to one of the most important potential agents of change in any national system of schooling - its teachers. The empirical data on secondary teachers and trainee teachers used here are taken from a larger case study of the attitudes and opinions of stakeholders in the education system of North Bali. Secondary teachers in Bali, as elsewhere in Indonesia, are seriously underpaid, but not necessarily undervalued in the community. They take on other jobs to support themselves and their families, yet they do not lack commitment to the professional task of teaching. It is argued that financial pressure on teachers to find other sources of remuneration militates against their capacity to act as agents of change in the rapidly reforming Indonesian state. Furthermore, teaching is not often seen as a financially rewarding profession by a new generation of secondary-school graduates. The author recommends that teachers' salaries be raised and infrastructure support for schools increased.     

Balancing Economic and other Discourses in the Internationalization of Higher Education in South Africa

Since the end of the apartheid era in South Africa, “internationalization” of higher education has been a popular theme as the country takes its place as a regional leader in education and research in sub-Saharan Africa. However, competing discourses of internationalization have produced economic and moral dilemmas rather than the realization of philanthropic academic aims. The process of internationalizing higher education in South Africa has been greatly compromised by under-funding and over-crowding of post-secondary education institutions in the country.     

'You're Hopeless I Swear to God': Shifting masculinities in classroom talk

In this article the author aims to problematise the discourse of masculinity in the co-educational classroom. Moving strategically sideways to focus on boys rather than girls, it is argued that 'masculinity' is not a fixed essence but a shifting gendered social identity. Although mass culture generally assumes there is a fixed, true masculinity, not all boys and men take up the same kind of masculinity, nor do they experience 'maleness' in the same way. Social class and subcultures (as well as other inflections of identity not discussed in this article) profoundly affect the presentation and representation of masculine identities. Moreover, masculinity as a particular configuration of gender is constituted in relation to local contexts within the meritocratic discourse of schooling. The ethnographic data in this article, which focuses on boys relating to girls in the classroom, show how varied the contexts of gender production can be even within the same roughly parallel configurations of task and location. It is concluded that masculinity is above all a social identity accomplishment.