Rethinking Affirmative Action: Redefining Compelling State Interest and Merit in Admission

The disruptive technologies of the Internet and computers are changing our world in myriad ways. These technologies are also increasingly being employed in higher education but to what effect? Are the effects on higher education quality measurable, and if so, what is the effect on the traditional gap between high-income and low- to middle-income nations on this score? This theme is pursued in this article, which uses a variety of methods to probe the question. Because great controversy attends the notion of institutional quality, measures differ, and the effect of these technologies on that quality depends to a great extent on the definition being used. Low- to middle-income countries' usage of the Internet and computer technologies lags behind that of high-income countries, but projections indicate they are catching up.     

Toward a conceptual framework of the process of organized innovation technological within the firm

The literature concerning information flow and organizational design for technological innovation is summarized and a conceptual framework of the process of organized technological innovation within the firm is developed. The framework incorporates Rosenbloom's premise that corporate strategy can serve to cut across both internal and external boundaries of the firm and is shown to be consistent with the relevant organizational and planning literatures. The potential for using mathematical models to represent a firm's corporate strategy, budgeting and resource allocation activities is discussed. We argue that such models are needed to provide for policy analysis and could lead to a simulation capability that serves as a surrogate for real-life experimentation.     

反思与创新:学习型城市理念演进及未来

学习型城市的理念从西方起源,并在欧洲进行了非常好的实践与传播,取得了非常多的研究和实践成果.近年来,学习型城市在欧洲的发展趋缓,发展的重点转向亚洲,并由独自发展转向合作发展.为促进学习型城市的可持续发展,各国都在制定发展策略以应对复杂的未来.学习型城市要进行理念创新,保障学习型城市发展中的"共同利益";进行合作创新,为学习型城市的国际合作创造各种机会;进行体系创新,从西方学习的理念与中国现状相结合.通过建立可持续的社会、经济和环境发展理念,学习型城市的未来发展才更加具有活力.     

Developing and acting upon one's conception of the nature of science: A follow‐up study

This study aimed to delineate the factors mediating the translation of preservice teachers' conceptions of the nature of science into instructional planning and classroom practice. Additionally, the study assessed the influence of temporally separating teaching preservice teachers about the nature of science and teaching them how to address it instructionally. This latter intervention was based on the results of a previous investigation. Prior to student teaching, the 13 participants responded to an open‐ended questionnaire designed to assess conceptions of the nature of science. Throughout student teaching, daily lesson plans, classroom videotapes, portfolios, and supervisors' weekly clinical observation notes were collected and searched for explicit instances of nature of science planning and/or instruction. Following student teaching, participants were interviewed to validate their responses to the open‐ended questionnaire, identify factors that mediate the translation of their conceptions of the nature of science into classroom teaching, and explicate their pedagogical preferences for teaching the nature of science. Participants possessed adequate understanding of several aspects of the nature of science and, contrary to the results of the earlier investigation, most did not conflate the nature of science with science processes. Furthermore, several participants explicitly addressed some aspects of the nature of science during classroom instruction. Participants, however, failed to include the nature of science among their instructional objectives and did not make a concerted effort to assess student understandings. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 37: 563–581, 2000     

Finding the right term: Retrieving and exploring semantic concepts in astronomical vocabularies

Astronomy, like many domains, already has several sets of terminology in general use, referred to as controlled vocabularies. For example, the keywords for tagging journal articles, or the taxonomy of terms used to label image files. These existing vocabularies can be encoded into skos, a W3C proposed recommendation for representing vocabularies on the Semantic Web, so that computer systems can help users to search for and discover resources tagged with vocabulary concepts. However, this requires a search mechanism to go from a user-supplied string to a vocabulary concept.     

The Critical Role of Stereopsis in Virtual and Mixed Reality Learning Environments

Anatomy education has been revolutionized through digital media, resulting in major advances in realism, portability, scalability, and user satisfaction. However, while such approaches may well be more portable, realistic, or satisfying than traditional photographic presentations, it is less clear that they have any superiority in terms of student learning. In this study, it was hypothesized that virtual and mixed reality presentations of pelvic anatomy will have an advantage over two-dimensional (2D) presentations and perform approximately equal to physical models and that this advantage over 2D presentations will be reduced when stereopsis is decreased by covering the non-dominant eye. Groups of 20 undergraduate students learned pelvic anatomy under seven conditions: physical model with and without stereo vision, mixed reality with and without stereo vision, virtual reality with and without stereo vision, and key views on a computer monitor. All were tested with a cadaveric pelvis and a 15-item, short-answer recognition test. Compared to the key views, the physical model had a 70% increase in accuracy in structure identification; the virtual reality a 25% increase, and the mixed reality a non-significant 2.5% change. Blocking stereopsis reduced performance on the physical model by 15%, on virtual reality by 60%, but by only 2.5% on the mixed reality technology. The data show that virtual and mixed reality technologies tested are inferior to physical models and that true stereopsis is critical in learning anatomy.     

ATHENS,gateways, and portals: components of the Distributed National Electronic Resource

The Distributed National Electronic Resource is a central plank of the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee's strategy. We outline the background and definitions of the DNER and discuss some of the issues to be investigated and the collaboration required between stakeholders and their partners.