Writing the Self: Wittgenstein,Confession and Pedagogy

In this paper I investigate ‘the confessional’ as an aspect of Wittgenstein's style both as a mode of philosophising and as a mode of ‘writing the self’, tied explicitly to pedagogical practices. There are strong links between Wittgenstein's confessional mode of philosophising and his life—for him philosophy is a way of life —and interesting theoretical connections between confessional practices and pedagogy, usefully explored in the writings of the French philosopher, Michel Foucault. The Investigations provides a basis and springboard for understanding the notion of ‘writing the self’ as a pedagogical practice which encourages a confessional mode compelling us to tell the truth about ourselves and, thus, creating the conditions for ethico‐poetical self‐constitution.     

Practical training and internships in engineering education: Educational goals and assessment

In many engineering curricula a period of practical training in industry is either compulsory or advised. Often the educational goals of such a period are defined as 'learning to put knowledge and skills into practice'. The assessment is usually based on a technical report of the activities during the period. In this paper, how the definition of educational objectives led to the introduction of practical training is discussed. These objectives are acquiring insight in the engineering profession, learning to 'survive' in a different culture and learning to apply as well as broadening technical knowledge and skills. Furthermore, an assessment procedure is introduced which allows for testing whether the students have met the objectives.     

Collaborative management of business metadata

Legal provisions, cross-company data exchange and intra-company reporting or planning procedures require comprehensively, timely, unambiguously and understandably specified business objects (e.g. materials, customers, and suppliers). On the one hand, this business metadata has to cover miscellaneous regional peculiarities in order to enable business activities anywhere in the world. On the other hand, data structures need to be standardized throughout the entire company in order to be able to perform global spend analysis, for example. In addition, business objects should adapt to new market conditions or regulatory requirements as quickly and consistently as possible. Centrally organized corporate metadata managers (e.g. within a central IT department) are hardly able to meet all these demands. They should be supported by key users from several business divisions and regions, who contribute expert knowledge. However, despite the advantages regarding high metadata quality on a corporate level, a collaborative metadata management approach of this kind has to ensure low effort for knowledge contributors as in most cases these regional or divisional experts do not benefit from metadata quality themselves. Therefore, the paper at hand identifies requirements to be met by a business metadata repository, which is a tool that can effectively support collaborative management of business metadata. In addition, the paper presents the results of an evaluation of these requirements with business experts from various companies and of scenario tests with a wiki-based prototype at the company Bayer CropScience AG. The evaluation shows two things: First, collaboration is a success factor when it comes to establishing effective business metadata management and integrating metadata with enterprise systems, and second, semantic wikis are well suited to realizing business metadata repositories.     

Elite und Exzellenz aus der Perspektive von Jugendlichen und ihren Peers an exklusiven Schulen

Against the backdrop of the recent political discourse on elite and excellence in the German education system, this paper examines how such constructions manifest themselves in programmatic concepts of schools and in the orientations of their pupils and their peers. They are reconstructed on the basis of a qualitative research project on educational careers of young people. This paper focuses on pupils and their peers at an elite school of sports and an international school. Firstly, the state of research on those types of school as well as on educational careers of their pupils will be presented. Secondly, the theoretical reference points and the methodological design of the study will be introduced. At the core of the paper is the analysis of the education related orientations of selected cases of young people and their peers: How do they position themselves towards elite and excellence in their individual and collective orientations and how is this relevant for processes of distinction and coherence building in the groups? In the resuming part of the paper, the results will be summarised and related to the state of research and the scientific discourse on elite and excellence.     

General library standards

Paul Evan Peters begins his discussion of library standards with a convincing argument that the acceptance by librarians of the need for order and standards is not a character flaw. Rather, in promoting the use of standards, librarians are efficiently forwarding their missions to build and organize collections and to make them accessible to their clients. Pointing out the economic realities of contemporary libraries, Peters further argues that standards are appealing because they help librarians to control costs. Paul Evan Peters, systems coordinator for the New York Public Library, is vice chairperson of the National Information Standards Organization and principal representative of the American Library Association to Accredited Standards Committee X3 (Information Processing Systems). Address for correspondence.