Broekman,Pauline van Mourik et al (2014) Open education Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham MD & Plymouth UK) isbn 978‐1‐78348‐209‐2 112 pp £16.95 https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781783482108

This short book is a result of a collaborative effort between staff at Mute Publishing and the Media Department at Coventry School of Art and Design (both based in Britain). One could describe it as notes towards a critique of open education. From the perspective of cultural studies, it provides rich material for reflection and further investigation. If the content of this book is likely to be relevant to you, I recommend that you buy a copy for your own use. Pete Cannell     

Managing Equality in Access

How can equality of access be managed successfully and what are the informing trends that institutions should not only acknowledge but act upon? An opening up of the education market means widening access, but this cannot be done in a vacuum. The associated management of equality in access must have a place in institutions’ strategic plans linked to a system of performance indicators to ensure appropriate measurement. Approaches will differ, but senior management should be committed to allocating resources and devoting marketing energies to this important area. Commitment to CATS will be a significant part of managing equality in access as will be the management of quality in access. These are challenges that are on the further and higher education agenda but which have yet to assume a higher priority in implementation.     

Temporal Hierarchy in Bergson and Whitehead

This article attempts to demonstrate the intelligibility of Bergson’s philosophy by analyzing his philosophical method and then applying it to the notions of biological time and of temporal hierarchy in biology. Bergson’s philosophical method contains three parts: the first is factual and scientific, the second intuitional and reflective, and the third consists in the formalization and application of intuitive insights. Intuition is not a single act, he insists, but a number of acts, each focussed on a particular level (breadth) of duration. Such acts, focussed on the rhythms of living organisms, can lead to researches in chronobiology like Lecomte du Noüy. Bergson’s philosophy, with its diversity of real organisms and levels of process, is more live Whitehead’s than has been believed.     

Distance education via the Internet: the student experience

This is the second in a series of papers that describes the use of the Internet on a distance-taught undergraduate Computer Science course (Thomas et al ., 1998). This paper examines students' experience of a large-scale trial in which students were taught using electronic communication exclusively. The paper compares the constitution and experiences of a group of Internet students to those of conventional distance learning students on the same course. Learning styles, background questionnaires, and learning outcomes were used in the comparison of the two groups. The study reveals comparable learning outcomes with no discrimination in grade as the result of using different communication media. The student experience is reported, highlighting the main gains and issues of using the Internet as a communication medium in distance education. This paper also shows that using the Internet in this context can provide students with a worthwhile experience.     

The ‘Isle of Vice’? Youth,class and the post-war holiday on the Isle of Man

This article broadens our knowledge of post-war holidaymaking (c. 1950–80) by adopting the Isle of Man as a case study. A popular holiday resort from the late nineteenth century, the Isle of Man experienced considerable political turbulence during the 1950s and 1960s about how best to stay competitive as a seaside resort, where authorities employed uniquely stringent methods to contain rowdiness and protect the island’s ‘respectable’ atmosphere. The first two sections examine the leisure habits of the young and working class in a holiday context, integrating this analysis with perceptions of their behaviour gleaned from oral interviews with local residents. The concluding section explores how the presence of holidaymakers on the Isle of Man – uniquely among seaside resorts in the British Isles – informed (and in some cases emboldened) a sense of national identity. Oral history, complemented by the Hansard reports of the Isle of Man parliament and local press coverage, sheds light on the activities of the post-war working class at play, and how the presence of holidaymakers fortified Manx national consciousness.