Some Achilles' Heels of Thinking Skills: a Response to Higgins and Baumfield

Steven Higgins and Vivienne Baumfield have recently attempted to defend the much discussed idea of general thinking skills against attacks from three quarters: what they regard as a priori objections, which they liken to Zeno's paradox that Achilles will not catch the tortoise; domains theories of knowledge, which oppose the idea of thinking skills being general and transcending domains; and the claim that experts use subject specific knowledge, and don't use general thinking skills. We examine these defences and find them flawed and worrying. We conclude that this is a domain in serious need of a priori approaches.     

Museums and Indigenous People in Australia: A Review of Previous Possessions,New Obligations: Policies for Museums in Australia and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples

Previous Possessions, New Obligations was launched by Museums Australia Inc. in 1993, the International Year for the World's Indigenous People, as a policy framework to guide the development of relationships between museums in Australia and Indigenous Australians. The policy was based on consultation with Indigenous people to develop protocols, policies and procedures for more sensitive collection management and for including Indigenous people in research and public programs; and to address issues of governance. It expressed the values that would underpin new relationships between museums in Australia and Indigenous Australians. An evaluation of the policy was conducted in 2000 in a collaboration between the Australian Museum Audience Research Centre, Sydney, and Museums Australia Inc., Canberra. The evaluation found that the policy had substantially met its goals, particularly in establishing the primary rights of Indigenous people to control their cultural material in museum collections. However, a range of substantially new issues emerged which require new policy responses and initiatives.     

University teacher approaches to design and teaching and concepts of learning technologies

This study investigates the experience of teaching of 19 teachers who are teaching on university courses involving face-to-face and on-line learning. The teachers are asked about how they think about learning technologies and how they approach the design and teaching of their courses across these two contexts. Results show that there are qualitatively different ways of thinking about learning technologies that relate logically and positively to qualitatively different ways of designing and teaching using learning technologies. The results have implications for teachers and those interested in maximising the likelihood of learning for university students when teachers teach with learning technologies.     

“What are you Representing?” Contesting Identities of Incarcerated Youth

This article explores how incarcerated youth and adult supervisors contest claims to identity via language of “representing”. Comparing how youth and adults “represent” in discussions of their own past and future selves sheds light on the constrained universe of discourse within which both groups work to express identities and on the basis of which we counsel, mentor, and educate young people. Acknowledging these constraints can contribute to understanding what I call exceptionalism—the idea that only exceptional poor and raced young men, through great personal effort and sacrifice, may resist the lure of the “street”. I conclude by discussing implications of this work for education and youth development work both inside and beyond the juvenile justice system as well as for research across lines of difference by committed “outsiders”.

一个标准能适合所有的项目吗:开放教育的选择

基于支持全英开放教育资源项目(英国开放教育资源项目,简称UKOER项目)的经验,本文将探讨该项目开展过程中所涌现出的各种不同的开放教育资源描述方法,及其对资源共享、工作流程计划、资源聚集观的影响.由于UKOUER项目包括个人层面的项目、学科层面的项目和院校层面的项目,而这三种类型的项目又有各自不同的特点,显然难以用一种技术或者描述性的解决方案来适合所有的项目.因此,目前这些项目只提供有限的描述性信息,包括项目标签、作者、题目、日期、链接地址、文件格式、文件大小、权限,以及一些附加信息,包括语言、学科分类、关键词、标签、评论和描述.所有项目可以自由选择编码、存储和分享上述信息的方法.本文通过大量的例证介绍了项目的描述方法,其中还包括工作流程和所作出的尝试.我们将考虑所选择的工具(资源库、Web2.0应用、虚拟学习环境)与标准选择的关系,以及本地需求和更广泛社区需求之间的关系.我们会考虑这些选择对资源传播和发现的影响,例如,资源描述对大量开放教育资源的发现服务的影响.     

Contrasting concepts of learning and contrasting research methodologies: Affinities and bias

This paper analyses the conceptual significance of different methods of researching learning. Based largely upon our own experiences, we briefly compare the use of mini‐ethnography, life history, cross‐sectional surveys and existing panel survey data. We argue that there are strong affinities between each of these methods and significantly different ways of understanding the nature of learning: mini‐ethnographies with learning as participation, life history with learning as construction and both types of survey with learning as acquisition. Three things follow. The first is that decisions about how to research learning are related to decisions about how to conceptualise and theorise learning. The second is that there is no foolproof empirical way to adjudicate between different conceptualisations of learning, though empirical evidence can and should play a significant part in informing such decisions. The third is that though mixing methods (including mixing more than one different qualitative approach) can bring advantages, the integration of the findings of mixed methods in relation to learning requires careful and sometimes difficult conceptual work.     

Effectiveness of peers in delivering programs or motivating older people to increase their participation in physical activity: Systematic review and meta-analysis

The objective of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to evaluate the effectiveness of peers to deliver programs or encourage older people to be physically active and improve physical outcomes. Peer reviewed articles published in English between January 1976 and June 2016, retrieved from six databases according to the predefined inclusion criteria were included. Where possible results were pooled and meta-analyses conducted. Eighteen articles were included in the review, a total of 3,492 intervention participants, average age 66.5 years and 67.1% were female. Overall, study quality was medium to high. Interventions mainly included resistance, flexibility and cardiovascular training, however there was one aquatic exercise group. Eight studies were delivered by peers and five utilised peer support, which included advice and being positive but was not directly linked to an exercise intervention. While 16 of the 18 studies reported improvement in levels of physical activity and/or noted physical benefits by peer involvement, the meta-analyses findings supported the control groups for the six-minute-walk-test and the timed-up-and-go test. Findings from this review suggest exercise programs involving peers can promote and maintain adherence to exercise programs. However, results were inconclusive as to whether peers have a positive effect on improving older people’s physical function.     

The tangled roots of real estate markets,the state,and public education

In this article, I use a case study of education in nineteenth-century Oregon to place the twentieth-century phenomenon of ‘shopping for schools’ within a broader historical context. In doing so, I make three points. First, documenting previously unacknowledged links between the spread of public education and efforts to market land, I suggest that education, real estate markets, and the state have deeper and more tangled roots than scholars have imagined. Second, I contend that wrestling with these tangled roots suggests the need for scholars to reexamine the role of private markets in shaping the organisation of educational opportunity across places and time. Third, I argue that histories like Oregon’s demonstrate that ‘state’ and ‘market’ are neither stable nor mutually exclusive categories.