Truth for Its Own Sake: Academic Culture and Technology Transfer at Johns Hopkins University

American research universities have long been a source of technical advance for industry, yet few have written on the history of university-industry relationships. This essay examines the evolution of practices and policies at Johns Hopkins University, which was established in 1876 as the first research university in the United States. Although an academic vision shaped its founding culture, the interests of technology transfer increasingly shape that culture. This essay considers the tensions between academic research and commercial orientation and the process of changing university orientation and culture.     

The Relationship Between Tutoring Mode and Learners’ use of Help Tools in Distance Education

This article presents an experimental study demonstrating how 120 learners use help tools in a virtual learning set-up. More specifically, several types of tutoring are investigated to find out the extent of the use of help tools in each. The effects of two independent variables which may have an impact on the behaviour of learners are studied: (1) whether or not they have access to a human tutor (HT) and (2) the tutor’s means of intervention (reactive or proactive). One of the goals of the study is to determine whether these modes of tutoring can influence positively or negatively distance learners’ use of lexical, conceptual, metacognitive and navigational help tools. The results of analysis of variance show that it is useless to prompt (effect of proactivity) learners to use the help that is available to them but that prompting is sometimes more subtle than initially foreseen. It appears that the presence of an HT pushes learners to use help tools, but this effect (of the presence of the HT) is still relatively weak and therefore may not justify the cost of employing a human tutor. It is also important to show the necessary intrinsic quality of the tools made available in order for a given mode of tutoring to have an effect on their use.     

Counselling the Gifted and Talented in France: Minimizing Gift and Maximizing Talent

After a presentation of the French school system, we describe how the three principal practices—acceleration, enrichment, and special classes—for the education of the gifted are functioning in France. Then, we deal with the counselling of the gifted through 1) the presentation of the professional involved in these tasks, 2) the role played by the parent associations of gifted children, and 3) the identification practices. For the talented, there are many practices, from primary education onwards, which allow schooling to be reconciled with sports studies or artistic tuition. The concept of “dual project” is introduced: the need for sportsmen/women to elaborate their career plan at the same time as their sporting project. The conclusion stresses that in France, measures for the gifted are not clearly laid out; whereas, provisions benefiting from clear and explicit information have been made for the talented and are encouraged by various institutions.     

Deleuze and Guattari’s language for new empirical inquiry

Abstract

This paper reviews Deleuze’s theory of language in Logic of Sense, and Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of language in A Thousand Plateaus. In the ontology informed by the Stoics described in those books, human being and language do not exist separately but in a mixture of words and things. The author argues that this flattened ontology of surfaces is incommensurable with the ontology of depth used in conventional humanist qualitative methodology and recommends beginning new empirical inquiry with a concept instead of with method and methodology.     

Disentangling school leadership and its ties to instructional practices – an empirical comparison of various leadership styles

This paper investigates the direct and indirect ties between various leadership styles, namely, instructional, transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire leadership, and the instructional practices of teachers by applying a structural equation model. For this purpose, we analyzed survey data of n = 3,746 teachers from 126 schools collected by the Hamburg school inspection in Germany between 2012 and 2015. The underlying model is based on Leithwood’s framework for guiding research on leader effects on learning and instruction. First, the results show that a bi-factor model seems to be the best measurement model. Next, it is shown that mediating variables are influenced by a leadership core as well as by different leadership facets. Third, we found that for influencing complex instructional practices like cognitive activation with challenging content, a combination of leadership styles is most promising, while for classroom management instructional leadership is the only and, thus, the primary determinant.