Do we need to move from communication technology to user community? A new economic model of the journal as a club

Much of the argument around reforming, remaking, or preserving the traditions of scholarly publishing is built on economic principles, explicit or implicit. Can we afford open access (OA)? How do we pay for high‐quality services? Why does it cost so much? In this article, we argue that the sterility of much of this debate is a result of failure to tackle the question of what a journal is in economic terms. We offer a way through by demonstrating that a journal is a club and discuss the implications for the scholarly publishing industry. We use examples, ranging from OA to prestige journals, to explain why congestion is a problem for club‐based publications, and to discuss the importance of creative destruction for the maintenance of knowledge‐generating communities in publishing.     

Remembering Peter Medway

Peter Medway was an exceptionally able teacher, researcher and thinker, and his work throws light on governments, inspectors and educators. In the early 1960s, Peter met a theory which ‘established language as a major means of constructing our realities’. Later, after teaching English in secondary schools for two decades, he reflected on why this theory had failed to make English more serious and more central. In his research, he looked into the history of English, its assumptions, practices and motivations. He also wrote about the significance of the students’ experiences, looking carefully (and critically) at what they produced in talk and writing. Persuaded that English needs to be about using language rather than studying it, he helped students find the right words. Starting with their own words, Peter focused on the business of making interventions without compromising students’ own agency. When he returned from Canada to take up a lectureship at King’s College, London, he was dismayed by the state of English in schools. His dissatisfaction with current English teaching led to a fully funded research project as well as a major publication that tells a story of the way teacher-led change transformed English in post-war London, English Teachers in a Postwar Democracy. Here we remember what was special about his contribution, his legacy and why we will miss him.     

An investigation of a novel three-dimensional activity monitor to predict free-living energy expenditure

The aim of this study was to assess the capability of the 3dNX accelerometer to predict energy expenditure in two separate, free-living cohorts. Twenty-three adolescents and 14 young adults took a single dose of doubly labelled water and wore a 3dNX activity monitor during waking hours for a 10-day period while carrying out their normal routines. Multiple linear regression with backward elimination was used to establish the strength of the associations between various indices of energy expenditure, physical activity counts, and anthropometric variables. 3dNX output accounted for 27% and 35% of the variance in the total energy expenditure of the adolescent and young adult cohort, respectively. The explained variance increased to 78%, with a standard error of estimate of 7%, when 3dNX output was combined with body composition variables. The 3dNX accelerometer can be used to predict free-living daily energy expenditure with a standard error of estimate of 1.65 MJ in adolescents and 1.52 MJ in young adults. The inclusion of anthropometric variables reduces the error to approximately 1 MJ. Although it remains to cross-validate these models in other populations, early indications suggest that the 3dNX provides a useful method of predicting energy expenditure in free-living individuals.     

Social media's use in postgraduate students' decision-making journey: an exploratory study

Universities globally are showing increased interest in the potential of social media as a marketing recruitment tool. This paper explores how and why potential postgraduate business students looking to study internationally use social media in their educational decision-making process. Due to a lack of existing research, this study adopted an exploratory approach, gathering data through in-depth interviews with 12 postgraduate international students at an Australian university. The findings indicate that besides Facebook and YouTube, students are using blogs in their study search. The two most common reasons for social media usage are finding out about student life and reading reviews from former students. In the decision-making process, social media is mostly used in the information search and evaluation stages. Students’ use of social media also varies across source countries. Our findings are a good information source for education marketers who need to engage more actively with social media.     

Learning to read: a professional learning journey

This article reports on a study that investigated a professional development initiative in Australia to address a decline in reading comprehension scores in the middle and upper years of Primary school. It describes the professional learning journey of a middle primary teacher and his literacy coach over a period of 12 months as they worked to improve the teacher’s knowledge and skills to explicitly teach reading comprehension. A series of classroom observations and interviews at the beginning, middle and end of the school year were analysed for the kinds of reading skills taught and the nature of the instruction. The data suggest that there were significant changes in the teacher’s pedagogical repertoires and practices and an observed improvement in the student’s understandings of different comprehension knowledge, skills and strategies.