The meaning-making affordances of composing print and digital graphic narratives

A classroom-based study with eight- and nine-year-old students included the participants having many opportunities to engage with multimodal print and digital texts, and various technological tools. The data presented in this article focus on one of the specific purposes of the research: to investigate students’ opinions of the affordances of designing print and digital graphic narratives. The content analysis of the students’ reflections about working with a software programme to compose a multimodal ensemble in the medium of comics revealed evidence of critical thinking as they analysed and critiqued the possibilities and constraints for meaning-making. The conclusion features a consideration of the importance of students and teachers developing metalevel knowledge about and a critical stance toward the meaning-making affordances of all texts and compositional tools and devices.     

The Changing Face of Retirement: Exploring Retirees’ Communicative Construction of Tensions through Bridge Employment

As more adults see bridge employment as part of their retirement, it becomes important to understand the communicative construction of this experience. This point is especially true as bridge employment emphasizes tensions between work and leisure and serves as a way to affirm or create occupational identity. To address this topic we conducted qualitative interviews with retirees and completed an abductive analysis of the data. In doing so, we found two overarching themes: bridge employment is an uncertain experience (negative, positive, or both frames), and bridge employment is an opportunity to (re)establish identities (maintenance, change, or both orientations). Not only do these findings make theoretical contributions, but inform practical implications for retirees and organizations, such as updating retention and recruitment efforts and changing age-based organizational structures.     

Explicit reasoning, creativity and co-construction in primary school children's collaborative activities

This paper describes research that explored the question of whether or not it is possible to characterise and teach a single type of educationally productive talk. We analysed and compared the quality of children's interactional strategies when jointly working on a reasoning task and a psycholinguistic task. The latter involved writing an integrated summary of three related texts. Sixth grade primary school children (11–12 years old) solved these two tasks as pre- and post-tests before and after training in the use of ‘Exploratory Talk’ (ET) to think together and argue as well as in strategies for producing summaries. After training, children improved substantially in the use of ET when solving the reasoning but not the psycholinguistic task. However, using ethnography of communication methods to analyse the talk further around the latter task revealed that both the number and quality of communicative events and acts increased importantly. These changes were accompanied by a significant improvement in the quality of the summaries produced. These findings suggest that the requirement for explicit reasoning in the definition and analysis of ET may be task dependent. To account for the common features of the educationally productive talk in the two settings, we propose the more inclusive concept of co-constructive talk to characterise the inter-subjective orientation, social ground rules and communicative actions that support effective collaboration, co-ordination and creativity.     

An investigation of the situated learnability effects of single- and dual-modal systems in education: a report of music-oriented learning environment and science computer-assisted teaching studies

The evolution of the World Wide Web has encouraged a huge surfacing of e‐learning technologies over recent years. Often, such technology is rolled out devoid of consideration towards the way in which students process and assimilate information. To date, there exists inconclusive and contradictory evidence concerning learnability effects of single‐ and dual‐model systems in education. To overcome this, we advocate that the design of e‐learning systems requires a managed mix of elements grounded in cognitive psychology. In this paper, we report the results of a study concerned with determining an effective mix of multimedia elements. This is with regard to the situated learnability effects of single‐ and dual‐modal systems tested via ‘text only’ and ‘text and auditory–verbal’ conditions. We report on these experiments using science computer‐assisted teaching and music‐oriented learning environment, e‐learning environments developed to act as test platforms for this research. The results indicated that simultaneous presentation of identical information via text and narration was associated with enhanced learnability.     

如此简单,你也能做

手工克隆,一种制作与动物基因相同的拷贝的新方法,不仅比现有的方式花费少、操作简便,而且看来效果更好。目前,克隆的关键仪器是“显微操作器”,它价格高昂,并且需要熟练的技术人员在显微镜下钳住一个卵细胞,插入一根极其精细的针头以吸出其核仁,再用另外一根针头注入待克隆动物的核仁,还有一种选择就是融合一空的卵细胞和待克隆动物的一个细胞。两种方法都是极其复杂且非常耗时的。     

Students as partners in evaluation: student and teacher perspectives

Most course evaluation in higher education is designed and conducted by university staff and rarely are students given central responsibility for planning and implementing an evaluation. Involving students as partners in educational evaluation may offer them authentic ways to develop professional skills. We describe an ‘education option’ that involved five students in designing and conducting an evaluation of the Virtual Anatomy Tutor (VAT), an online learning resource for medical students, and report both student and staff reflections on the process. The experience gained by the five students can be transferred to other settings which provide opportunities for student designed and conducted evaluation of learning resources.