Health-inclusive higher education: listening to students with disabilities or chronic illnesses

This paper reports on a small-scale project undertaken with tertiary students who identified as having an impairment either at enrolment or by registering with the university's Disability Support Unit (DSU). The aim of the study was to explore with these students ways in which the university was currently meeting their academic support needs and the ways in which these needs might be better met. Consistent with the definition of disability within the Australian Disability Discrimination Act, it became apparent that a significant number of students who identified with that definition, or sought help from disability services, also presented with needs arising from chronic illness. The majority of participants cited an emotional or psychological illness, rather than a physical, intellectual or sensory one, as a possible precursor to difficulties in engagement with the university. We conclude by considering whether commonly used institutional categories are apposite to an understanding of the ways in which students perceive themselves and, importantly, their engagement with the university and success within it.     

An evaluation of APT: an Animated Program Tracer for novice Prolog programmers

This paper describes an approach to evaluating the usefulness of an Animated Program Tracer (APT) in communicating run-time information to novice Prolo programmers. The method used in the evaluation consists of a set of programs which have been specially designed to elicit how novices think Prolog programs are executed, and thus to reveal how accurate their model of program execution is. Two experiments are reported. The first determines the misconceptions that novices hold about the runtime actions of the Prolog interpreter, and produces six different categories of misconception. The second experiment investigates the ability of APT to communicate run-time information to novice Prolog programmers. A scoring technique was used to interpret subjects' answers, and shows that there was a significant improvement in the scores of the group who saw programs traced by APT when compared with a control group who saw no trace.     

Integrating environmental sustainability into universities

Universities play a fundamental role in addressing global environmental challenges as their education, research and community involvement can produce long-lasting environmental effects and societal change. By demonstrating best practice in their operations, research and teaching, universities have both multiple and multiplier effects on society. For universities to comprehensively address sustainability, a ‘learning for sustainability’ approach needs to be embedded across every aspect of institutional operations in a synergistic way. Using semi-structured interviews, this research explored the factors that influence the integration of sustainability into the operations, teaching and research activities of universities in Australia and England. The research found that individuals, committed to the goal of a more sustainable world, play a vital role in the success of integrating environmental sustainability into universities. The factors critical to enabling universities to undertake the transformational changes necessary to embed environmental sustainability into all university areas included: a strong policy environment, resourcing of strategies, and encouragement of leaders and environmental sustainability advocates. Educating and building the awareness of university staff of the importance of environmental sustainability to future generations was key to a successful strategy.     

An Exploratory Study of Factors Influencing Audience's Attitudes Toward Imported Television Programs in Taiwan

The diffusion of international television programs has been an important area of international communication research. In this article, we use theoretical constructs from country-of-origin and cultural proximity literatures and develop a model to explain audience's attitudes toward and willingness to watch imported television programs from China. Our study used a questionnaire survey method to collect data from 553 respondents in Taiwan. We examined television programs imported from China, a country that has tried to invade Taiwan to destroy its democracy in the past decades. Regression analyses found that, whereas cultural proximity was an important predictor, animosity turned out to be a more powerful predictor of Taiwanese audience's attitudes toward television programs from China. The results also demonstrated that if the Taiwanese audience perceived China as holding less animosity and more cultural proximity, they had more positive attitudes and were more willing to watch television programs imported from China.     

Journalism and Critical Engagement: Naiveté, Embarrassment,and Intelligibility

This article explores the possibility of journalists acting as custodians of critical engagement, drawing on Rancière's conception of dissensus as organized disagreement over the conditions of understanding. It begins by assessing the status that worthiness and naiveté have as negative symbolic capital in the journalistic field, before asking whether journalists' ambivalent detachment from the objects of their inquiry hinders their ability to engage critically with experts in other fields. It argues that journalism's role in marshaling dissensus amounts to making clear the limits and absences of intelligibility in journalism and other fields, in distinction to disseminating knowledge as such.     

eResources in Academic Libraries: A Look Ahead

Tim Collins, President and Founder, EBSCO Publishing, presented “eResources in Academic Libraries: A Look Ahead” at the eResource & Emerging Technologies Summit held at Mississippi State University Libraries on August 3, 2012. Collins presented EBSCO's strategy for creating the single search box and the philosophy behind their Discovery Service. He provided information on the different types of content providers and the search capabilities of their Discovery Service. Collins also presented information regarding eBooks on EBSCOhost and what they have done since acquiring NetLibrary.     

A Global Perspective on Technology Integration in Education: Problems and Strategies

Abstract

How to prepare to use the new technologies in education is a challenge to all of us, and in particular how to use PCs. The article looks at these, the curriculum strategies and the problems sometimes faced by conservatism in the instructors, and it concludes with hints for helping with technologies through behaviours.