Agile administrative choreographies for multimode education at the University of Pretoria

This paper responds in part to a special edition of this journal (39/2) on dual-mode provision. We were concerned that contact providers might drift into distance education provision through extending campus-based online learning without first thinking through the underpinning implications of its administrative systems, an issue that was not addressed in the special edition. Proceeding from a pragmatic and constructivist perspective, while adopting a transactional orientation drawing on systems theory and hermeneutics, this paper focuses on the challenge for administrative staff and systems of the changing nature of provision in terms of both the underpinning learning and business models. Based on experience and reflection, we conclude that the move into dual- and multimode provision is inevitable and that this requires agility on the part of both administrative staff and systems that is often overlooked in planning and review processes.     

把好听的歌曲录下来

《魔力软件》指路牌放假喽!自由喽!嘟嘟和编辑部的众小编们可没这等好事,羡慕……假期中,和心爱的电脑有了更多亲密接触的时间。除了玩游戏、看新闻、聊天……还能用电脑做什么呢?仔细想想,对!电脑还可以用来听音乐。但是你有没想过用电脑来学唱歌呢?本期《魔力软件》的主题就是“快乐暑假,音乐相伴”,有《把好听的歌曲录下来》、《眯眯虾的歌星之路》、     

Thinking with certainty or with doubt: a Lacanian theorisation of discursive knowledge in teacher education

ABSTRACT

The paper presents a theorisation of pedagogic knowledge formation, as a continuous attempt to understand the positions in discourse we occupy. The paper documents some participatory practitioner research by teacher educators centred on a course development initiative for student teachers of English, at an English university. Students researched their experiences of becoming a teacher within a course that was largely school-based, whilst their tutors researched their own involvement in the process (the main focus of this paper). Drawing on Lacanian theory, tutors are depicted as learning subjects having more or less certainty or doubt about the knowledge they possess. In attempting to understand this interplay of certainty and doubt, tutors arrive at stronger conceptualisations of learning. Through this approach, the paper provides a theoretically informed conception of professional knowledge, as involving a process of renewing ideas about learning, in meeting or resisting external demands.     

Globalization as Both Threat and Opportunity for the Hong Kong Teaching Profession

The paper examines the roles of theHong Kong government, schools and teachers inthe translation of global economic imperativesinto demands on education, and how suchtranslation affects the teaching profession.Two global imperatives are selected forillustration because of their peculiarforegrounding by the Hong Kong government:international (English) language proficiencyand competence in information technology. Thepaper argues that preparation for economicglobalization not only poses a threat, but alsocreates an opportunity for the development ofthe teaching profession, and that this dependsto a large extent on how the governmenttranslates these global imperatives intodemands on teachers. The government is theprincipal actor in the selection andtranslation of global imperatives. Schools arenot just brokers and enforcers of governmentpolicy, but can be an important buffer betweenthe government and teachers by helping themcope with the imposed imperatives at the schoollevel. Teachers can be key players in acceptingor rejecting such imperatives. Governmentstrategies that are insensitive to teachers'needs and practical concerns create moreproblems than solutions.     

Prevalence,School Progress and Referral of Mildly Retarded Children in Regular Classes

This study sought to determine the prevalence of mildly retarded children in a sample of 312 primary school classes (N (pupils) = 8,967). Schools were chosen at random from each of the eight Psychological Service districts of metropolitan Auckland; all Grade 2‐5 classes in the sample schools were included in the investigation. Eighty percent of the teachers surveyed believed they had one or more mildly retarded children in their classes, yielding an overall prevalence rate of 8.04 percent (N = 721). Approximately one‐third of the children designated as mildly retarded were considered by their teachers to be not coping academically as well as socially, but of these 75 percent had not been referred for special educational consideration. Comparisons among the eight districts revealed that prevalence/referral rates and characteristics of identified/referred children did not differ significantly across districts. Results are discussed in terms of their policy implications for the identification and referral of mildly retarded children in need of special educational services.     

Building parallel corpora by automatic title alignment using length-based and text-based approaches

Cross-lingual semantic interoperability has drawn significant attention in recent digital library and World Wide Web research as the information in languages other than English has grown exponentially. Cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) across different European languages, such as English, Spanish, and French, has been widely explored; however, CLIR across European languages and Oriental languages is still in the initial stage. To cross language boundary, corpus-based approach is promising to overcome the limitation of the knowledge-based and controlled vocabulary approaches but collecting parallel corpora between European language and Oriental language is not an easy task. Length-based and text-based approaches are two major approaches to align parallel documents. In this paper, we investigate several techniques using these approaches and compare their performances in aligning English and Chinese titles of parallel documents available on the Web.