A Review of: “HMO/PPO Directory. Mackenzie,Leslie”

This column describes a collaboration between faculty members in an Allied Health program and academic librarians to provide information literacy instruction to students enrolled in an evidence-based practice course. The process of collaboration is described beginning with the inception of the idea to collaborate, which grew out of an informal conversation between librarians and Allied Health faculty. Implementation of the project is described as well as future plans for the collaboration. The column also discusses initial impressions of student outcomes as well as plans for a more rigorous study of those outcomes.     

Programming Templates: Professional Programmer Knowledge Needed By the Novice

Students first learning to program in any procedural language face the often difficult task of translating solution processes, which they are familiar with, into a form that is bug‐free from a computer standpoint. One element of the differences between the novice and the expert programmer is that the expert already has a set of mappings that allow him or her to translate common solution patterns. This article examines some of the most basic patterns and suggests that students be taught how to recognize them and translate them into code. It is argued that the patterns and the code requirements are similar across a whole range of imperative languages including C, Pascal, Basic, and Cobol.     

School Leaders as Political Strategists: William Boyd's Contributions to our Understanding of the Politics of Leadership

William Boyd's contributions to the education field's understanding of the political nature of school leadership are formidable. In this article, I describe the growth and development, over a roughly 30-year time span, of his key insight that successful school leaders should have the capabilities of a political strategist and that the actualization of this capacity is related to school leaders’ political and policy context. The perennial question of “who governs education” was central to Boyd's work and his various answers are important touchstones for today's educational leaders.     

THE IMPACT OF A ‘CITIZEN AFFAIRS’ WORKSHOP ON ANOMIA,LIFE SATISFACTION AND INTERNAL‐EXTERNAL CONTROL IN A SELECTED GROUP OF OLDER ADULTS

An educational experience designed to increase knowledge of the political process, provide peer interaction, and promote civic involvement did appear to enhance internal locus of control in a selected sample of older adults. No significant changes in anomia or life satisfaction occurred. Implications of the findings for educational programming for older adults are discussed. It is suggested that the SRS model used in the study should be tested further for exploring the impact of educational programs upon internal‐external control.     

New approach to visual servo control using terminal constraints

A large class of visual servo controllers relies on an a priori obtained reference image, captured at the desired position and orientation (i.e., pose) of a camera, to yield control signals to regulate the camera from its current pose to a desired pose. In many applications, accessibility and economics of the operation may prohibit acquisition of such a reference image. This paper introduces a new visual servo control paradigm that enables control of the camera in the absence of reference image using a set of terminal constraints. Specifically, the desired pose is encoded using the angle of obliquity of the optical axis with respect to the object plane and its direction of arrival at the plane. A constrained convex optimization problem is formulated over a conic section defined by the terminal constraints to yield an error system for the control problem. Subsequently, this work introduces continuous terminal sliding mode visual servo controllers to regulate the camera to the desired pose. Lyapunov-based stability analysis guarantees that the origin is a finite-time-stable equilibrium of the system. Numerical simulation results are provided to verify the performance of the proposed visual servo controller.     

Enhancing Intercultural Communication among Business Communication Students

The issue of international students in the tertiary classroom is of broad significance across disciplines as evidenced, for example, in the work of Ladyshewsky (1996), Pe‐Pua (1995), and Romm, Paterson and Hill (1994). The need for university instructors to employ teaching strategies that are student‐centred and interactive has also been gaining attention in recent literature, for example, in the work of Biggs (1992, 1997), Chalmers and Volet (1997), and McKay and Kember (1997). This article presents some practical teaching strategies employed in an undergraduate Business Communication class that, in our experience, provide a context that encourages student interaction and participation to the mutual benefit of both local and international students. Data collection procedures included an open‐ended questionnaire, observation of students, informal and unstructured discussions and reflective journals of students and tutor. The conclusions drawn here suggest that these strategies not only enhance classroom participation by international students but also allow international and local students to interact more productively with each other.