赜墨和胶印孰优孰劣？

过去人们在说“在不久的将来,现在用大胶印机印刷的活件以后会在喷墨数码印刷机上印刷”的时候,你会笑话他们,因为你认为这事儿永远不可能。不过,今天你可能已经不会再笑话别人了,因为喷墨技术在过去几年里的进步之快,远出乎业内很多人士的预期。     

Androgyny and the Mentoring Role: an empirical study to examine for prominent mentor expectations

abstract

As part of an ongoing research design, we wished to examine how mentors behave whilst in the mentoring role. The starting point for this was a study to examine how mentors felt they were expected to behave in context; that is, an organised educational mentoring situation, as we recognised the importance of situation‐specificity. Prior to empirical study, we theorised that the mentor may be androgynous; or more precisely are able to display high levels of expressive and instrumental behaviour. Seven suppositions were examined. Our findings were that whilst in the role, mentors do indeed feel expected to blend and display high levels of both instrumentality and expressiveness. Further, the levels of expressive behaviour they perceived they were expected to display were significantly higher. The higher levels of expected expressive behaviour is not congruent with the androgyny literature: our samples proved an exception to the ‘masculine supremacy effect’. Also, that mentoring may require high levels of stereotypically feminine behaviour is something that the mass of mentoring literature has not discussed and may warrant further attention. We concluded that the diverse, complex and complicated nature of mentoring is met with expectations to display flexibility and versatility across situations — to take a proactive approach to coping with mentoring situational demands — such is not mitigated by gender. Their reported high expected levels of both expressive and instrumental behaviour are congruent with our theory of the androgynous mentor.     

Taking a step back: learning without the facilitator on solo activities

The purpose of this study is to report on the nature of student learning resulting from an open facilitation approach to solo activities. Three key moments of facilitator intervention were identified at which the facilitator was encouraged to take a step back from directing the experience. They are the pre-activity brief, the mid-activity visit and the post-activity review. Findings suggest that participants' learning focused on their raised self-awareness and social relationships. Raised spiritual awareness was also identified and this was closely linked to a connection with the landscape and eco-system. Evidence was also identified for emergent learning to have occurred that is not normally identified in the solo discourse. The findings suggest that participants on solo activities do not require a facilitator to tell them what they should be learning and that they will identify for themselves outcomes that are personally meaningful and important.     

School district enrollment and inequality in the supply of classes

This study explores relationships between school district enrollment and the internal allocation of resources across subject areas of the curriculum. The central argument is that differences in how resources are allocated stem, in part, from the uneven impact district size has on the relative costs of educational services. These internal differences in resource allocation are viewed as a possible obstacle to achieving equity in the provision of educational opportunities. The empirical work is based on a random sample of New York State school districts and includes cross-sectional as well as longitudinal results.     

Critical realist review: exploring the real,beyond the empirical

This article defines the ‘critical realist review’, a literature-based methodological approach to critical analysis of health care studies (or any discipline charged with social interventions) that is robust, insightful and essential for the complexities of twenty-first century evidence-based health and social care. We argue that this approach, underpinned by a critical realist philosophy and methodology, will facilitate students and researchers to employ relevant theoretical insights from a range of disciplines that have necessary contributions to make to our understanding of health and social care practice and provision. We explore the limitations of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and the systematic review for informing evidence-based health and social care. The article also offers some suggestions on method, although, as we argue, the approach deliberately eschews a ‘cookbook’ approach. A glossary of terms is provided in the Appendix.     

Bottling fog? The quest for instructional management

Elsewhere, the authors have unpacked instructional leadership and have documented that such leadership is associated with more effective schools. Indeed, there has been for a considerable time nearly universal acceptance that learning-centered leadership should provide the central platform on which leadership is enacted. In this paper, a less sanguine narrative is provided on instructional management. Specifically, it documents that for all the evidence and recognition of importance, learning-focused leadership remains a small domain of action for leaders at the school and district levels. It then focuses on both the culture of the profession of school administration and the nature of schooling to explain why in the face of considerable energy and effort only marginal improvements have been realized in deepening instructional leadership. It closes with an analysis of possible paths going forward.