瑞典远程教育的发展与模式

本文描述瑞典远程教育的背景与环境.随着整个世界的变革,远程教育的目标、策略及学生来源在一百多年的实践过程中也发生了根本性的变革,新的政策、理论和技术为远程教育增添了新的机遇和新的参与者.今天,利用数字化信息的学习者可以在任何地方,通过移动电话和计算机连接到互联网获取信息,这就给教育机构提出了新的要求:灵活、更新、适合、快速并且兼备愉悦性以吸引学生.同时,教育机构的另一挑战是如何利用新技术的优势,发展新型的教学论,鼓励创造力、批判性思维,同时学会抵制和对抗欺骗性学习行为.关于教育与学习,具有时代特征的是文本、图片、声音、照片及电影等普遍的"复制粘贴"技术,这些技术一方面可以以建设性的和发展性的方式被利用,同时也可能用于违法、欺骗和毁灭性的使用.本文将以自上而下和由内及外的方式,来讨论远程教育在瑞典的发展与瑞典政治目标与政策的关系.由于教育逐渐全球化而且受国家政策以外其他力量的影响,因此也用自下而上和由内及外的方法讨论一些新的概念.文章的第二部分讨论远程教育的多种概念和方法,即什么是数码世界的远程教育和可替代的新概念.其中的一个结论是:虽然在国家的层面上已设定了宏大目标,但教育组织机构的变化非常缓慢.而在数字传媒文化里长大的年轻学子却有着特定的能力,他们能在多种的教育途径中作出自己的抉择.瑞典的教育机构面临着很大的压力,因为教育经费在持续递减,教师与学生的比例也越来越小.文章最后的总结评论部分比较了瑞典远程教育的初始阶段和现状的特征,并探讨了远程教育中主要领域的发展前景.     

The Assessment of Student Teachers’ Academic and Professional Knowledge in School‐Based Teacher Education

The aim of this study was to scrutinize the assessment of teacher knowledge in a school‐based course at one Swedish pre‐service teacher education program. In a general education school‐based course, teacher educators visited the student teachers at their school placements and met them and their school mentors in student‐teaching conferences to assess their teacher knowledge. The findings primarily show that the assessment procedures are influenced by teacher educators’ organization of the school visits and conferences. Secondly, the organization of the school visits and conferences influences who the potential and actual assessors at the conferences can be and are. Thirdly, the assessed student teacher knowledge at the conferences is described as procedural knowledge in a knowledge‐in‐practice perspective, almost exclusively in the area of relational, emotional, and caring learning objectives and aspects of teaching activities. Fourthly, the findings show that propositional knowledge in a knowledge‐for‐practice perspective is hardly mentioned or assessed.     

A bibliometric analysis of the clinical development of drugs in Norway for the year 2000

Purpose: Bibliometric analysis of publications was used to investigate the research output relating to the development of drugs in Norway and to evaluate the impact of Norwegian involvement in this research. Material and methods: One hundred and nine articles published between 2002 and 2008 were analysed. Bibliometric methods used were as follows: information on peer review, impact factor (IF), the Science Citation Index (SCI) and the representation of Norwegians in the list of authors. Results: All publications were in journals with peer review or in publications with corresponding evaluation. Industrial support, international research cooperation and drug development in phases I, II and III seem to promote publication in journals with high IF and a high SCI. In 63% of the international project articles, the Norwegian contributors were not represented in the list of authors. Conclusion: In addition to a scientific standard secured by referees, three probably independent factors – industrial support, international cooperation and early phases of the research (phases I, II and III) – seem to promote publications in journals with high IF and a high SCI. A more active Norwegian contribution to the research should be encouraged.     

Education returns of wage earners and self-employed workers: Rejoinder

In their reply to our comment, García-Mainar and Montuenga-Gómez [García-Mainar, I., & Montuenga-Gómez, V. M. (2009). A response to the comment on education returns of wage earners and self-employed workers. Economics of Education Review] did not address our fundamental criticism that they have not provided the information necessary to replicate their study.     

Social Support and Socioeconomic Status Predict Secondary Students' Grades and Educational Plans Indifferently Across Immigrant Group and Gender

Social support and socioeconomic status (SES) have received considerable attention in explaining academic achievement and the achievement gap between students with ethic majority and immigrant background, and between boys and girls. Using a Structural Equation Modeling approach we examine (1) if there exist a gap in school achievements between these groups, (2) whether social support and SES is associated with achievements across these groups, (3) whether social support is associated with achievements after controlling for SES, and (4) whether achievement gaps are explained by group differences in social support and SES. Self-reported cross-sectional survey and register data from 8,574 10th graders in Norway was employed. Although we found group differences in achievements, and direct associations with social support and SES, we found no group differences in these associations. Controlling for SES and other sources of social support, teachers' support remained a significant positive influence on students' school outcomes.     

Search and browse services for heterogeneous collections with the peer-to-peer network Pepper

Peer-to-peer networks have recently gained importance as environments for digital libraries. In this paper, we describe Pepper, a peer-to-peer network for supporting two important access modes, searching and browsing. Pepper seamlessly combines hierarchical networks with service-oriented architectures. Hierarchical networks improve efficiency by partitioning peers into high-end hubs which are responsible for routing the query, and leaf peers (typically running on desktop PCs or laptops) which host documents. Service-oriented architectures allow for loosely coupled systems, improve extensibility and reusability, and enable integration of the two access paradigms by combination of multiple services. For example, distributed searching and browsing both use the same statistical metadata, and thus the same storage service, for solving their tasks.