Book Review

Steve Adams, Derbyshire LEA/University of Nottingham School of Education, The Evaluation of Pastoral Care, Clemett, Tony & Pearce, John, 1986, Blackwell, £5.95 pp. 180

Margaret Bowes, John Port School, Art Therapy for Groups, Marian Liebmann 1986, Croom Helm Ltd., £9.95 [Paperback], ISBN 0-7099-4108-0

Sylvia Lindoe, Westhill College, The Education of Children with Severe Learning Difficulties: Bridging the gap between Theory and Practice Coupe, J. & Porter, J. (1986), London, Croom Helm Paperback £9.95

Michael Marland, North Westminster School, “You don't have to fill in a form to have a baby” The frustrations and fulfilment of the adoption process Margaret S. Evans, 1986. Family Welfare Association. £2.95     

Back to the Future: Recapturing the Vision of REA in the 21st Century

In this Presidential Address 2013 the author's plea is threefold. First, to strive for a legitimate place of religions and worldviews in the public square within the playing field of liberal-democratic societies. Second, to foster the religious or worldview identity formation of students as an inclusive part of the embracing personhood formation for all students in both public and denominational schools, and to strengthen the development of their self responsible self-determination in respect to religions and worldviews. Third, dialogue, encounter, and understanding each other should be seen as the devices, instead of policies and practices fostered by anxiety, fear, and disrespect. Thus, pedagogues, politicians, administrators, teachers, and leaders of religious and worldview communities and societal organizations should join forces for the best educational arrangements to let the religious and worldview identity formation of students flourish. This will also be beneficial for the common good, for society broadly speaking.     

The Dark Side of “Postmodern Moonshine”

In our summer 2006 issue, we ran a comprehensive overview of how postmodernism has degraded composition on our campuses. Steve Kogan enlarges that indictment and charges that the movement has deliberately corrupted every area of English instruction—from the acquisition of skills and knowledge to the more fundamental mission of developing in students the habits of disciplined learning.

The Worlds of Harriet Henderson: Fiction as a Window into the English Classroom

Steve Shann’s latest book is a novel called The Worlds of Harriet Henderson. It’s about 15-year-old Harriet Henderson who has a new English teacher, Molly McInness, and all at once school seems full of possibilities. But, inspired by Molly and impelled by her own adolescent restlessness, Harriet makes an impulsive decision, a decision that takes her, her teacher and her new friend into complex and dangerous worlds. The novel is a natural extension of Shann’s earlier articles and books arguing that mythopoetics – the use of intuition and imagination to reveal the ordinarily unseen – is a legitimate scholarly methodology. In this article, Shann uses extracts from a 2015 journal he kept as he began to think about writing a novel.     

Building Bridges Between Neuroscience,Cognition and Education With Predictive Modeling

As the field of Mind, Brain, and Education seeks new ways to credibly bridge the gap between neuroscience, the cognitive sciences, and education, various connections are being developed and tested. This article presents a framework and offers examples of one approach, predictive modeling within a virtual educational system that can include representations from the neural level to the policy level. Researchers could calibrate, test, and question the model, potentially providing quicker, more efficient, and more responsible ways of making advances in the developing educational field. Virtual investigations using models with this sort of capability can supplement the valuable information derived from carrying out policy and instructional experiments in real educational contexts.     

After this nothing happened

In response to Michiel van Eijck and Wolff-Michael Roth’s article and Michael Mueller and Deborah Tippin’s rejoinder, we explore traditional ecological knowledges as science education. Adopting a stance of situated partial perspectives, and drawing on selected literature in science and technology studies and feminist postcolonial theories, we reflect on acts of dissociation, localism, utilitarianism and principled pluralism as referent points for epistemological and pedagogical renewal. In conclusion, we return to an opening narrative of cultural loss combined with an invitation to imagine science pedagogy as a site of possibility, vulnerability and fragility. Such an invitation, we suggest, involves troubling manifestations of pedagogical and epistemic desires of normative closures and certitude. What now remains is a series of tensions and open questions for further work.     

Case study: the Health SmartLibrary experiences in web personalization and customization at the Galter Health Sciences Library,Northwestern University

Question:

How can the user''s access to health information, especially full-text articles, be improved? The solution is building and evaluating the Health SmartLibrary (HSL).

Setting:

The setting is the Galter Health Sciences Library, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University.

Method:

The HSL was built on web-based personalization and customization tools: My E-Resources, Stay Current, Quick Search, and File Cabinet. Personalization and customization data were tracked to show user activity with these value-added, online services.

Main Results:

Registration data indicated that users were receptive to personalized resource selection and that the automated application of specialty-based, personalized HSLs was more frequently adopted than manual customization by users. Those who did customize customized My E-Resources and Stay Current more often than Quick Search and File Cabinet. Most of those who customized did so only once.

Conclusion:

Users did not always take advantage of the services designed to aid their library research experiences. When personalization is available at registration, users readily accepted it. Customization tools were used less frequently; however, more research is needed to determine why this was the case.     

A microfluidic platform for measuring electrical activity across cells

In this paper, we present a microfluidic chip that is capable of measuring electrical conductance through gap junction channels in a 2-dimensional cell sheet. The chip utilizes a tri-stream laminar flow to create a non-conductive sucrose gap between the two conducting solutions so that electrical current can pass across the sucrose gap only through the cells. Using the chip, we tested the effect of a gap junction inhibitor, 2-APB, on the electrical coupling of connexin 43 (Cx43) gap junction channels in NRK-49F cells. We found that 2-APB reversibly blocks the conductivity in a dose-dependent manner. The tri-stream chip further allows us to simultaneously follow the conductance changes and dye diffusion in real time. We show that 2-APB affects both conductance and diffusion, supporting the interpretation that both sets of data reflect the same gap junction activity. The chip provides a generic platform to investigate gap junction properties and to screen drugs that may inhibit or potentiate gap junction transmission.