Education recoded: policy mobilities in the international ‘learning to code’ agenda

Abstract

Education policy increasingly takes place across borders and sectors, involving a variety of both human and nonhuman actors. This comparative policy paper traces the ‘policy mobilities,’ ‘fast policy’ processes and distributed ‘policy assemblages’ that have led to the introduction of new computer programming practices into schools and curricula in England, Sweden and Australia. Across the three contexts, government advisors and ministers, venture capital firms, think tanks and philanthropic foundations, non-profit organizations and commercial companies alike have promoted computer programming in schools according to a variety of purposes, aspirations, and commitments. This paper maps and traces the evolution of the organizational networks in each country in order to provide a comparative analysis of computing in schools as an exemplar of accelerated, transnationalizing policy mobility. The analysis demonstrates how computing in schools policy has been assembled through considerable effort to create alignments between diverse actors, the production and circulation of material objects, significant cross-border movement of ideas, people and devices, and the creation of strategic partnerships between government centres and commercial vendors. Computing in schools exemplifies how modern education policy and governance is accomplished through sprawling assemblages of actors, events, materials, money and technologies that move across social, governmental and geographical boundaries.     

Crunch time: the revised ISO 15489 and the future of recordkeeping

The revised International Standard ISO 15489:2016 Part 1: Principles and Concepts establishes a framework and a set of techniques with which today’s recordkeeping professionals can implement appropriate and digital-ready strategies for recordkeeping. Moving away from conventions that remained tied to the paper world, the Standard establishes a set of principles to guide any approach, regardless of technologies and formats, and explains the fundamentally important work of appraisal. It also describes the essential elements of controls for records, to assist with access, retention and more. In this reflection, the author describes the genesis of the revised standard and argues that, unless recordkeeping professionals embrace the contingent and fluid nature of their work, and adhere to principles such as those described in the Standard, they will not produce solutions to accountability, access and memory challenges that meet the needs of the connected world.     

Faculty and Instructor Perceptions of Open Educational Resources in Engineering

As open education initiatives aiming to lower the cost of course materials appeared at two universities, librarians became involved in identifying open educational resources (OERs) for university courses. However, when considering a number of subject areas—particularly in colleges focused on upper-division instruction—librarians encountered problems related to the availability of resources and materials selection processes. For this project, librarians selected one prominent subject area at their respective institutions—engineering—and worked to identify best practices for introducing OERs into courses. They surveyed engineering faculty and instructors to better understand their perceptions and needs related to OERs and, based on this work, they suggest best practices for liaison librarians in specialized fields who wish to incorporate OERs into their outreach work with a focus on upper-division courses.     

Inductive Influence

Objective Bayesianism has been criticised for not allowing learningfrom experience: it is claimed that an agent must give degreeof belief     

Book reviews

The Effective Editor's Handbook, By Barbara Horn, Leatherhead: Pira International 1997, 176 pp £20.00, ISBN: 1 85802 186 3