Browsing is a collaborative process

Interfaces to databases have traditionally been designed as single-user systems that hide other users and their activity. This paper aims to show that collaboration is an important aspect of searching online information retrieval (IR) systems that requires explicit computerised support. A number of systems offering varied approaches to supporting collaboration are surveyed and a structure for analysing the various aspects of collaboration is applied. The dominant form of collaboration in digital libraries is likely to be remote and asynchronous. Collaborative work in the digital library requires that both the search product and the search process can be captured and communicated. The ARIADNE system is introduced as an example of computerised support for collaboration between browsers.     

Dangerous Darwinism

We are concerned with a particular rhetorical narrative that appeared in the early stages of the Darwin debate but that has been fiercely resurgent in the past two decades. Freud wrote of Darwin's theory as one of three major blows to which human vanity had been submitted at the hands of science. Assertions that "Darwin's dangerous idea" came as a horrible shock to the Victorians and that it is still a profound psychological threat, and therefore widely resisted, remain current. When such assertions are offered as the premise on which Darwin is to be approached by the general reader they call for some detailed scrutiny, with regard both to the bases on which they are made, and the effect they have on the terms of public debate. This paper offers a critique of the culture-shock myth based on a re-examination of Victorian reactions to Darwin's work, and on an analysis of the ways in which the myth functions as a rhetorical strategy in our own time.     

An evaluation of multimodal interactions with technology while learning science concepts

This paper explores the value of employing multiple modalities to facilitate science learning with technology. In particular, it is argued that when multiple modalities are employed, learners construct strong relations between physical movement and visual representations of motion. Body interactions with visual representations, enabled by interactive technologies, can encourage rhythmic cycles of engagement and reflection. A study was carried out to investigate how students interpret distance–time and velocity–time graphs created through hand movement. It explored the dynamic coupling between their body movements and graphs, and their subsequent interpretation and production of graphs on paper. The results show that physical manipulation of kinematics graphs has a significantly greater effect on students' ability to relate graphs to movement than observing the graphs being produced by someone else.     

Preschool provision and children of migrants in Beijing

Chinese children with an urban household registration (hukou) normally attend subsidized preschools for three years prior to primary school. This is an experience available to relatively few of China's many millions of migrant children whose families are registered as rural residents but choose to migrate to urban areas. This paper presents research, in the form of a case study, which examined an informal playgroup for rural-registered migrant children whose parents worked in a Beijing market. The playgroup was established by volunteers to provide an affordable, though limited, alternative preschool experience for migrant children. The original programme was derived from community concepts that initially underpinned the “Sure Start” intervention in the United Kingdom. In the paper, survey data is utilized to determine if an informal playgroup can be a positive alternative in a context where migrant children have little capacity to access the preschool programmes available to their urban counterparts.     

Making art invisible: visual education and the cultural stagnation of neo-liberal rationality

The popularity of visual literacy may have resulted, in part, from some school authorities rushing the process of determining school curriculum. This article argues that the haste is reflective of pressure placed on educational discourse to conform to neo-liberal reforms of the sector, and is not the result of a careful and complex debate within the education community. In Australia, such reform has contributed to the erosion of visual art as a discrete subject in the general curriculum. The article accounts for the fact that the lack of careful debate may be due to art educators rehearsing tired arguments for retaining the place occupied by visual art, which smack of sentimentality. The author examines the conceptualisation of visual art at a cultural and theoretical level, and argues that by considering the function art has traditionally played in relation to conceptions of human subjectivity, we may disclose the marginalisation of visual art as a signal of much larger threats to political and economic structures in democratic society. The article considers whether the absorption of ‘art’ within a broader preference for visual communication, graphic design, or design and technology, is symptomatic of a long-term cultural stagnation.     

Voices from the East and West: congruence on the primary purpose of tutor feedback in higher education

While feedback in education is important, formative feedback that leads to improvement in students’ learning outcomes and emotional disposition is vital. This argument has been made repeatedly in the Western literature, both by researchers and by students participating in their research in higher education. This paper presents both affective and non-affective improvement as the most frequently occurring theme identified in a mixed-methods study conducted at a National Key University in mainland China, which investigated 232 Chinese students’ experiences and expectations of feedback from their Chinese tutors. This paper, thus, concludes that mainland Chinese university students and Western researchers and students likely agree on the primary function of tutor feedback. The desire for tutor feedback to also or chiefly play a formative role appears not to be a geographically or culturally specific phenomenon.