Science Curricula and the Organization of Secondary Schooling

This paper explores the substance of competence-driven changes in teacher education curricula by testing the possibility of using a framework distinguishing between the German pedagogical culture of Didaktik and the Anglo-Saxon Curriculum culture to describe the substance of these changes. Data about the perceptions of competence-driven changes in teacher education curricula has been collected in 30 in-depth interviews with teacher educators, student teachers, and their school mentors in Serbia, and analysed with the help of qualitative data processing software. The coding procedures involved classification of utterances into five groups relating to the perceptions of (1) teacher evaluation, (2) teacher competence in subject matter, pedagogy, and curriculum, (3) understanding of the education system and contribution to its development, (4) teacher competences in dealing with values and child-rearing, and (5) changes in teacher education curricula related to these groups of competence. The perceptions in each group of utterances were interpreted in terms of their alliance with Didaktik or Curriculum cultures. The findings indicate that the framework cannot be used as a continuum since the utterances aligned with the two cultures co-exist in the individual responses, but could be useful as a reflection tool in teacher education curricula.     

Environmental Education in Serbian Primary Schools: Challenges and Changes in Curriculum,Pedagogy, and Teacher Training

The protection of human health and the preservation of the environment are topics that form an integral part of the primary school curriculum in Serbia. However, research studies have shown that students do not have enough knowledge to contribute to the development of a healthy lifestyle and environmental awareness. The latest changes in school policy and curricula confirm that the relevance of environmental education has been recognized, but changes in school practice are yet to come. This article discusses the challenges encountered in the implementation of the intended curriculum and offers suggestions for changes to the curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher training in order to enhance environmental education.     

Dubious Early Medieval Jewels from Matzhausen (Bavaria): New Material and Technological Investigations

ABSTRACT

A controversial set of elite jewels assumed to be of early medieval period, recovered in 1937–1938 from a burial site in Matzhausen (northeastern Bavaria) was investigated to determine their technological coherency as well as their authenticity. The discovery of these jewels was exploited by German nationalists to argue that the material culture observed in Bohemia and Moravia in the ninth century had Germanic roots. The circumstances of their discovery, however, remain unclear. Research in archives demonstrated the involvement of the SS Ahnenerbe organisation in the recovery of the jewels. Are these jewels authentic or are they forgeries manufactured or modified by a modern craftsman to serve German expansionist nationalism? Three jewels recovered in the grave – a gombik (hollow spherical pendant), an earring with chainlet, and a zoomorphic figurine – were investigated using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) coupled with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), X-radiography, and stereomicroscopy. The investigation revealed a very heterogeneous set of objects with respect to technology and state of preservation. It also uncovered repairs and past invasive interventions involving modern metal and solder. Comparison with similar types of jewels from Bohemia and Moravia points to important differences in construction and technology, which confirms the uniqueness of this set of objects and casts suspicion on their authenticity.     

When Glass and Metal Corrode Together,V: Sodium Copper Formate

A sodium copper formate, first described in 2002, can also form on copper alloys with sodium originating from soda glass hydrolysis. The frequent occurrence (50% of 250 cases of glass-induced metal corrosion) is due to the presence of formaldehyde emissions in storage and its direct reaction to formate in the alkaline surface films. The compound can be produced without the presence of acetate when chalconatronite or metal coupons immersed in soda solution are exposed to formaldehyde vapours. The crystal structure, derived from X-ray powder diffraction, yielded the sum formula Cu₄Na₄O(HCOO)₈(OH)₂·4H₂O. Except for the absence of acetate in the structure, this is in good agreement with the 2002 publication. To assess which kind of combined glass/metal objects are affected, a number of large museum collections were surveyed. Sodium copper formate was detected as a corrosion product using mainly micro-Raman spectroscopy, for instance, on 18 painted Limoges enamels, eight glass vessels with metal mountings, glass beads on metal wire from 11 bridal crowns, nine Christmas tree balls with wire decoration, 40 pieces of jewellery with glass gems, three daguerreotypes, and one miniature with cover glasses.     

Identifying top relevant dates for implicit time sensitive queries

Despite a clear improvement of search and retrieval temporal applications, current search engines are still mostly unaware of the temporal dimension. Indeed, in most cases, systems are limited to offering the user the chance to restrict the search to a particular time period or to simply rely on an explicitly specified time span. If the user is not explicit in his/her search intents (e.g., “philip seymour hoffman”) search engines may likely fail to present an overall historic perspective of the topic. In most such cases, they are limited to retrieving the most recent results. One possible solution to this shortcoming is to understand the different time periods of the query. In this context, most state-of-the-art methodologies consider any occurrence of temporal expressions in web documents and other web data as equally relevant to an implicit time sensitive query. To approach this problem in a more adequate manner, we propose in this paper the detection of relevant temporal expressions to the query. Unlike previous metadata and query log-based approaches, we show how to achieve this goal based on information extracted from document content. However, instead of simply focusing on the detection of the most obvious date we are also interested in retrieving the set of dates that are relevant to the query. Towards this goal, we define a general similarity measure that makes use of co-occurrences of words and years based on corpus statistics and a classification methodology that is able to identify the set of top relevant dates for a given implicit time sensitive query, while filtering out the non-relevant ones. Through extensive experimental evaluation, we mean to demonstrate that our approach offers promising results in the field of temporal information retrieval (T-IR), as demonstrated by the experiments conducted over several baselines on web corpora collections.     

The Visual Holdings of the Slavonic Library,Prague

This study focuses on the visual collections in the holdings of the Slavonic Library (a section of the National Library of the Czech Republic). The library holdings also include unique collections relevant to the topic of Russian and Ukrainian emigration: collections of visual art, ex libris, posters and flyers by Ukrainian émigrés (1918–1945), and a collection of invitations and flyers by Russian émigrés (1918–1945). Rudolf H?lka’s collection of photographs, dating back to the 1920s, captures a series of ethnographic, folkloric, and architectonic phenomena which no longer exist. Moreover, Russian posters from the period of WWI, from the revolutionary year of 1917, and the subsequent civil war are equally fascinating as are banknotes from the same period and region.