Is online delivery less costly than print and is it meaningful to ask?

The costs of shifting from print‐based to online delivery arc examined in relation to the three principal rationales that are commonly advanced to justify such a shift: saving costs, improving quality, and increasing access. The projected costs of converting an existing print‐based subject to online delivery arc analysed. Based on this analysis, it is argued that, at least in the Australian context, it is difficult to justify the shift to online delivery in terms of cost saving alone. Rather, such a shift needs to be justified in strategic terms. A possible strategic rationale for shifting to online delivery is articulated.     

Thinking Strategically about Assessment

Drawing upon the literature on strategy formulation in organisations, this paper argues for a focus on strategy as process. It relates this to the need to think strategically about assessment, a need engendered by resource pressures, developments in learning and the demands of external stakeholders. It is argued that in practice assessment strategies are often formed at the level of practice, but that this produces contradiction and confusion at higher levels. Such tensions cannot be managed away, but they can be reflected on and mitigated. The paper suggests a framework for the construction of assessment strategies at different levels of an institution. However, the main conclusion is that the process of constructing such strategies should be an opportunity for learning and reflection, rather than one of compliance.     

AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE PRIOR ECONOMIC EXPERIENCE OF PRIMARY EDUCATION STUDENTS

In a previous paper (AEHE vol. 17(2) pp. 69‐88) Alistair Ross explored student teachers’ backgrounds and economic experiences, relating this to their economic and industrial understanding.

In this complementary paper he draws on the work of his research group and its EATE‐sponsored project to examine student teachers’ attitudes to economic issues and to their perceptions of teaching as work. In particular, the paper discusses students’ attitudes to the English and Welsh national curriculum cross‐curricular theme: economic and Industrial understanding (EITJ).     

Developmental Pathways Between Infant Gestures and Symbolic Actions,and Children’s Communicative Skills at Age 5: Findings From the All Our Families Pregnancy Cohort

Using data from the All Our Families study, a longitudinal study of 1992 mother-child dyads in Canada (47.7% female; 81.9% White), we examined the developmental pathways between infant gestures and symbolic actions and communicative skills at age 5. Communicative gestures at age 12 months (e.g., pointing, nodding head “yes”), obtained via parental report, predicted stronger general communicative skills at age 5 years. Moreover, greater use of symbolic actions (e.g., “feeding” a stuffed animal with a bottle) indirectly predicted increased communicative skills at age 5 via increased productive vocabulary at 24 months. These pathways support the hypothesis that children’s communicative skills during the transition to kindergarten emerge from a chain of developmental abilities starting with gestures and symbolic actions during infancy.     

The Victorian Information Society: Surveillance, Bureaucracy, and Public Librarianship in 19th-Century Britain

Contrary to the "retro" image often awarded them, and despite their continuing enthusiasm and responsibility for the organization of printed materials, librarians are upbeat about the prospects of an information society driven primarily by electronic technologies, but in which libraries can play an important part. Public librarians detect a natural correlation between the historic democratic mission of their institution and the increased accessibility made possible by digitalized sources. The library community's acceptance of the information society idea as a "given" social phenomenon supports discourses that play down historical continuities and herald the dawn of a new age. Such discourses ignore or reject historical evidence that points to the existence of past information societies, revolutions, and infrastructures defined, in part, by the operation of indirect surveillance, constituted by the bureaucratic information systems of modernity. Victorian Britain serves as a good example of an early information society, to which public libraries, themselves micro-information societies, contributed significantly. The role played by public librarians in the Victorian information society, illustrated in this article by evidence drawn from the contemporary library press, is seen in their preoccupation with the surveillance and ordering of knowledge; their adoption for library operations of the businesslike, bureaucratic procedures described recently by business historians; and their panoptic tracking of users and their activities.     

Video email: a method of speeding up assignment feedback for visual arts subjects in distance education

The type of asynchronous communication offered by electronic mail has been shown to be particularly effective for providing feedback on assignments in distance education. However, the use of electronic mail has generally been restricted to the exchange of textual information. For practical assignments which include a large visual component, a method of providing feedback which enables the tutor to point to features of the student's work is needed. This paper reports the results of a recent investigation into the feasibility of providing visual feedback to students in practical art subjects by sending compressed digital video clips as attachments to email messages. It concludes that transmission of video by email is now technically feasible, although bandwidth constraints of dial-up links and the time taken for compression put a tight limit on the amount of video that it is practicable to transmit. Nevertheless, developments in technology are expected to improve this situation quickly. Many of the issues that are examined are relevant to other areas of multimedia delivery     

Three Gorges Dam: friend or foe of riverine greenhouse gases?

Dams are often regarded as greenhouse gas (GHG) emitters. However, our study indicated that the world''s largest dam, the Three Gorges Dam (TGD), has caused significant drops in annual average emissions of CO₂, CH₄ and N₂O over 4300 km along the Yangtze River, accompanied by remarkable reductions in the annual export of CO₂ (79%), CH₄ (50%) and N₂O (9%) to the sea. Since the commencement of its operation in 2003, the TGD has altered the carbonate equilibrium in the reservoir area, enhanced methanogenesis in the upstream, and restrained methanogenesis and denitrification via modifying anoxic habitats through long-distance scouring in the downstream. These findings suggest that ‘large-dam effects’ are far beyond our previous understanding spatiotemporally, which highlights the fundamental importance of whole-system budgeting of GHGs under the profound impacts of huge dams.     

Assessing efficiency–effectiveness tradeoffs in multi-stage retrieval systems without using relevance judgments

Large-scale retrieval systems are often implemented as a cascading sequence of phases—a first filtering step, in which a large set of candidate documents are extracted using a simple technique such as Boolean matching and/or static document scores; and then one or more ranking steps, in which the pool of documents retrieved by the filter is scored more precisely using dozens or perhaps hundreds of different features. The documents returned to the user are then taken from the head of the final ranked list. Here we examine methods for measuring the quality of filtering and preliminary ranking stages, and show how to use these measurements to tune the overall performance of the system. Standard top-weighted metrics used for overall system evaluation are not appropriate for assessing filtering stages, since the output is a set of documents, rather than an ordered sequence of documents. Instead, we use an approach in which a quality score is computed based on the discrepancy between filtered and full evaluation. Unlike previous approaches, our methods do not require relevance judgments, and thus can be used with virtually any query set. We show that this quality score directly correlates with actual differences in measured effectiveness when relevance judgments are available. Since the quality score does not require relevance judgments, it can be used to identify queries that perform particularly poorly for a given filter. Using these methods, we explore a wide range of filtering options using thousands of queries, categorize the relative merits of the different approaches, and identify useful parameter combinations.