Envisaging a new education studies major: what are the core educational knowledges to be addressed in pre‐service teacher education?

Reviewing and rethinking the ‘knowledge base’ for teacher education has become a particularly critical issue in recent times, given profound social and cultural shifts and changes and the emergence of new epistemological, political and technological conditions and contexts. This paper takes up the question of what are the key conceptual and contextual knowledges that student teachers arguably need to encounter and engage in their initial professional education and training. It does so by firstly reviewing the changing kinds and orders of knowledge, education and society in and for the twenty‐first century, and then by outlining a specific initiative in this regard: a reworked, reconceptualized Education Studies Major in the pre‐service teacher education program at Deakin University. The challenge the paper takes up is how to help prospective teachers to think differently about knowledge, so that they can better use such understanding to sustain and develop themselves as active, informed, reflexive professional practitioners.     

The effects of instructional media: identifying the task demand/media match†

Task instruction may be presented in many forms. However, training system designers are often forced to depend on intuition when choosing a presentation medium. Though past research has investigated the effectiveness of instructional media types, results have been mixed with no clear recommendations of which medium to use for instruction. An organizational framework for matching the appropriate medium or media to a learning situation is necessary for progress to occur in this research area. Through three experiments, we investigated the attributes of audio and video as instructional media, identified tasks for which we might predict the most beneficial instructional media, and tested our proposed organizational framework by manipulating the difficulty of the task and the complexity of the instructions. Older and younger adults participated in the experiments to help us understand differences in training needs for varying cognitive and perceptual abilities. We provide the basis for a taxonomy of instructional media and task demands, to be added through further research.     

低能电子破坏DNA

高能电离辐射穿过细胞时会损害DNA，这已不足为奇。每个高能粒子的能量是可见光光子能转的100万倍。然而．近期的实验证明．即使电离辐射释放的是能量很低的电子，同样会破坏RNA和DNA中的核心分子成份。这一结果意味着人们将掌握低水平辐射产生的生物学效应．并改进放射性疗法。