Building an evolving method and materials for teaching legal writing in large classes

In South Africa and in other parts of the world, many professions are bemoaning the poor ability of many graduates to communicate their skills and knowledge effectively once they enter the workplace. Increasingly, pressure is placed on higher education to do more in terms of equipping future professionals with the necessary critical reading, research, thinking and writing skills the workplace demands. However, in South Africa especially, the demand for access to higher education is resulting in increased admissions, and in many lecturers standing in front of larger classes filled with students from a wide range of home and educational backgrounds with ‘variable’ commands of English as a medium of instruction and communication (Greenbaum and Mbali in S Afr Linguist Appl Lang Stud 20:233–244, 2002). This makes the task of equipping these students with disciplinary knowledge and skills a challenge. In responding to this challenge, the Law Faculty at the University of the Western Cape, in collaboration with a writing specialist, initiated a project aimed at transforming the way in which legal writing was taught at first year level. The overall aim was to start training students, from first year, to adapt their thinking and writing to the kinds of knowledge and practice required by academic study as well as the legal profession. The project was successful in achieving its modest aims, but certain challenges remain. This paper reflects critically on the development and evolution of the model for teaching legal writing in large classes. It argues that teaching legal writing in large classes requires creative and sustainable approaches so that students can become active and critical writers, readers and thinkers over time in this, or any, field.     

Using quantitative data in World Bank per-student funding reform projects: data,designs and dilemmas in transition countries

Since the late 1980s, education systems have increasingly moved to allocating funding for general education by means of a per-student formula. The trend started with developed economies and moved to transition and developing economies, where the World Bank has promoted the adoption of per-student funding (PSF). But promoting a particular reform, such as PSF, by including it in a package of sector-specific development projects funded by World Bank grants or loans, and employing local and international specialist staff do not guarantee successful implementation. This paper examines experience with implementing PSF to school level in transition countries, comparing varying degrees of success to date (2013) in Bulgaria, Moldova and Kosovo. The paper considers the dilemmas inherent in designing PSF formulae for schools, how this played out in each of the countries and the reasons for varying success in implementation.     

Using Young Adult Literature to Develop Content Knowledge of Autism for Preservice Teachers

This promising practice explores the use of young adult literature as a supplement to texts in an undergraduate introduction to a special education course. Literature portraying adolescent characters with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were used to build schema of preservice teachers. Participants' knowledge and attitudes about ASD were examined before and after reading a young adult novel of their choice. Results indicated that students in the literature group out-performed peers in the control group on measures of ASD content. Exemplars of students' responses suggested students who read the novel expressed increased knowledge and interest, recognition of commonalities, and complex and nuanced views of ASD. Participant satisfaction with reading the novels outside of class was also high, suggesting students found the authentic literacy experience enjoyable.     

Trip to Russia and Uzbekistan,April 2013

The author reports on her trip to Moscow and Uzbekistan. In Moscow she attended and presented a paper at the conference Rumiantsevskie chteniia [Rumiantsev readings] 2013. After the conference she set up a new approval plan for Yale University Libraries with Natasha Kozmenko Booksellers. In Tashkent she participated in the seventh international conference Information and Library Resources for Science, Education, Culture, and Business: Central Asia 2013. She and some of the other participants also traveled to Samarkand.     

What do Our Faculty Use? An Interdisciplinary Citation Analysis Study

During the fall of 2012 and spring of 2013, two librarians from the University of Kansas Libraries conducted a citation analysis of faculty publications in three broad disciplinary areas: humanities, social sciences, and science. The main purpose of research was to find out if the library provides adequate support to faculty researchers. The authors confirmed that KU Libraries provide access to the majority of items used by campus researchers. In addition, the findings will be used in collection management decisions, such as demand driven acquisition. Finally, the authors analyzed additional citation analysis studies in order to establish external benchmarks for their results.     

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.     

Peer production and collective intelligence as the basis for the public digital university*

This paper reviews two main historical approaches to creativity: the Romanticist approach, based on the culture of the irrational, and the Enlightenment approach, based on the culture of the objective. It defends a paradigm of creativity as a sum of rich semiotic systems that form the basis of distributed knowledge and learning, reviews historical ideas of the university, and identifies two conflicting mainstream models in regards to understanding of the university as a public good: the ‘Public’ University circa 1960–1980, and the ‘post-historical’ university. Based on practical experiences, and on previous works by Peters and Jandri?, it develops the new model of ‘the creative university as digital public university’, and argues that it provides a useful philosophical goal for directing present and future practices of the contemporary university.     

Pedagogy in practice: the pedagogy of a learning setting as students experience it

This paper opens a theoretical discussion regarding the pedagogy of a learning setting as students experience it. Students’ experience of learning deserves particular attention because it may differ from the pedagogy that is designed and campaigned for by the school, or even from the one that is ‘experienced’ by the teacher in the same situation. In order to open up such a discussion, we introduce the term ‘pedagogy in practice’ (PiP). This new term describes the pedagogy that actually acts on students’ thought and affects; it relates to the interaction between the school’s pedagogy and students’ experience of it. In this paper, we define the concept of PiP and examine its implications and differentiation from related pedagogic concepts. By doing so, we question educators’ and policy makers’ ability to understand, evaluate, make sense of, and eventually improve pedagogies or curricula in general without looking at PiP in particular.     

Language morphology offset: Text classification on a Croatian–English parallel corpus

We investigate how, and to what extent, morphological complexity of the language influences text classification using support vector machines (SVM). The Croatian–English parallel corpus provides the basis for direct comparison of two languages of radically different morphological complexity. We quantified, compared, and statistically tested the effects of morphological normalisation on SVM classifier performance based on a series of parallel experiments on both languages, carried over a large scale of different feature subset sizes obtained by different feature selection methods, and applying different levels of morphological normalisation. We also quantified the trade-off between feature space size and performance for different levels of morphological normalisation, and compared the results for both languages. Our experiments have shown that the improvements in SVM classifier performance is statistically significant; they are greater for small and medium number of features, especially for Croatian, whereas for large number of features the improvements are rather small and may be negligible in practice for both languages.