Pre‐service teachers’ preconceptions,misconceptions, and concerns about virtual schooling

Over the last decade, online distance education has become a common mode of study in most states in the USA, where it is known as virtual schooling (VS), but many people have misconceptions about it. Pre‐service teachers’ personal histories as students and their preconceptions, misconceptions, and concerns influence pre‐service teacher training experiences. A qualitative study of an introductory field experience course that included this new mode of schooling for the first time analyzed the personal journals and online discussion responses of 65 pre‐service teachers in the USA. Analysis identified that common misconceptions and concerns included career threat, viability of VS, academic dishonesty, reduced interaction, teacher feedback, and lack of rigor. The curriculum innovations in this innovative teacher preparation program were shown to address these misconceptions and concerns and facilitate understanding and acceptance of VS as an alternative form of education by many of these pre‐service teachers.     

Using ICTs to create a culture of transparency: E-government and social media as openness and anti-corruption tools for societies

In recent years, many governments have worked to increase openness and transparency in their actions. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are seen by many as a cost-effective and convenient means to promote openness and transparency and to reduce corruption. E-government, in particular, has been used in many prominent, comprehensive transparency efforts in a number of nations. While some of these individual efforts have received considerable attention, the issue of whether these ICT-enabled efforts have the potential to create a substantive social change in attitudes toward transparency has not been widely considered. This paper explores the potential impacts of information and ICTs – especially e-government and social media – on cultural attitudes about transparency.     

Mothering Sunday

It is the day of all the year,Of all the year the one day,And here come I,my Mother dear,To bring you cheer,A-mothering on Sunday.E辞典:Mothering Sunday:母亲节(注:5月11日为母亲节。这首儿     

Public sector readiness for digital preservation in New Zealand: The rate of adoption of an innovation in records management practices

Recent legislation in New Zealand has placed statutory obligations on its government organizations to introduce sound records management practices and to ensure long-term access to their digital records. To obtain a base level of knowledge on current digital preservation practices and on awareness of digital preservation issues, an online survey was conducted of the nation's government organizations in March 2006. The survey, which achieved a response rate of 42.4%, found that most organizations were knowledgeable about basic aspects of their digital resources but their awareness of digital preservation was generally low, and digital preservation activity was modest overall. To identify possible reasons for this situation, Rogers' (Diffusion of innovations. 5th ed. New York: Free Press. 2003) Diffusion of Innovations model is used to discuss digital preservation as an innovation and the level of readiness for digital preservation as the innovation's rate of adoption. The paper concludes by using Rogers' model as the basis for making recommendations aimed at helping the government's lead agencies to increase New Zealand's public sector readiness for digital preservation.     

Through the kaleidoscope: Perspectives on cultural change within an integrated information systems environment

The study of information systems and their influence on organisational culture is a complex and highly contested area of research which has been the subject of much theorising. This paper intends to add to the debate through a longitudinal case study of an integrated information system implementation undertaken within a large UK university. The system known as SITS (Strategic Information Technology Services) was introduced into the university in 2006 and the focus of the research has been on culture change within the SITS environment. Document analysis, interviews and participant observation were used to collect the data for this study. What has emerged from this study is that current approaches are unable to account for the complexity of cultural studies within an integrated information systems environment and therefore we have developed the concept of the ‘cultural kaleidoscope’ as a heuristic to better understand the nature of cultural change within these circumstances.     

Teaching without the teacher? Building a learning environment through computer simulations

This article analyzes the impact of a computer simulation (business game) on the users’ perceived learning. The theoretical model developed in this paper is derived from collaborative learning and human–computer interaction assumptions. The hypotheses relating to group dynamics and the user–computer interface design with the users’ perceived learning are tested using the business game “FirmReality” on a sample of 173 respondents. Multiple regression and qualitative results show that, in a computer-based simulation context, perceived learning is influenced more by human–computer interaction factors than by group dynamics. Furthermore, results point out a negative effect of interaction with the instructor on individual perceived learning. These results support the possibility to automate the interaction between teacher and students.     

Museums, plasticity, temporality

Throughout the 28th century, numerous philosophers of history and time have questioned the most ingrained of all our beliefs: does time progress in a linear way and is the future simply the next chapter in this narrative?² This essay proposes to rethink the future of museums outside of this narrative structure, one for which the future is reduced to words such as projection, prediction and prophecy. It asks: in an age of globalisation, can the museum still think of the future as the outcome of a chronological narrative? This essay takes one recent attempt (by the philosopher Catherine Malabou) to destabilise—again—this belief, and proposes to reveal the impact that this attempt could have on the museum's understanding of time and its place within it.     

Learning User Similarity and Rating Style for Collaborative Recommendation

Information filtering is an area getting more important as we have long been flooded with too much information, where product brokering in e-commerce is a typical example. Systems which can provide personalized product recommendations to their users (often called recommender systems) have gained a lot of interest in recent years. Collaborative filtering is one of the commonly used approaches which normally requires a definition of user similarity measure. In the literature, researchers have proposed different choices for the similarity measure using different approaches, and yet there is no guarantee for optimality. In this paper, we propose the use of machine learning techniques to learn the optimal user similarity measure as well as user rating styles for enhancing recommendation acurracy. Based on a criterion function measuring the overall prediction error, several ratings transformation functions for modeling rating styles together with their learning algorithms are derived. With the help of the formulation and the optimization framework, subjective components in user ratings are removed so that the transformed ratings can then be compared. We have evaluated our proposed methods using the EachMovie dataset and succeeded in obtaining significant improvement in recommendation accuracy when compared with the standard correlation-based algorithm.     

陨星揭示太阳秘密

The extraordinary find of a meteorite (陨星) that was photographed as it plummeted (垂直落下) to Earth has helped resolve some of the mysteries about the solar system's rocky wanderers, but also created new ones.     

Considering Pre-Existing Domain-Specific Knowledge as Presage Variable for the Selection of Teachers

Teacher educators and educational policy makers are concerned with the selection of good teachers. Presage variables have been studied in the hope of predicting teaching performance now or later. This paper reports an initial attempt to explore the differential prior domain-specific knowledge of high- and low-performance trainees. About three hundred trainees in a pre-service teacher education course identified one positive and one negative critical incident after viewing a video-taped lesson. Responses reveal a variety of knowledge about teachers and teaching. Is there a set of identifiable domain-specific knowledge that is related to course performance? This study attempts to establish this relationship. Results provide insights into the prediction of teaching performance and the selection of trainees.