A Bourdieusian approach to academic reading: reflections on a South African teaching experience

As in many other parts of the world, ‘academic literacy’ has emerged as both a concern and a contested concept in South African universities. In this article we focus specifically on academic reading, which we argue is a relatively underemphasized aspect of academic literacy. This article is the product of reflections on academic reading during and subsequent to the development and presentation of a postgraduate module presented at Stellenbosch University. It briefly explores the literature on academic literacy; develops the Bourdieusian perspective on academic reading that we used to develop the module; and concludes with a discussion of the module. Our intention was to make ‘reading as social practice’ more visible to students. Bourdieu's concepts of ‘competence’, ‘habitus’ and ‘field’ set the scene for a discussion of the role of reading in different disciples and more generally within the social sciences and humanities.     

Transferwirkungen künstlerischer Tätigkeiten. Ihre kritische Kommentierung durch eine umfassende Theorie ästhetischer Bildung

Transfer research examines how artistic activities can have an impact outside of the realm of art itself. The article concludes that this research can be carried out in a meaningful way, only within the framework of a comprehensive theory of aesthetic education. This theory would encompass the structural analysis of artistic activity, as well as biographical reports about artistic experiences. The elucidation of the concepts or themes relevant to the theory would include the notion of aesthetic experience, the understanding of immediate, aesthetic experiences, the analysis of artistic processes, and the outcomes of scientifically evaluated applications of aesthetic education.     

Wann kann Kompetenzdiagnostik negative Auswirkungen haben?

This paper addresses potential negative effects of systematic external competence assessment on different levels of the education system. We discuss possible sources of misinterpretations of competence assessment feedback, potential consequences of feedback and assessment for different education stakeholders (teachers, students, and educational administration) as well as negative effects of systematic competence assessment on the culture of teaching and learning. The paper concludes with some reflections on possibilities to prevent or reduce the discussed negative effects.     

Wie können Ergebnisse der Kompetenzdiagnostik in Forschungsprojekten sinnvoll zurückgemeldet werden?

Reporting on research results to students, teachers and institutions is a big challenge within competence assessment research: students individually have to be given feedback about how they performed, teachers have to be provided with information about their classes, education authorities are interested in actual research results. For feedback being helpful for students, teachers and institutions, the following questions have to be thought of: (1) Who is the feedback given to? What is the aim of the feedback? (2) Which results shall be reported? (3) How should feedback theoretically look like? And (4) how does feedback depend on the given general framework? The given article discusses these questions and offers a “checklist” to research projects with a focus on competence assessment.     

Skizze zur Historiographie der Ästhetischen Bildung

This article is focussing on a historical approach to the term of aesthetic education from three different angles: as history of ideas, biographies and images. Aesthetic education is thereby understood as performative and reflective involvement with aesthetics and the fine arts such as arts, theatre and literature etc. A first approach is defining the history of ideas as a theoretical reconstruction of aesthetic concepts and their educational relevance; this history is also discussing educational theories and their aesthetic implications. It is more or less an implicit and compensatory history because the important contexts are not visible at first sight; and the aesthetic and pedagogical theories often need a reciprocal addition. A biographical perspective is hereby concentrated on the biography of artists. Thereby the educational science of biographies are highlighting the situation of the arts and the artists, the development of becoming an artist, the progression as an artist and the artistic institutions in a educational-aesthetic nexus. Such a perspective is supplementing the history of ideas concerning cultural and socio-historical dimensions as well as institutional and biographic aspects. Finally, the history of images is focusing on the thesis that every picture also includes a programme of aesthetic education. In pictures the process of productive and reflective visualisation is expressed: paintings refer to their production and their understanding. For the method of the historical-educational iconography of aesthetic education a historicizing matrix from production aesthetics, work aesthetics and reception aesthetics is suggested. This matrix is combined with a theory of education as transformation of self-relation, of relations to other individuals and the world. The three approaches just mentioned are exemplified by Leonardo da Vinci and his famous picture “Vitruvian Man” from 1492.     

Educational Publishing in China: Status Quo,Problems and Counter Measures

In China, educational publishing is devoted to publishing mainly textbooks and teaching materials. For a long time, education publishing has dominated others in China’s publishing industry. However, after entering the new century, especially in the last 2 years, there has been the impact of changes in the College-Entrance Examination, the Invitation to Bid for Compilation and Publication of Textbooks, government procurement and Scientific and Technological Advancement for supplementary books. Therefore, publishing for education has been losing its previous major role and dominance. For making a leap forward and breakthrough in educational publication, we must open up a new train of thought for the development of educational publishing, we need three distinct transformations: first, change in publishing mode from extensive to intensive growth. Second, transformation from variety-scale to market-scale expansion. Third, transformation from being just a provider of content to one providing both content and services.     

Comparison of Alternative Channels in Cross Media Publishing

This paper attempts a direct comparison of the available alternative channels that can be employed in a cross media publishing scheme. More precisely it examines the content, the publishing speed, and the rhythm of the publishing channels. Interesting conclusions are drawn concerning the characteristics of each channel. A new publishing channel is proposed in order to allow newspapers to directly compete with radio and TV channels.     

Negation recognition in medical narrative reports

Substantial medical data, such as discharge summaries and operative reports are stored in electronic textual form. Databases containing free-text clinical narratives reports often need to be retrieved to find relevant information for clinical and research purposes. The context of negation, a negative finding, is of special importance, since many of the most frequently described findings are such. When searching free-text narratives for patients with a certain medical condition, if negation is not taken into account, many of the documents retrieved will be irrelevant. Hence, negation is a major source of poor precision in medical information retrieval systems. Previous research has shown that negated findings may be difficult to identify if the words implying negations (negation signals) are more than a few words away from them. We present a new pattern learning method for automatic identification of negative context in clinical narratives reports. We compare the new algorithm to previous methods proposed for the same task, and show its advantages: accuracy improvement compared to other machine learning methods, and much faster than manual knowledge engineering techniques with matching accuracy. The new algorithm can be applied also to further context identification and information extraction tasks.