Promoting versatility in mentor teachers’ use of supervisory skills

Mentor teachers need a versatile supervisory skills repertoire. Besides taking the prevalent role of daily advisor and instructor, mentor teachers should also be able to stimulate reflection in student teachers. Video recordings of 60 mentoring dialogues were analysed, both before and after a mentor teacher training aimed at developing the encourager role. Mentor teachers’ repertoires of supervisory skills were found to consist of an average of seven supervisory skills. After training, a shift was observed in the frequencies and duration with which supervisory skills were used. Although considerable inter-individual variability existed between mentor teachers, training positively affected the use of supervisory skills for stimulating reflection in student teachers.     

Document,documentation, and the Document Academy: introduction

A series of efforts starting in the late nineteenth century to manage the increase in documents came to be knows as “documentation.” Leaders included Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet. The concern was with access to evidence and the meaning of “document” was broadened to include any sign preserved to represent phenomena. Legal deposit, when extended to new modern media, required new techniques and led to a new program in documentation at the University of Tromsø, Norway, in 1996. Niels Lund, Michael Buckland, and others collaborated in forming the Document Academy and organized a series of conferences.     

Property,privacy and personhood in a world of ambient intelligence

Profiling technologies are the facilitating force behind the vision of Ambient Intelligence in which everyday devices are connected and embedded with all kinds of smart characteristics enabling them to take decisions in order to serve our preferences without us being aware of it. These technological practices have considerable impact on the process by which our personhood takes shape and pose threats like discrimination and normalisation. The legal response to these developments should move away from a focus on entitlements to personal data, towards making transparent and controlling the profiling process by which knowledge is produced from these data. The tendency in intellectual property law to commodify information embedded in software and profiles could counteract this shift to transparency and control. These rights obstruct the access and contestation of the design of the code that impacts one’s personhood. This triggers a political discussion about the public nature of this code and forces us to rethink the relations between property, privacy and personhood in the digital age.     

Green Open Access in Astronomy and Mathematics: The Complementarity of Routines Among Authors and Readers

Minerva - Open access (OA) to publications has become a major topic in science policy. However, electronic publication providing free access to research via the internet is more than a decade...     

Gross efficiency predicts a 6-min double-poling ergometer performance in recreational cross-country skiers

The purpose of the study was to investigate which physiological parameters would most accurately predict a 6-min, all-out, double-poling (DP) performance in recreational cross-country skiers. Twelve male recreational cross-country skiers performed tests consisting of three series lasting 10 s, one lasting 60 s, plus a 6-min, all-out, DP performance test to estimate mean and peak power output. On a separate day, gross mechanical efficiency (GE) was estimated from a 10-min, submaximal, DP test and maximal oxygen consumption (VO₂ max) was estimated from an incremental treadmill running test. Power was measured after each stroke from the acceleration and deceleration of the flywheel that induced the friction on the ergometer. The power was shown to the skier on a small computer placed on the ergometer. A multivariable correlation analysis showed that GE most strongly predicted 6-min DP performance (r = 0.79) and interestingly, neither DP VO₂ max, nor treadmill-running VO₂ max, correlated with 6-min DP performance. In conclusion, GE correlated most strongly with 6-min DP performance and GE at the ski ergometer was estimated to be 6.4 ± 1.1%. It is suggested that recreational cross-country skiers focus on skiing technique to improve gross mechanical efficiency during intense DP.     

Uncovering contents of mentor teachers' interactive cognitions during mentoring dialogues

In the context of developing mentor teachers' use of supervisory skills, two consecutive studies were conducted, using stimulated recall. Firstly, with eight participants, an instrument was developed to categorize contents of interactive cognitions. Secondly, with 30 participants, the instrument was applied to uncover contents of mentor teachers' interactive cognitions, before and after training in supervisory skills. After training, mentor teachers demonstrate an increased awareness of their use of supervisory skills. This indicates that mentor teachers not only seem to emphasize pupil learning and needs when conducting a mentoring dialogue, but simultaneously focus on their own supervisory behaviour.     

Make Way for the Robots! Human- and Machine-Centricity in Constituting a European Public–Private Partnership

Minerva - This article is an analytic register of recent European efforts in the making of ‘autonomous’ robots to address what is imagined as Europe’s societal challenges. The...     

Towards a Theory of Pedagogic Text Analysis

The present study examines why businesses and government ministries use and need occupational second foreign language (L3) skills, but fail to mention these in job advertisements. It contrasts data from two quantitative surveys of language use in business and government domains with two studies of the mention of L3 skills in job advertisements. While the former show that L3 languages are still used and still considered important and relevant, the latter show that such skills are hardly mentioned in job advertisements, not even as cautious requests in positions where these would be highly relevant. The authors discuss whether this may be due to the lack of L3 skills among new employees or due to the belief that English is sufficient, also known as “Anglophone complacency.”     

Teacher Education for Research‐based Practice in Expanded Roles: Finland's experience

Preparing teachers for a research‐based professionalism has been the central mission of teacher education in Finland since the mid‐1970s. More recently, as a result of such national policy developments as school‐based curriculum development and local decision‐making, the conception of teachers' work and professionalism has expanded. Drawing on experience within the teacher education programmes at the University of Helsinki and Åbo Akademi University, this paper discusses some of the programmatic issues that these developments have raised in class‐teacher, i.e. “elementary”, teacher education programmes. We focus in particular firstly on the research thesis that is a part of every teacher education programme in Finland, and the hallmark of the research‐based professional ideal; and, secondly on the emerging issues that derive from the need to incorporate the expanded understanding of the teacher's role within the curriculum of teacher education.     

School Closure: What are the consequences for the local society?

School closures have been common in rural areas since the middle of the last century, when new and modern schools replaced small old‐fashioned schools with only one or two classrooms. Due mainly to the industrialisation of farming and hastened by the merging and globalisation of industry, the last 50 years have seen a migration of people from rural areas to large towns. This has caused closures of schools built in the 1950s and 1960s, which had been the pride of and a sign of development in local societies. These closures most often give rise to heated debate, the main cry of protest being that the closure of the school is a death‐blow to the local society. The present study is based on a qualitative analysis performed in 2003 of 30 Danish school closures in the period 1990–1999. The results show that school closure in itself does not have the devastating effects mentioned in the debate. The main problem for local societies is a lack of people and thus lack of human capital, and in remote areas and on small islands school closure is a sign of a community in the final phase of the death process, not a cause.