Video-stimulated recall in cross-cultural research in education: a case study in Vietnam

This paper examines incorporating video-stimulated recall (VSR) as a data collection technique in cross-cultural research. With VSR, participants are invited to watch video-recordings of particular events that they are involved in; they then recall their thoughts in relation to their observations of their behaviour in relation to the event. The research draws on a larger Ph.D. project completed at an Australian university that explored Vietnamese lecturers’ beliefs about learner autonomy. In cross-cultural research, using the VSR technique provided significant challenges including time constraints of participants, misunderstandings of the VSR protocol and the possibility of participants’ losing face when reflecting on their teaching episodes. Adaptations to the VSR technique were required to meet the cultural challenges specific to this population, indicating a need for flexibility and awareness of the cultural context for research.     

The teacher as a ‘colony’: a case study of agentive responses to ‘colonising’ education policy in Vietnam

Neo-liberal educational policies that are being implemented globally work to foster competition among schools and teachers, as well as among children. In this situation, teachers must often come to accept the dominant representations of curricular policy developed by higher authorities. In this study, a case study design is used to describe how one school in Vietnam shifted away from this state of ‘colonisation’ by reforming the school under the framework of lesson study for learning community (LSLC). This paper subsequently argues that there is a need for school-level policies that democratise school culture and practices, resisting the negative impacts of colonising policies.     

The romance and the reality between pre-service teachers’ beliefs about the potential benefits of a short-term study abroad programme and their practices

This qualitative study aimed to explore Hong Kong pre-service teachers’ beliefs about the potential benefits of a short-term study abroad programme and their practices. Pre- and post-programme semi-structured interviews and reflective journals were employed to collect data. The findings suggest that the transformation of beliefs into practices plays a critical role in the actualization of possible learning outcomes, such as increasing the use of the target language, fostering pedagogical development, broadening cultural understanding and nurturing personal growth. The programme per se, however, does not guarantee target language enhancement in a short time. Implications for programme coordinators and future research are discussed.     

Streaming and congestion control using scalable video coding based on H.264/AVC

INTRODUCTION Streaming of multimedia data over the Internet has rapidly increased in recent years. All commercial applications and most research in video streaming use conventional hybrid video coding. To adapt the data transmission rate on the server to the varying bandwidth caused by congestion in the Internet or to different available bandwidths of different clients, the simulcast solution is widely applied (Balk et al., 2003; Feamster et al., 2001; Schierl and Wiegand, 2004). A larg…     

Professional Development for Teachers Working with International Students

The commercialisation of education and the massive recruitment of international students across different vocational education and training (VET) systems including the US, UK, Canada and Australia have led to significant changes in the VET teaching and learning landscape. This situation compels the VET sector to design and develop new professional development programs to support the immediate and changing needs of teachers working with the diverse international student cohort. However, to date, teacher professional development in response to the growing population of international students has not been an explicit focus of empirical study and theoretical conceptualisation in VET research. This study responds to this paucity. It draws on a broader three-year research project funded by the Australian Research Council (2014–2017) that involves fieldwork, participation in and observation of staff professional development activities and interviews with 102 VET staff in Australia. It uses positioning theory as a conceptual framework to examine how VET teachers position themselves and their professional development needs in response to international students. The results call for a critical need to re-examine the focus of the current professional development programs offered for VET teachers. The current context requires teacher professional development in international VET to focus on developing teachers’ capabilities to re-examine their pedagogical beliefs and practices and to understand international students’ various needs and cultural backgrounds. The study also stresses the importance of ongoing professional learning to equip teachers with the skills and knowledge to appropriate their pedagogical practices in response to the critical need to prepare all students for the intercultural labour market and to use students’ diversity as a resource for teaching and learning.     

The contributions of community learning centres (CLCs) to personal and community development in Myanmar

Community learning centres (CLCs) have been widely established in the Asia-Pacific region as locally managed institutions that offer non-formal educational opportunities and community development activities. Myanmar officially has more than 3,000 centres, which is one of the highest numbers in the region. This article examines the operation of CLCs and their contributions to personal and community development in Padaung, Myanmar. The author’s research is based on six weeks of fieldwork in Myanmar for data collection including semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions and informal conversations. Her findings suggest that CLCs can contribute to the improvement of both individuals’ quality of life and communities’ social capital, which facilitates mutually beneficial collective action. The findings also support the conclusion that CLCs can provide additional educational opportunities beyond the formal system, especially for adults and members of rural communities, e.g. farmers. However, due to constraints in terms of budget, implementing capacity and socio-economic factors, the outreach of CLC activities is still somewhat limited and has yet to reach its full potential.     

Improving the performance of personal name disambiguation using web directories

Frequent requests from users to search engines on the World Wide Web are to search for information about people using personal names. Current search engines only return sets of documents containing the name queried, but, as several people usually share a personal name, the resulting sets often contain documents relevant to several people. It is necessary to disambiguate people in these result sets in order to to help users find the person of interest more readily. In the task of name disambiguation, effective measurement of similarities in the documents is a crucial step towards the final disambiguation. We propose a new method that uses web directories as a knowledge base to find common contexts in documents and uses the common contexts measure to determine document similarities. Experiments, conducted on documents mentioning real people on the web, together with several famous web directory structures, suggest that there are significant advantages in using web directories to disambiguate people compared with other conventional methods.     

Is the learning approach of students from the Confucian heritage culture problematic?

This article is concerned with the learning style adopted by Asian students who come from a Confucian heritage culture (CHC) such countries as China, Vietnam, Singapore, Korea and Japan are considered countries with Confucian heritage culture (Phuong-Mai et al. 2005). These students are generally viewed as typically passive, unwilling to ask questions or speak up in class and often based on memorising rather than understanding knowledge delivered by teachers. This learning style is claimed to be shaped by the CHC in Asian countries and receives massive criticism in the literature. This article aims to challenge this criticism of the passive learning style adopted by Asian students who come from the CHC. By conducting in-depth interviews with 10 Asian students from the CHC currently studying tertiary education in Australia, this article addresses the confusion between passive learning style and CHC, between memorising and understanding and between quietness and passiveness. Finally, if passiveness of Asian students is indeed observed in both Asian CHC countries and English-speaking countries, it is more because of situation-specific factors of teaching methodologies, learning requirements, learning habits and language proficiency rather than cultural factors.     

Lifelong learning for elders in Hong Kong: policy and practice

ABSTRACT

This article explores non-traditional student and graduate views of the university in Ireland and Portugal as it relates to their expectations of, and experiences in, the labour market. The research is based on in-depth biographical interviews with 61 non-traditional students and graduates conducted longitudinally (85 interviews in total). The article contextualises the research in relation to the expansion of higher education internationally as well as national and EU policies aimed at supporting a ‘knowledge-based economy’. It offers an overview of the meaning of precarity. It then outlines key empirical findings from the research related to student expectations of their degree and their post-graduation experience in the labour market. In particular, it explores the phenomenon of precarity amongst graduates how this is experienced and handled in various ways. Using a critical and egalitarian lens the overall aim of the research is to widen the focus of widening participation debates and explore how educational and institutional initiatives impact, or not, on wider social and employment inequalities.