Cinderellas and ugly ducklings: Positive turning points in students' educational careers—exploratory evidence and a future agenda

Positive turning points touch upon the essence of education. They epitomize its power and reflect its core agenda: maximizing human capital. Paradoxically, previous studies have not looked into this important phenomenon. The current exploratory study fills this lacuna by building on extensive empirical research of key educational experiences to shed light on four aspects of turning points in students' educational careers. Data come from a sample of 3045 key educational experiences. The article uses a narrative analysis to describe four features in students' changing trajectories, suggesting that the opportunities to experience a positive turning point are organizationally produced and socially distributed to the advantage of higher socio‐economic status students. It is concluded with pointers for policy and practice and opens up questions for future studies in this important domain.     

Project Comptown: educational intervention and action research

The introduction of computers into education raises questions such as: are computers in education effective? If they are, in what sense? What are the most effective strategies for using computers in education? How should teachers be encouraged to use them?
To answer these questions a large-scale experiment (Project Comptown) was carried out in Israel, to test ways and means under real rather than laboratory conditions. This project is a research-oriented educational intervention, applying massive computerisation of schools and their 'close environment' to two localities in Israel (Arad and Ashkelon). Our starting point was the premise that computerisation of education is an inevitable process. Consequently, turning the computer into a 'cultural tool' in schools becomes a major challenge, aiming to narrow the gap between 'school culture' and 'real-world culture'. The main objectives for Project Comptown are: [1] To create a computer culture in schools; [2] To use the computer's potential for innovative teaching and learning, both inside and outside schools. To achieve these, we identified a number of principles which we considered pre-conditions for an 'appropriate' computer strategy in schools.     

A mind of her own. Hélène Metzger to Emile Meyerson, 1933

In May 1933 the historian of chemistry Hélène Metzger addressed a letter to the renowned historian and philosopher of science Emile Meyerson, a cri de coeur against Meyerson's patronizing attitude toward her. This recently discovered letter is published and translated here because it is an exceptional human document reflecting the gender power structure of our discipline in interwar France. At the age of forty-three, and with five books to her credit. Metzger was still a junior scholar in the exclusively male community of French historians and philosophers of science. We sketch the institutional setting of higher learning in France at the time, noting the limited openings it offered to would-be femmes savantes, and situate Metzger in this context. We also describe the philosophical differences between Metzger and Meyerson. Though Metzger never managed to obtain a post of her own, in her letter to Meyerson she forcefully lays claim, at least, to a mind of her own.     

Key educational experiences and self-discovery in higher education

This study investigates key educational experiences in higher education. Key experiences are short and intense instructional episodes that students remember to have had a decisive effect on their lives. Data comes from a sample of 3045 key educational experiences, focusing on the 11.6% that relate to higher education. The paper uses a qualitative analysis to describe different features of key experiences in higher education. The results suggest that key experiences involve a process of self-discovery where students find features about themselves they knew nothing of previously. They also help to characterize three main contexts for self-discovery in higher education. First, key experiences take place in academically challenging circumstances that get students to embark on identity adventures. Second, challenging circumstances also provided ripe ground for sage advice that professors provided their students with. These words of wisdom became leitmotifs for students’ lives henceforth. Finally, the results indicate the importance of second chance opportunities for self-discovery and identity rehabilitation in higher education.     

(Hyper) local news aggregation: Designing for social affordances

Being able to debate, reflect, form opinions, consider counter evidence and make informed decisions is a foundation of civic life in democratic societies. Government benefits from broad participation in collective decision making in terms of sustainable outcomes (e.g., greater consensus) and quality of life in our cities and communities. These collective decision making capabilities are undermined by a strange combination of diminishing (or extinct) local print media, especially local newspapers, and by its obverse, a plethora of information and communication opportunities that are scattered across numerous disparate and decentralized websites and resources (e.g., webpages, RSS feeds, social network software, email, listservs, podcasts, tweets). To address this problem, a number of news aggregators have emerged that capture local content from dispersed sites. To facilitate civic engagement, these sites also need to support social interaction and information exchange. In this paper we review the state of the art in local news aggregation in the U.S. and their support for social affordances (social trust, networks and interaction) that are essential to civic participation. We present a system we call the Virtual Town Square (VTS) that we have developed for local news aggregation that supports social affordances. We summarize briefly the design strategies and techniques (e.g., algorithms) we used to cluster topics and user generated content derived from existing local sources. This system should lead to a replicable model for other U.S. communities.     

Cultured Technology: The Internet and Religious Fundamentalism

In this article we identify four principal dimensions of religious fundamentalism as they interact with the Internet: hierarchy, patriarchy, discipline, and seclusion. We also develop the concept of cultured technology, and analyze the ways communities reshape a technology and make it a part of their culture, while at the same time changing their customary ways of life and unwritten laws to adapt to it. Later, we give examples for our theoretical framework through an empirical examination of ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in Israel. Our empirical study is based on a data set of 686,192 users and 60,346 virtual communities. The results show the complexity of interactions between religious fundamentalism and the Internet, and invite further discussions of cultured technology as a means to understand how the Internet has been culturally constructed, modified, and adapted to the needs of fundamentalist communities and how they in turn have been affected by it.