Lighting the Shroud of Turin for Exhibition in 2015

ABSTRACT

Lighting a cultural heritage artifact requires balancing visual perception with preventive conservation, by providing the best lighting (in terms of spectral distribution and quantity) to enable the viewer to appreciate details and color, while limiting photo-induced degradation. The paper outlines the methodology applied by a multi-disciplinary team while lighting the Shroud of Turin at its last public exhibition in 2015. The methodology considered the special requirements of the Shroud, including exposure to ultraviolet light, while providing appropriate display conditions that would meet audience expectations. The desired appearance (readability of the body image and color) was defined with the help of Shroud researchers and confirmed by subjective tests, while appropriate light levels for preservation were set in agreement with standard requirements and using knowledge of the degradation of linen in visible and UV light. The installation provided a controlled environment and a managed visitor route to the Shroud, assuring excellent perception of both details and color, with the lowest illuminance level about 15?lx.     

Overcoming Obstacles to Preventive Conservation Projects in Italy: With a Case Study of the Savoy Carriage Collection of the Presidency of the Republic

ABSTRACT

Working on preventive conservation in Italy is difficult but not impossible. After small successes and setbacks convincing museums to adopt elements of preventive conservation in the 1990s, the first author (Rossi Doria) was contracted for 15 years to preserve the historic carriages and associated objects of the Presidency of the Republic of Italy. This required patience to overcome or circumvent obstacles such as an inflexible bureaucracy and the absence of any formal recognition of preventive conservation within the educational and contractual systems for heritage conservation. The key factors in his success were the support of the curators, the financial and planning autonomy of the Presidency, and the obvious need for conservation and preservation of these elegant and complex objects. The program began in 2001 with the recovery of the forgotten collection from inappropriate storage in several locations. The entire collection was surveyed and recorded, not only the carriages but also thousands of harnesses, saddles, clothing, fabrics, weapons and memorabilia. Multiple preventive and interventive actions were undertaken, such as pest eradication for all sensitive materials, environmental surveys, and everyday maintenance, as well as complex treatments for the ornate carriages. Analysis by country of published articles on preventive conservation and of IIC membership both confirm that the topic is not as well established in Italy as in many other countries. Some reasons and solutions are proposed.     

In pursuit of becoming a senior coach: the learning culture for Australian Football League coaches

Background and Purpose: Given the turbulent and highly contested environment in which professional coaches work, a prime concern to coach developers is how coaches learn their craft. Understanding the learning and development of senior coaches (SCs) and assistant coaches (ACs) in the Australian Football League (AFL – the peak organisation for Australian Rules Football) is important to better develop the next generation of performance coaches. Hence the focus of this research was to examine the learning of SC and AC in the AFL. Fundamental to this research was an understanding that the AFL and each club within the league be regarded as learning organisations and workplaces with their own learning cultures where learning takes place. The purpose of this paper was to examine the learning culture for AFL coaches.

Method: Five SCs, 6 ACs, and 5 administrators (4 of whom were former coaches) at 11 of the 16 AFL clubs were recruited for the research project. First, demographic data were collected for each participant (e.g. age, playing and coaching experience, development and coach development activities). Second, all participants were involved in one semi-structured interview of between 45 and 90 minutes duration. An interpretative (hierarchical content) analysis of the interview data was conducted to identify key emergent themes.

Results: Learning was central to AFL coaches becoming a SC. Nevertheless, coaches reported a sense of isolation and a lack of support in developing their craft within their particular learning culture. These coaches developed a unique dynamic social network (DSN) that involved episodic contact with a number of respected confidantes often from diverse fields (used here in the Bourdieuian sense) in developing their coaching craft. Although there were some opportunities in their workplace, much of their learning was unmediated by others, underscoring the importance of their agentic engagement in limited workplace affordances.

Conclusion: The variety of people accessed for the purposes of learning (often beyond the immediate workplace) and the long time taken to establish networks of supporters meant that a new way of describing the social networks of AFL coaches was needed; DSN. However, despite the acknowledged utility of learning from others, all coaches reported some sense of isolation in their learning. The sense of isolation brought about by professional volatility in high-performance Australian Football offers an alternative view on Hodkinson, Biesta and James' attempt in overcoming dualisms in learning.     

Zum Verlauf des Zweitspracherwerbs im Migrationskontext

Zusammenfassung Die Entwicklung der mündlichen und schriftlichen Kenntnisse in Deutsch und der Sprache des Herkunftslandes bei Angeh?rigen der ersten und zweiten Einwanderergeneration aus den Gastarbeiter-Anwerbel?ndern, bei Aussiedlern und neuen Zuwanderergruppen wird beschrieben und Erkl?rungsfaktoren für Unterschiede werden mit Hilfe bivariater und multivariater Verfahren untersucht. Die Deutschkenntnisse der ersten Generation steigen zwischen 1984 und 2001 kaum an, wohingegen Aussiedler und Zuwanderer in kurzer Zeit relativ gute Fortschritte aufweisen. Die meisten Befragten sind bilingual. Defizite bei Deutschkenntnissen variieren nach Herkunftsland. Der Zweitspracherwerb erfolgt im Generationenverlauf, d.h. in Deutschland geborene Personen mit Migrationshintergrund haben in der Regel bessere Deutschkenntnisse als die erste Generation. Die Aufenthaltsdauer hat per se keinen Einfluss auf den Spracherwerb, ebenso wie das Geschlecht, w?hrend das Einwanderungsalter und die Schulbildung entscheidende Faktoren sind. Personen mit niedrigem Einwanderungsalter, Personen, die eine weiterführende Schule im Herkunftsland oder eine h?here Schule in Deutschland abgeschlossen haben, haben eine h?here relative Chance, gute mündliche und schriftliche Deutschkenntnisse zu erwerben.      

Grading students' programming and soft skills with open badges: A case study

Well-developed programming (technical) skills are very important for software engineers, information systems engineers and programmers in general. However, they must also possess relevant personal skills (soft skills) to be successful at the workplace (eg, collaboration, solving real-world problems and communication). The latter, however, are rarely assessed and acknowledged in regular software engineering courses. This paper describes the results of a small case study involving an extracurricular Java programming course in which, in addition to knowledge and skills in relevant technologies, students' soft skills were also assessed. As part of the assessment, students have been awarded Open Badges. The study was exploratory in nature, aimed at examining Open Badges as a motivational mechanism, students' engagement in attaining soft skills and students' perception of soft skills and Open Badges. The results suggest that Open Badges may not be so effective in motivating students to complete the assignments nor attend the course, although students' perception of Open Badges is generally positive. Soft skills were generally perceived as important as hard skills. Students' engagement in attaining soft skills could be affected by assignment announcement time and its level of difficulty.     

Teachers’ voice,power and agency: (un)professionalisation of the early years workforce

This article examines Slovak early years teachers’ concerns with conceptions of teacher professionalism. It suggests that there is a mismatch between understandings of professionalism, policy aspirations and the attitudes of teachers to their own professionalism, and that this mismatch fuels early years teachers’ sense of agency. These tensions between conceptions of professionalism, teaching practice and actual working conditions have led to a ground-up approach to self-governance within the early years teacher workforce. We analyse teachers’ discussions in an early years online forum of 12,500 members that was started and remains governed by the teachers themselves. It represents in itself a very particular attitude and response to the need to determine what it means to be a professional teacher. This analysis examines intersections of policy, quality and professionalism, and highlights considerations of power and voice, and the complexities of uncertainty and change. The article concludes with the suggestion that teacher attitudes, power and agency are impacted in unpredictable ways by the policy landscape.     

Group size and organisational conditions for children’s learning in preschool: a teacher perspective

Background:?There is a limited amount of research about group size in preschool, and how it impacts on teachers’ working conditions and their ability to support children’s learning and knowledge development in line with curriculum intentions.

Purpose:?From a perspective on quality, this article examines the organisational conditions for children’s learning in preschool in relation to group size. The questions at issue are: how do teachers explain how they organise the child group and the learning environment in preschool, and why?

Sample:?The sample consists of 12 preschools from different parts of Sweden. The preschools selected for the study are stratified in order to represent small and large group sizes in Swedish preschools as defined by the Swedish National Agency for Education. The sample contains both urban and rural regions and represents districts that differ geographically, demographically, ethnically, and which include varied socioeconomic structures. The 12 preschools had children in three age groupings: 1–3, 3–5 or 1–5. The number of children in the participating preschools ranged from 12 children to 45 children, with seven of the preschools having more than 30 children in their groups.

Design and method:?The article is based on interactionist perspectives, Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, a critical ecology of the early childhood profession, theories of children’s learning, and four dimensions of pedagogical quality. Together, these theoretical perspectives contribute to an understanding of the relationships between policy issues, educational goals, group size and teachers’ competence in organising and creating conditions for children’s learning. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with two teachers from each of the 12 preschools. The interviews lasted between 40–60 minutes and were recorded and transcribed verbatim. The analytical process was conducted in three steps and can be described as an analytical process of abduction. The four dimensions of pedagogical quality were used as analytical lenses to discern and understand critical aspects related to the teachers’ understanding of group size.

Result: Irrespective of group size, most of the children participate in different group constellations throughout the day, some organised by the teachers and some by the children themselves. Teachers’ competence to organise the children in such ways that good conditions for learning were created, differed between preschools, and depended on the teachers’ approach, which can be described as either intentional or unintentional learning.

Conclusion: Teachers’ organisational approaches influence the quality of the preschool and conditions for children’s learning in distinct ways.     

The status of research on women and communication

The purpose of this essay is to survey and summarize the research on women, gender, and sex differences that has been published in speech communication journals. Five categories of research emerged from this survey: historical treatments of women, sex differences, images of women in the media, education and pedagogy, and surveys and integrative works. While future research is needed to fill in the gaps made evident by this survey of literature, perhaps more important is to begin to question and investigate the assumptions underlying current research about women.