London Re‐cut: Reclaiming History through the Co‐curated Remixing of Film

Abstract Film archives offer unique opportunities for co‐curation between collections‐based institutions and members of the public. By making available source materials and the tools to manipulate them, institutions can work with the public to develop new interpretations of their collections as well as to tap into the remixing and sharing cultures of social and digital media. Digital co‐curation projects can develop relationships with audiences that many institutions find difficult to engage, developing alternative narratives and reclaimed histories. This paper describes the evolution of an approach to co‐curation and the tools and strategies needed to engage users. It focuses on London Re‐Cut, a project to remix London’s film history, drawing on material from 11 film archives across the city. Projects such as London Recut suggest that audiences have both the enthusiasm and the skills to open up this radical “remix” approach to interpretation.     

The school effectiveness movement: origins,shortcomings and future possibilities

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that the school effectiveness/school improvement movement has provided an antidote to the pessimism and fatalism of the 1970s. However, it is deficient in four important respects: (1) it places too much emphasis on the notion of progressive school management as the dynamic of change; (2) it fails to take full account of the characteristics of the education system as a whole; (3) it shows little regard for issues of social class; (4) it has little to say about issues of curriculum content and pedagogy.     

基于班杜拉的交互决定论谈网络教学中的交互

网络教学是一种时新的教学形式，发展势头迅猛。但由于其自身的特征，导致教学交互成为制约教学质量的瓶颈，因此引发了对网络教学交互的研究。本文基于班杜拉的交互决定论提出了网络教学的交互要素、交互形式、交互模式，旨在更好地研究网络教学，提高教学绩效。     

The educational legacy of Francis Galton

This paper examines the claim, put forward by Roy Lowe over three decades ago, that members of the twentieth-century eugenics movement exerted a major, perhaps even decisive, influence on the structure of secondary schooling in England and Wales – and particularly with regard to the intellectual justification for fairly rigid tracking systems, whereby children were to be directed through separate school routes towards differing career outcomes and contrasting adult lifestyles. Can it, in fact, be argued that Sir Francis Galton and his disciples, and notably Cyril Burt, were directly or indirectly responsible for the nature of the divided system of secondary education that developed in England and Wales in the years following the Second World War?     

(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.     

The 'Moment of 1976' Revisited

This paper, which is a response to a previous one by Charles Batteson (1997) published in the Journal, challenges the view that James Callaghan's personal intervention in the politics of education in 1976 in making the Ruskin Speech was pivotal in shaping the subsequent direction of Labour' policies for school reform. The paper also queries the idea that the Ruskin Speech was the immediate harbinger of New Right education policies. Instead, it is suggested, the historical record points up that such policies gained ascendancy only some ten years later, the intervening period being dominated more by an acceptance of the educational consensus constructed by the Labour leadership in 1976–77.     

Book reviews

Mark Hukill, Ryoto Ono and Chandrasekhar Vallath (Eds.), Electronic Communication Convergence: Policy Challenges in Asia New Delhi: Sage, 2000.

Stuart Cunningham (Ed.), Floating Lives Oxford University Press, 1996

Anura Goonasekera and Duncan Holaday (Eds.), Asian Communication Handbook AMIC, 1998.

Shelton A. Gunaratne (Ed.), Handbook of the Media in Asia Sage, 2000