New Information Technologies in Special Education

Abstract

The aim of this study is to examine possible applications of new information technologies (NIT) in special education within different educational, socio‐economic and socio‐cultural contexts and, in particular, the possibilities of transference of these applications from the industrialised nations to the developing countries. The study also contains references to positive and negative results of the use of NIT in the special education of children, youth and adults.     

ADAPT<Superscript>IT</Superscript>: Tools for training design and evaluation

This article describes a set of computerized tools that support the design and evaluation of competency-based training programs. The training of complex skills such as air traffic control and process control requires a competency-based approach that focuses on the integration and coordination of constituent skills and transfer of learning. At the heart of the training are authentic whole-task practice situations. The instructional design tools are based on van Merriënboer's 4C/ID^* methodology (1997). The article describes a training design tool (Core) that supports the analysis and design for competency-based training programs and an evaluation tool (Eval) that supports the subsequent revision of this training design.     

Sharing teacher knowledge at scale: teacher inquiry,learning design and the representation of teachers’ practice

Sharing teachers’ professional knowledge remains challenging. Teachers’ development often remains ad hoc or local, and attempts to scale this up have proved problematic. To address this, research in areas such as ‘learning design’ has explored the use of formal representations of practice. This proposes that educational practice can be improved by documenting, sharing and building on what teachers already do. Whilst this has led to some successes, it has not resulted in the widespread transformation of practice. This paper reviews the literature about sharing teacher knowledge. The challenges of scaling up development are then considered in relation to two theories that help explain the challenges: Communities of Practice and Sociomateriality. This analysis is illustrated through case studies in Norway and the UK. These show that teachers already create and share artefacts that represent their pedagogic knowledge. However, they found formal representations, such as learning designs, difficult to work with. The paper concludes that scaling up teacher development using abstract formalisms is unlikely to succeed. Instead, teachers value stories and the materials they already create in their day-to-day practice. It is this intermediate level of representation, between direct experience and formal abstraction, that offers the most promise for sharing practice.     

The Folk High School: A Contemporary Educational Pathway for Swedish Parliamentarians?

The aim of this study is to explore the contemporary role of the folk high school as an educational pathway for Swedish MPs. Statistics from the folk high school register at Statistics Sweden are analysed. In summary, there are still quite a large number of former folk high school participants in the Swedish parliament (27%, 2014). The MPs’ folk high school participation mainly took the form of short courses. Over time, the folk high schools have increasingly come to be used by members of parties on the left of the political spectrum. The folk high schools are commonly used as meeting places during the MPs’ political career, and thus not only as an educational pathway to power, as emphasised in earlier research.     

Thinking about the future because of the past: young children's knowledge about the causes of worry and preventative decisions

Two studies investigated 3- to 6-year-olds' and adults' (N= 128) knowledge about emotions and behaviors caused by thinking about the future because of the past. Participants listened to stories featuring characters that experienced negative events, and then, many days later, felt worried or changed their behaviors upon seeing an entity associated with the prior harm. Results revealed a significant increase between 3 and 5 years in the frequency that participants explained characters' reactions as caused by anticipating the reoccurrence of a negative past event. Across age, females more often marked future events as uncertain, as well as predicted that people in ambiguous risk situations would feel worried due to past-to-future connections.     

Why do not more prisoners participate in adult education? An analysis of barriers to education in Norwegian prisons

International Review of Education - From a lifelong learning perspective, education during incarceration is crucial for prisoners’ rehabilitation. This article describes the authors’...     

Enacting Cultural Identities in Conversation: Managing Collaboration in Two Nonprofit Organizations

As they conduct the practical work of collaborating during meetings, nonprofit stakeholders construct, negotiate, and manage identities. In this article we use membership categorization analysis to explore how meeting participants avow and ascribe cultural identities during collaborative meetings in two nonprofit organizations. Examination of identification practices, including employing labels for ethnic categories and implicating cultural identities through category-relevant predicates—which are part of the practical work of collaborating in nonprofit organizations—can serve as an aid to understanding how stakeholders negotiate interorganizational collaboration in social interaction.     

From a Means to an End: Patenting in the 1999 Danish ‘Act on Inventions’ and its Effect on Research Practice

This paper examines the potential pitfalls for academic research associated with goal displacements in the implementation of goals and indicators of research commercialization. We ask why patenting has come to serve as the key policy indicator of innovative capacity and what consequences this has for the organization of academic research. To address these questions, the paper presents a case study from Denmark on, firstly, why and how the 1999 Danish ‘Act on Inventions’ introduced patenting as a central instrument to Danish science policy and, secondly, the effects the Act has had on Danish university organization and research practices. We trace why and how commercialization was introduced as an important objective in Danish science policy since the 1980s. The increased focus on patents is explained as an isomorphic adjustment to an international ‘science policy field,’ manifested in particular through OECD statistics, where patenting has come to serve as a key metric in international rankings. In a second step, we examine what effects the patenting requirements have had on organization and research practice at a Danish university. We show that in practice ‘number of patents’ changed from serving as an indicator of innovative capacity to being a policy goal in itself, thus in effect producing a goal displacement that is potentially damaging for both academic research and innovation capacity of the surrounding society. As a consequence of this goal displacement, active scientists now increasingly engage in patenting primarily as a means to fulfill organizational targets and to increase their ‘fundability,’ rather than to promote commercial applications of their research. In conclusion, we discuss how these unfulfilled policy ambitions have led to a retrospective redefinition of policy goals rather than an adjustment of the actual policy tools.