Letter from the Special Issue Editor

Editorial work for DEBULL on a special issue on data management on Storage Class Memory (SCM) technologies

Open and distance learning staff development : an impact evaluation of a southern African collaborative programme.

This study is a qualitative evaluation of the impact of the Certificate for Distance Education Practitioners, a collaborative staff development programme for open and distance learning practitioners in the five southern African countries of Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland. It aims to inform the stakeholders of this programme on its impact and to add to the limited research on open and distance learning in Africa. It is the first southern African systematic evaluation of the impact of a staff development collaboration programme delivered through open and distance learning methods. The study evaluates the impact of the programme on the 1997 - 2000 learners and on the organisations where these learners worked. Parlett and Hamilton’s (1975) illuminative evaluation methods were combined with McAnany’s (1975) five criteria impact evaluation model to produce an expanded and innovative design of programme impact evaluation. Postal questionnaires and interviews provided biographical data and direct views of the programme’s participants. Progressive focusing illuminated the key issues emerging from the programme’s delivery and McAnany’s (1975) evaluation criteria were used to analyse and interpret the programme’s impact. One of the key findings from this study is that the conceptions informing the delivery of the Certificate for Distance Education Practitioners are based on notions of openness, flexibility, learner-centredness and collaboration and that the programme’s implementation endeavoured, in varying degrees, to match these notions. The second finding is that the participants regarded the programme highly as a sound introduction to open and distance learning approaches and practices and felt it contributed to the application of learner-centred ideas in their organisations. However, the programme’s low enrolment numbers and progressively declining throughput rates contradicted this high regard and did not match the providers’ original projections. Lack of resources impacted negatively on participants’ application of open and distance learning approaches while organisations’ implementation of new policies and mergers created job insecurity for some participants. As in Perraton and Lentell (2004) other key issues emerging from this study include the absence of enabling staff development policies, lack of recognition, currency and/or reward after completion of the programme, limited marketing, level and national focus of the programme, and management and administration issues. These findings suggest that it is possible to deliver a regional collaboration staff development programme through open and distance methods but that the issues raised in this study need to be addressed to make such programmes sustainable, effective and financially viable

Vol. VI, Tab 38 - Ex. 32 - Language Learning in the United States of America

Exhibits from the un-sealed joint appendix for Rosetta Stone Ltd., v. Google Inc., No. 10-2007, on appeal to the 4th Circuit. Issue presented: Under the Lanham Act, does the use of trademarked terms in keyword advertising result in infringement when there is evidence of actual confusion

Information Outlook, March 1999

Volume 3, Issue 3https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_1999/1002/thumbnail.jp

The structure of social disparities in education : gender and wealth

Using internationally comparable household data sets (Demographic and Health Surveys), the author investigates how gender and wealth interact to generate within country inequalities in educational enrollment and attainment. He carries out multivariate analysis to assess the partial relationship between educational outcomes and gender, wealth, household characteristics (including level of education of adults, in the households), and community characteristics (including the presence of schools in the community). He finds that: 1) women are at a great educational disadvantage in countries in South Asia and North, Western, and Central Africa. 2) Gender gaps are large in a subset of countries, but wealth gaps are large in almost all of the countries studied. Moreover, in some countries where there is a heavy female disadvantage in enrollment (Egypt, India, Morocco, Niger, and Pakistan), wealth interacts with gender to exacerbate the gap in the educational outcomes. In India, for example, where there is a 2.5 percentage point difference between male and female enrollment for children from the richest households, the difference is 34 percentage points for children from the poorest households. 3) The education level of adults in the household has a significant impact on the enrollment of children in all the countries studied, even after controlling for wealth. The effect of the educational level of adult female is larger than that of the education level of adult males in some, but not all, of the countries studied. 4) The presence of a primary and a secondary school in the community has a significant relationship with enrollment in some countries only (notably in Western and Central Africa). The relationship appears not to systematically differ by children's gender.Public Health Promotion,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Primary Education,Teaching and Learning,Early Childhood Development,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Primary Education,Teaching and Learning,Poverty Assessment,Early Childhood Development

Development Of Peptide Inhibitors Targeting Clostridium Difficile Toxins A/b And Characterizing The Regulatory Role Of A Putative Negative Regulator Tcdc In Clostridium Difficile Toxin Gene Expression

Clostridium difficile infections cause one of the most common and vital hospitalacquired diseases often associated with broad-spectrum antibiotic usage. TcdA and TcdB are the key virulence factors involved in major patho-physiology. While standard antibiotics provide some respite, due to the high relapse rates and the emergence of more severe disease presentations, antibiotics alone have often proven to be suboptimal. Therefore there is a desperate need to develop an effective non-antimicrobial therapeutics. Part of this work focuses on identification and further characterization of peptide therapeutic that target the major virulence factor TcdA/TcdB. Towards development of mechanistic-based anti-toxin agent, phage display was used to identify peptides that bind to the catalytic domain of C. difficile Toxin A. Characterization of the binding and inhibitory activity revealed that the lack of parent peptide ability to inhibit the cells in vivo. Further derivatization of above parent peptides in to irreversible binders lead to protects cells in vivo. Mass spectroscopy approaches revealed the peptide inhibition was mainly due to cross-linking of modified peptide in to key catalytic residues in active site. While there are still several steps required to further explore in terms of the stability of these compounds, agents like these could be potentially used prophylactically 163 to avoid extensive cellular damage during treatment with broad spectrum antibiotics or in populations prone to CDI. The other area, focused on this thesis, is identification of the functional role of a negative regulator (TcdC) involved in toxin gene expression. In this work, we used a variety of biochemical and genetic approaches and characterized TcdC is not repressor instead acts as an Extra Cytoplasmic Class (ECF) anti-sigma factor and was able to propose a new mechanistic model regarding the regulatory role of TcdC. As well as here we have successfully developed GFP-based reporter system which has a potential to be an adaptable tool for investigating fine details on toxin genes tuning. Being able to adopt in host environment is vital for survival and propagation of a pathogenic bacteria. Thus, exploring the regulatory nodes on PaLoc gene expression can be lead to exploit potential therapeutic opportunities hidden within such systems

Modelling the dynamics of team situation awareness

For decades both industry and academia have been interested in situation awareness, from individual situation awareness to system situation awareness of dynamic collaborative systems. Several theories and definitions exist for situation awareness and although considerable research has been conducted in this domain no definitive consensus has been reached. Therefore, the purpose of the research in this thesis is not develop new theories or definitions, but to explore how situation awareness presents itself in teams and systems in terms of team cognition. The methods used in this thesis include simulating team tasks using agent-based modelling, analysing team knowledge using concept maps and analysing team processes using entropy. In order to remove the risk of intrusion on the tasks being explored, the communications of team members are recorded and used as the primary data for the analyses conducted. Visually presenting knowledge of agents using concept maps made it easier to understand how the information was stored and transferred throughout the teams. An interesting result showed that it was not important for all agents to have the same information when key decisions were made and that when information is not shared the team performed better and with greater accuracy than when there was a focus on information sharing. Visually presenting team processes using entropy and process distribution allowed for patterns of behaviour to be identified. Results show that while individuals within teams feel confident with the amount of knowledge they have they will focus on working independent up until the point they can no longer achieve results on their own, at that point the team shifts to teamworking. The differences between teamwork and taskwork are related to the theories of shared and distributed situation awareness, concluding that shifts in team processes represent shifts in the two types of situation awareness