The case for new academic workspaces

Executive summary: This report draws upon the combined efforts of a number of estates professionals, architects, academics, designers, and senior managers involved in the planning of new university buildings for the 21st century. Across these perspectives, all would agree – although perhaps for different reasons - that this planning is difficult and that a number of particular considerations apply in the design of academic workspaces. Despite these difficulties, they will also agree that when this planning goes well, ‘good’ buildings are truly transformational – for both the university as a whole and the people who work and study in them. The value of well-designed buildings goes far beyond their material costs, and endures long after those costs have been forgotten ..

Identity, environment and mental wellbeing in the veterinary profession

Mental health and career dissatisfaction are of increasing concern to the veterinary profession. The influence of identity on the psychological wellbeing of veterinarians has not been widely explored. Twelve recent veterinary graduates were enrolled in a private social media discussion group, and their identities investigated through narrative inquiry: a methodology which enables identity priorities to be extrapolated from stories of experience. Two distinct variants of the veterinary identity were identified: an academic, ‘diagnosis-focused’ identity, which prioritised definitive diagnosis and best-evidence treatment; and a broader ‘challenge-focused’ identity, where priorities additionally included engaging with the client, challenging environment or veterinary business. Contextual challenges (such as a client with limited finances or difficult interpersonal interactions) were seen as a source of frustration for those with a diagnosis-focused identity, as they obstructed the realisation of identity goals. Overcoming these challenges provided satisfaction to those with a challenge-focused identity. The employment environment of the graduates (general veterinary practice) provided more opportunities for those with a challenge-focused identity to realise identity goals, and more markers of emotional wellbeing were apparent in their stories. Markers of poor emotional health were evident in the stories of those with a diagnosis-focused identity

Hearts-on Approach to Educational Leadership

Christian educational leaders come equipped with an arsenal of skills, talents, and beliefs rooted in their faith. The synthesis of faith in their daily lives or “hearts-on” approach provides them a solid foundation. Communication is the most important skill for an effective leader. This article provides an overview of the critical elements of communication and their potential impact upon educational leadership. Several communication styles and strategies are discussed and clarified by biblically-inspired directives

Toward a Library Renaissance

For centuries, librarians have tried to safeguard information, sometimes in the face of destruction. Think of the great Library of Alexandria, the burning of which symbolizes the irretrievable loss of knowledge. Think also of Umberto Eco\u27s novel, The Name of the Rose, and the (fictitious) 14th-century story about the search for a lost volume of Aristotle that no one is allowed to read—but yet must be preserved—because it might reveal that Jesus could and did laugh, contrary to the death-obsessed zeitgeist of the time. Fast-forward to the age of the internet, when some fear libraries are again being destroyed and many ask: Who wants libraries when you have Google? This is not an easy question to address but one need not yield to pessimism. This paper argues that identifiable trends direct to a promising future: in light of these, one should be able to circumscribe plausible scenarios. Approaches to strategic planning that count on ownership should make a big difference and point to desirable skills for librarians. If they also invest in resilience and give unequivocal attention to branding, libraries can enjoy a renaissance

Disruptive Technology: Approaches to Escape a Discontinuous Environment

Disruptive technologies have erased and continue to extinct previously successful industries. Scholars’ studies consider ICT as a major cause for various industries, as, e.g., analogue photography, typewriters, VHS-cassettes and so on. They have become obsolete as its effect. Despite the creation of new industries at the same time, the environment for old industries results frequently in obsolescence. Especially, as research tends to hold, impact on organisations increases, when new technologies effectuate an additional shift in consumer behaviour. Opportunities for established firms become likely discontinuous then. The replication industry of optical discs is a specific industry sector within the wider Home Entertain-ment Industry manufacturing the present dominant design of the physical mass product, DVD and CD. However, ICT-based dematerialised, virtual products threaten the replication industry’s future, which may become obsolete, since more and more consumers adopt virtual downloads as their preference. This paper studies the approaches of selected industry’s incumbents to be innovative themselves to escape their emergent disruptive environment. Based on primary and secondary research, it addresses their adopted opportunities of accessing new growth paths through extended technology management and the development of a future-oriented direction by additional technologies and augmented services to escape the environment of decline and exit. The purpose of the underlying long-term research is to study, how do replicators (as an example for declining industries) respond to the threat of disruptive innovation and whether their (strategic) behaviour may serve as a model for other industries facing similar scenarios. This research is undertaken qualitatively using a single case study from which excerpts are presented. The present findings provide evidence that after a long time of reluctance, replicators have started to develop further resources and capacities to identify new and additional ways supporting them in their struggle for survival. But these findings show as well a pattern that approaches to future orientation may not be sufficient, since 1. They do not resolve the dilemma of competing with products and services committed to the physical place against a shifting consumer behaviour pattern addressing the virtual space. 2. Constraints, like e.g., staff, physical facilities, skills and path-dependent reasons further marginal, or in Abernathy et al.s’ understanding regular innovation or re-engineering fighting against radical innovation by both, technological impact and market linkages (1983, 1984). 3. The established customer-supplier relationships may be of disadvantage, since hindering replicators to have direct access to the point of consumption. These indicators suggest that disruptive innovation will be stronger in the end and many present efforts may be in vain

Towards leadership for school cultures associated with good academic performance in South African township secondary schools: the ‘power’ of organic emergence, diversity and service

The South African government has over the past fourteen years been introducing numerous efforts aimed at improving the academic performance of schools who have been struggling in this regard for some time now. However, these efforts are not having the desired effect. Indications are that this may be due to their power-coercive and rational-empirical underpinnings. Such leanings ignore findings that have been been pointing to normative reeducative underpinnings as being more foundational for bringing about ,and/ or maintaining, change than is the case with the other two frameworks (see, McLaughlin, 1993, for example). Thus, the purpose of this article is to contribute towards a better understanding of school leadership that is related to school cultures that are associated with good academic performance in the stated context. This is informed by findings in an ethnographic study in which I explored the relationship between academic performance, school culture and leadership in two ‘African’ township secondary schools of varying academic performance. One of the major findings in this study was that school cultures that, in this context, have the potential of enabling participation in activities that are associated with good academic performance are those that are communal in nature but embrace ‘societal’ negotiations for their common understandings. In turn, the type of leadership that was concluded as being linked to such school cultures was that which emerges organically from within the African township secondary schools. The power of such emergence was found to be in the related diversity and service

Illuminating the possibilities for social learning in the management of Scotland’s water

Our research explores the context of water management in Scotland as it existed in late 2003. We took as a key question: Is the Scottish policy context conducive to the emergence of “social learning” as a purposeful policy option in the future management of water, and in the implementation of the European Water Framework Directive in particular? Data generated by several means, including semistructured interviews with key stakeholders, tested the explanatory potential of a SLIM (Social Learning for the Integrated Management and sustainable use of water) heuristic concerned with how changes in understanding and practices can transform situations to produce social learning. Our research demonstrates how the historical context, including initial starting conditions; conducive institutions, especially political devolution, and policies; facilitation; building stakeholding; and the use of learning processes together can create the possibilities for social learning. The processes that went on through the development of the Scottish Water Bill exemplify how social learning as concerted action emerged, but it did not do so from any overall purposeful design. A major challenge is to create purposefully the conditions for social learning as a deliberate policy or governance mechanism

NEXUS/Physics: An interdisciplinary repurposing of physics for biologists

In response to increasing calls for the reform of the undergraduate science curriculum for life science majors and pre-medical students (Bio2010, Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians, Vision & Change), an interdisciplinary team has created NEXUS/Physics: a repurposing of an introductory physics curriculum for the life sciences. The curriculum interacts strongly and supportively with introductory biology and chemistry courses taken by life sciences students, with the goal of helping students build general, multi-discipline scientific competencies. In order to do this, our two-semester NEXUS/Physics course sequence is positioned as a second year course so students will have had some exposure to basic concepts in biology and chemistry. NEXUS/Physics stresses interdisciplinary examples and the content differs markedly from traditional introductory physics to facilitate this. It extends the discussion of energy to include interatomic potentials and chemical reactions, the discussion of thermodynamics to include enthalpy and Gibbs free energy, and includes a serious discussion of random vs. coherent motion including diffusion. The development of instructional materials is coordinated with careful education research. Both the new content and the results of the research are described in a series of papers for which this paper serves as an overview and context.Comment: 12 page