New creative careers: the problems of progression and uncertainty

This chapter presents findings from research which we conducted with participants who were current and former art college students, practitioners in different areas of creative arts and design, and therefore workers in a relatively newly named part of the economy, the ‘creative industries’. Originally identified by New Labour as a significantly successful new sector, they have subsequently received considerable attention from policy-makers and also academic commentators, in the UK and elsewhere. The list of creative industries cited by New Labour (DCMS 2001) also corresponds closely to the subject areas and activities of many art college courses, indicating how these institutions function as a vocational training ground and entry point for the creative industries. In this chapter, we discuss special issues which our research raised in relation to creative working; the implications of our research findings for vocational learners themselves and for course providers, teachers and institutions; sources of advantage and disadvantage for learners, as indicated by our research, and some further implications for those aiming to assist and expand lifelong learning opportunities

Teaching new media composition studies in a lifelong learning context

Governmental proposals for lifelong learning, and the role of Information and Learning Technologies/Information Communication Technologies (ILT/ICT) in this, idealistically proclaim that ILT/ICT empowers learners. A number of important governmental funding initiatives have recently been extended to the development of ILT in further education, which provides a particularly appropriate environment for lifelong learning. Yet little emphasis is given to more problematic research findings that students may be ‘disarmed’ in the process of learning to use technology. In the current global shift towards new forms of multimedia literacy, it is important to recognize human diversity by carrying out research focusing on the actual problems students face in adapting to Web‐based technology as a new authoring medium. A case study into multimedia creative composition carried out with FE students in 1996–9 found that students tend to experience a problematic but potentially useful period of ‘creative mess’ when authoring in multimedia, and that ‘scaffolding’ strategies can be useful in overcoming this. Such strategies can empower students to derive benefits from multimedia composition if close attention is given to the setting up of the learning environment: a teachers’ model for supporting novice hypermedia authors in further education is proposed, to assist teachers to understand and support the learning processes students may undergo in dynamic composition using new media technology

Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications

Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

Designing Open and Distance Learning for Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: A toolkit for educators and planners

Everyone remembers a good teacher. Good teachers are the key to educational expansion and improvement. In many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, there is an urgent need to expand the number of primary and secondary teachers. In all African countries, there is an equally important need to improve the quality of teaching. To achieve this, it is clear that new approaches to teacher education are essential. Existing institutions of teacher education will continue to play an important role, but, alone, they will not meet the goals of Education for All (EFA) by 2015. It is fortunate that, just as the twin needs to improve the quantity and quality of teachers become imperative, so new forms of education and training are becoming available. The world is witnessing a revolution in information and communication technologies (ICTs), which can offer training and support of a type and at a cost hitherto impossible to consider, and thus, must be fully explored given the scale and urgency of demand. In doing so, however, it will be necessary to build on existing and well-tested strategies, including the best models of open and distance learning. This toolkit is the third in a series of recent publications by the Africa Region Human Development Department of the World Bank to share knowledge and experience on how distance education and ICTs can support education in Sub-Saharan Africa. It emphasizes the rigorous process by which new forms of distance-education programs for teacher education can be planned and implemented. The best models of established programs are considered along with the potential for incorporating, as the means become available, new modes of communication. Most forms of teacher education, particularly those concerned with qualification upgrading and ongoing professional development, will have to be based in schools. The authors demonstrate how school-based programs, appropriately resourced and supported, have the potential not only to raise significantly the number and quality of teachers, but also to improve classroom practice and school organization, generally. The guidance and advice, which is drawn from many years of experience in design and implementation, and embraces a range of case studies from across the region, will be of considerable value to those preparing new policies and programs of teacher education and to those seeking to improve existing programs

Adaptation of WASH Services Delivery to Climate Change and Other Sources of Risk and Uncertainty

This report urges WASH sector practitioners to take more seriously the threat of climate change and the consequences it could have on their work. By considering climate change within a risk and uncertainty framework, the field can use the multitude of approaches laid out here to adequately protect itself against a range of direct and indirect impacts. Eleven methods and tools for this specific type of risk management are described, including practical advice on how to implement them successfully

Patterns and trends in entrepreneurial network literature: 1993-2003

This paper reflects the increasing interest in entrepreneurial networking. Indeed Monsted (1995) suggests that networking is now a vogue concept in the entrepreneurship field. The popularity of the network theme has resulted in an increasing number of publications. Our study is an attempt to first quantify the growth in network research, as indicated by published papers. It then attempts to provide a guide to developments in network publications

In response to 'Celebrate citation: flipping the pedagogy of plagiarism in Qatar'

In her article (http://uobrep.openrepository.com/uobrep/handle/10547/335947) Molly McHarg makes several points that I agree with, particularly that for the majority of students the plagiarism is not deliberate but is due to a lack of understanding of how to reference correctly

A Process to Implement an Artificial Neural Network and Association Rules Techniques to Improve Asset Performance and Energy Efficiency

In this paper, we address the problem of asset performance monitoring, with the intention of both detecting any potential reliability problem and predicting any loss of energy consumption e ciency. This is an important concern for many industries and utilities with very intensive capitalization in very long-lasting assets. To overcome this problem, in this paper we propose an approach to combine an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) with Data Mining (DM) tools, specifically with Association Rule (AR) Mining. The combination of these two techniques can now be done using software which can handle large volumes of data (big data), but the process still needs to ensure that the required amount of data will be available during the assets’ life cycle and that its quality is acceptable. The combination of these two techniques in the proposed sequence di ers from previous works found in the literature, giving researchers new options to face the problem. Practical implementation of the proposed approach may lead to novel predictive maintenance models (emerging predictive analytics) that may detect with unprecedented precision any asset’s lack of performance and help manage assets’ O&M accordingly. The approach is illustrated using specific examples where asset performance monitoring is rather complex under normal operational conditions.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad DPI2015-70842-