Spartan Daily, April 22, 2020

Volume 154, Issue 36https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartan_daily_2020/1035/thumbnail.jp

Sports mega-events – three sites of contemporary political contestation

This article discusses the contemporary politics of sports mega-events, involving the Olympic Games and Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Men’s Football World Cup Finals as well as other lower ‘order’ sports megas, taking two main forms: the promotional and the protest. There is a politics in, and a politics of, sports mega-events. The former focuses on the internal politics of the organizing bodies, such as the International Olympic Committee and FIFA. This form of politics has been written about elsewhere, and hence, there is no detailed discussion in this article about it. Instead this article offers a brief discussion of the range and number of sports mega-events since 2000, an assessment of the contemporary politics of sports mega-events, a focus on three main sites of political contestation – rights, legacy and labour, and finally, it offers conclusions about research into the politics of sports mega-events

Assessing context-based learning: Not only rigorous but also relevant

Economic factors are driving significant change in higher education. There is increasing responsiveness to market demand for vocational courses and a growing appreciation of the importance of procedural (tacit) knowledge to service the needs of the Knowledge Economy; the skills in demand are information analysis, collaborative working and 'just-in-time learning'. New pedagogical methods go some way to accommodate these skills, situating learning in context and employing information and communications technology to present realistic simulations and facilitate collaborative exchange. However, what have so far proved resistant to change are the practices of assessment. This paper endorses the case for a scholarship of assessment and proposes the development of technology-supported tools and techniques to assess context-based learning. It also recommends a fundamental rethink of the norm-referenced and summative assessment of propositional knowledge as the principal criterion for student success in universities

A manifesto for the creative economy

The UK\u27s creative economy is one of its great national strengths, historically deeply rooted and accounting for around one-tenth of the whole economy. It provides jobs for 2.5 million people – more than in financial services, advanced manufacturing or construction – and in recent years, this creative workforce has grown four times faster than the workforce as a whole. But behind this success lies much disruption and business uncertainty, associated with digital technologies. Previously profitable business models have been swept away, young companies from outside the UK have dominated new internet markets, and some UK creative businesses have struggled to compete. UK policymakers too have failed to keep pace with developments in North America and parts of Asia. But it is not too late to refresh tired policies. This manifesto sets out our 10-point plan to bolster one of the UK\u27s fastest growing sectors

Smartphones

Many of the research approaches to smartphones actually regard them as more or less transparent points of access to other kinds of communication experiences. That is, rather than considering the smartphone as something in itself, the researchers look at how individuals use the smartphone for their communicative purposes, whether these be talking, surfing the web, using on-line data access for off-site data sources, downloading or uploading materials, or any kind of interaction with social media. They focus not so much on the smartphone itself but on the activities that people engage in with their smartphones

Education for the Third Industrial Revolution

At the risk of sounding like a crass economist, I want to assert at the outset that one major purpose of the K-12 educational system is “vocational” in the broad sense. Specifically, the K-12 system is a mechanism for preparing cadres of 18-year-olds (many of whom will get some higher education first) to perform the tasks needed and remunerated by the U.S. job market (or of being easily trained to do so). To be sure, this narrowly economic purpose of mass public education is not the only reason to educate America’s youth; an educated citizenry presumably has other social benefits as well. But I believe it is an important purpose and, in any case, it is the perspective that guides this essay. Any reader who does not accept this initial premise can stop reading right now. My second, and much more controversial, premise is that the needs of the U.S. economy are changing (that’s not the controversial part) in ways that are at least somewhat predictable (that is the controversial part). To be sure, I am not foolish enough to believe that we can predict in detail the mix of jobs that will be available in the United States in, say, 2028 or 2038 and then fine-tune the educational system to meet those demands. But I think at least two broad trends are clearly foreseeable.

Next Generation Learning

Describes the foundation's investments in utilizing technology to develop innovative learning models and personalized educational pathways to help low-income and minority high school students graduate ready for college and obtain postsecondary degrees