Agency, pedagogy and e-learning in TAFE educational development

The study is a deconstructive autoethnographic examination of the ways in which various discourses of agency shape the pedagogy of educational developers supporting the use of e-learning in Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institutions

Towards the Private Provision of a Public Good: Exploring the role of Higher Education as an instrument of European cultural and science diplomacy with reference to Africa. EL-CSID Working Paper Issue 2018/17 • May 2018

The European Union’s (EU) universities and their provision of higher education (HE) to international students remains one of its most powerful, global cultural assets. They play an important and growing role in EU cultural and science diplomacy. This is due not only to the quality of EU HE but also to its role as a generator of export income and as a provider of a global public good—both of which are powerful indicators of prestige and international influence. Until now, the World Bank has been the leading supporter of HE in Africa, closely followed by the EU. The EU has developed a sophisticated and wide-ranging set of strategies to assist Africa in enhancing the quality and quantity of provision of its HE. These strategies are discussed in this study. The EU and its member states, through their interactions with Africa, have an established track record of supporting advancements in education. The 10th European Development Fund allocated €45 million to support the Nyerere African Union Scholarship Scheme for some 250 individuals per year and, since 2009, students and higher education institutions across the continent have benefited from the Erasmus Mundus Program. African higher education (HE) has recorded the highest growth rates of all the regions of the world since 2000. Universities in many African countries are experiencing a surge in their enrolments. Between 2000 and 2010, higher education enrolments more than doubled, increasing from 2.3 million to 5.2 million”1. But an 8% average enrolment rate (2014) across all sub-Saharan African nations is still much lower than the average of 20-40% for all other developing regions, including North Africa and the Middle East. Moreover, an ongoing brain drain and reduction in public financing for HE institutions in Africa continues to adversely impact quality. Resources have failed to match higher enrolment figures and public universities are under increasing pressure to deliver more with less. Currently, only one percent of total African GDP is spent on higher education

A gentle transition from Java programming to Web Services using XML-RPC

Exposing students to leading edge vocational areas of relevance such as Web Services can be difficult. We show a lightweight approach by embedding a key component of Web Services within a Level 3 BSc module in Distributed Computing. We present a ready to use collection of lecture slides and student activities based on XML-RPC. In addition we show that this material addresses the central topics in the context of web services as identified by Draganova (2003)

Fractured pedagogy: the design and implementation fault line in architectural knowledge - a conceptual and historical analysis

There appears to be a gap in architectural knowledge between design theory and implementation practice which is difficult to bridge in teaching, learning and work. As evidence of the existence of this gap two sources of data are contrasted: exhibition catalogues which convey what individual architects say to each other about their work, and official reports which convey what institutional representatives of the organised profession say about failures in the work of architects. These data sets are contradictory, reinforcing the possibility of a fault-line between design knowledge and implementation. The question then arises as to whether this tension in professional knowledge in the field of production is reflected in the pedagogisation of the knowledge, reinforced through its transmission. As the architectural curriculum in Commonwealth countries has a generic format, this generic curriculum is analysed next, in terms of Bernstein's concepts of classification/ framing, and integration I collection. The analysis is ambiguous, as both strong and weak criteria co-exist with dual coding, complicated by the horizontality and tacit nature of spatial design knowledge on the one hand, and the extent of regionalised knowledge on the other which recontextualises contradictory knowledge systems from sources in arts and sciences. Tacit implementation knowledge sits uncomfortably in this mix as a largely segmental horizontal discourse. To understand the default pattern in this pedagogy more clearly, the research then tracks back to the initial definition of the knowledge system at the time of the formation of the modern profession. In this analysis Bernstein's pedagogic device is used as the framework for locating and unraveling the historic data in terms of the production and recontextualisation of knowledge, distributive rules and power relations between agents. The history maps neatly onto this theoretical model, confirming in-built tensions in the knowledge system which marginalise knowledge of implementation and which construct a professional consciousness centered around spatial imagination primarily and technical innovation secondarily. The research is thus an initial attempt at a historical analysis of a region of professional knowledge

Embedding sustainability through systems thinking in practice: some experiences from the Open University

One initiative that has emerged during the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) through the work of the Open University Systems group has been its postgraduate programme in Systems Thinking and Practice (STiP). Built on some forty years’ experience of systems teaching and research at the Open University (OU), this open learning, distance taught programme is designed to develop students’ abilities to tackle complex messy situations, to provide skills to think more holistically and to work more collaboratively to avoid systemic failures. This paper critically reviews the trajectory of this programme –its past, present and future. It discusses the STiP programme’s many boundaries with other programmes and across sectors. Challenges of epistemology, ethics and purpose are explored, in relation to education for sustainability. The programme’s many and varied teaching and learning processes are explicated. The pedagogy of the STiP programme is grounded in a diverse range of students’ experiences and needs that by no means all focus explicitly, or primarily, on sustainability or sustainable development. Many OU students study part-time alongside their other commitments, both work and community-based. STiP students are all interested in systems and learning. But what STiP is a part of for them varies considerably. Students come mainly from the UK and rest of Europe. Many of their interactions are online through several different fora. A diverse, active and critical OU STiP alumni community has developed, initiated by the early graduates of the programme. Academics responsible for the programme also participate in this community’s deliberations, at the invitation of student alumni. In this paper, the authors build on their various experiences of the STiP programme and re-explore its contexts and boundaries from an ESD point of view. They use some of the systems heuristics that they teach, to critically reflect on both what is being achieved through this programme in relation to education for sustainability and what they and some of their past students and associate lecturers think ought to be occurring in this respect as they go forward

Pedagogy of Inclusion: A Quest for Inclusive Teaching and Learning

Since the advent of the philosophy of inclusion and the inception of inclusive education, following a number of international developments such as the signing of the Salamanca Statement in 1994, attempts worldwide to define the elusive concept of inclusive pedagogy have been largely unsuccessful. This qualitative study therefore seeks to highlight the state of current debates around the development of the notion of inclusive pedagogy, its definition, conception and operationalization. A detailed review of the current literature was conducted to synthesise a conceptual framework. Interviews were conducted with six purposefully selected inclusive practitioners in secondary schools in one education district of South Africa. An inductive analytical framework was used to analyse the data. The main findings of the study indicate that there is no universally accepted definition of inclusive pedagogy but that its meaning is contextually, philosophically and operationally determined. The study demonstrates that more research is required to redefine the notion of inclusive pedagogy

Computer Science and Technology Series : XV Argentine Congress of Computer Science. Selected papers

CACIC'09 was the fifteenth Congress in the CACIC series. It was organized by the School of Engineering of the National University of Jujuy. The Congress included 9 Workshops with 130 accepted papers, 1 main Conference, 4 invited tutorials, different meetings related with Computer Science Education (Professors, PhD students, Curricula) and an International School with 5 courses. CACIC 2009 was organized following the traditional Congress format, with 9 Workshops covering a diversity of dimensions of Computer Science Research. Each topic was supervised by a committee of three chairs of different Universities. The call for papers attracted a total of 267 submissions. An average of 2.7 review reports were collected for each paper, for a grand total of 720 review reports that involved about 300 different reviewers. A total of 130 full papers were accepted and 20 of them were selected for this book.Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Vocational Education and Training in the Age of Digitization

The increasing digitization of the world of work is associated with accelerated structural changes. These are connected with changed qualification profiles and thus new challenges for vocational education and training (VET). Companies, vocational schools and other educational institutions must respond appropriately. The volume focuses on the diverse demands placed on teachers, learners and educational institutions in vocational education and training and aims to provide up-to-date results on learning in the digital age

Reviews

Judith Jeffcoate, Multimedia in Practice ‐Technology and Applications, BCS Practitioner Series, Prentice‐Hall International, 1995. ISBN: 0–13–123324–6. £24.95