Imagined, prescribed and actual text trajectories: the ‘problem’ with case notes in contemporary social work

Drawing on a text-oriented action research ethnography of the writing practices of UK-based social workers, this paper focuses on a key but problematic aspect of everyday, professional textual practice – the production of “case notes.” Using data drawn from interviews, workshops, texts and observation, the paper locates case notes within social work everyday practice and explores the entextualization of three distinct case notes. The heuristic of imagined, prescribed and actual trajectories is used to track specific instances of entextualization and to illustrate why the production of case notes is a particularly complex activity. A key argument is that in the institutional imaginary, and reflected in the institutionally prescribed trajectory, case notes are construed as a comprehensive record of all actions, events and interactions, prior to and providing warrants for all other documentation. However, they are in actual practice produced as parts of clusters of a range of different text types which, together, provide accounts of, and for, actions and decisions. This finding explains why case notes are often viewed as incomplete and raises fundamental questions about how they should be evaluated. The complexity of case notes as an everyday professional practice is underscored in relation to professional voice, addressivity and textual temporality

Against Professional Development

This paper raises questions about the sort of knowledge which has come to count as professional development knowledge. The author interrogates the curriculum and pedagogy of academic professional development programs in Australian universities, drawing parallels with Third World development programs. She argues that professional development knowledge is privileged over disciplinary knowledge in setting lifelong learning agendas for academics, and notes some problematic consequences of this for academics engaged in professional development programs

Rising Expectations in Business Education

The article comments on the rising expectations in business education. It explains the term liberal education. It mentions the Liberal Education & America\u27s Promise Campaign launched by the Association of American Colleges & Universities in 2005. The article also notes that integrative learning is particularly relevant because it melds students\u27 professional and liberal educations

Does Domestic Regulation Promote Globally Competitive Filipino Professionals and Educational Services?

Almost every country has its own set of domestic regulations that determine how easy or difficult it is to pursue a freer movement in the trade of services. In the Philippine setting, how do the functions and powers of the country's two major regulatory bodies for professional and educational services affect the movement of these services as well as the quality of global competitiveness of Philippine higher education and professionals? This Notes discusses more on this.professional services, domestic regulation, educational services, Professional Regulation Commission (PRC), Commission on Higher Education (CHED)

Commercial property loan valuations in the UK : the changing landscape of practice and liability

This paper is the first of two which aim to examine the major legal liability implications of changes to the commercial property loan valuation process caused by the recession in the UK property market and to make recommendations to valuers and their professional institutions to improve the quality of the process and the result. This paper identifies the market background to commercial property lending and discusses the implications of the falls in value for lenders and valuers. These include two major strands; first, the outcome of discussions between the representative bodies of these two groups and, second, the increasing litigation caused by lenders suing valuers for professional negligence. The discussions between representative groups have driven a debate on the valuation process leading to a number of reports and guidance notes. This paper discusses the outcomes paying particular attention to the basis of valuation for loan purposes and the provision of additional information in valuation reports. This paper also reviews the legal framework which influences the relationship between the lenders and valuers and discusses the duty of care. The role of instructions in the valuation process, the significance of the identity of the person to be advised and the possibility of a conflict of interest arising are all considered. The paper also addresses the issue of the standards required of a commercial loan valuer, including how this is interpreted by the courts and the legal status of professional guidance notes. The paper concludes by identifying potential areas for dispute within the loan valuation process and raising a number of research questions concerning the operation of this process which are addressed in a following paper

Internet: turning science communication inside-out?

In the four decades since two university computers were first linked to each other over the prototype internet, scientific researchers have been innovators, early adopters and prolific adapters of internet technologies. Electronic mail, file transfer protocol, telnet, Gopher and the World Wide Web were all developed and applied first in research communities. The Web's development for sharing of information in the high-energy physics community unexpectedly heralded the internet's extension into many aspects of commerce, community, entertainment and governance. But despite the rapid proliferation and diversification of both over the past 15 years, the internet in its various forms has scientific communication indelibly inscribed into its fabric, and internet communication is thoroughly integrated into the practice of science. This chapter reviews some effects of the internet's emergence as a principal means of professional scientific communication, and of public communication of science and technology. It notes several paradoxes that characterise these developments, for example the contradictory trends towards easier collaboration across continents, and towards greater fragmentation. It notes the very significant disturbances caused by electronic publishing in the all-important field of scientific journals. It suggests that these and other developments have made more completely porous than before the boundaries between professional and public communication, facilitating public access to previously private spaces, and thus 'turning science communication inside-out'

That’s more like they know me as a person": one primary pre-service teacher’s stories of her personal and ‘professional’ digital practices

In contributing to debates about how student-teachers might draw from personal experience in addressing digital literacy in the classroom, this paper explores the stories that one primary student-teacher told of her digital practices during a larger study of the role of digital literacy in student-teachers' lives. The paper investigates the 'recognition work' this student-teacher did as she aligned herself with different discourses and notes how themes of 'control' and 'professionalism' seemed to pattern her stories of informal and formal practices both within and beyond her professional education. The paper calls for further research into how student-teachers perceive the relevance of their personal experience to their professional role and argues for encouraging pre-service and practising teachers to tell stories of their digital practices and reflect upon the discourses which frame them

Exploring the Use of Virtual Worlds as a Scientific Research Platform: The Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA)

We describe the Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA), the first professional scientific organization based exclusively in virtual worlds (VWs). The goals of MICA are to explore the utility of the emerging VR and VWs technologies for scientific and scholarly work in general, and to facilitate and accelerate their adoption by the scientific research community. MICA itself is an experiment in academic and scientific practices enabled by the immersive VR technologies. We describe the current and planned activities and research directions of MICA, and offer some thoughts as to what the future developments in this arena may be.Comment: 15 pages, to appear in the refereed proceedings of "Facets of Virtual Environments" (FaVE 2009), eds. F. Lehmann-Grube, J. Sablating, et al., ICST Lecture Notes Ser., Berlin: Springer Verlag (2009); version with full resolution color figures is available at http://www.mica-vw.org/wiki/index.php/Publication

Discretion, Due Process, and the Prison Discipline Committee

A revised version of this paper was published as: Schafer, N.E. (1986). "Discretion, Due Process and the Prison Discipline Committee." Criminal Justice Review 11(2): 37–46 (Fall 1986). (http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/073401688601100207).Prison discipline received considerable attention from both the courts and professional organizations during the decade of the 1970s. It was widely assumed that the due process requirements which resulted from judicial review coupled with the promulgation of model discipline standards and procedures would limit the broad discretionary authority found in the traditional prison disciplinary process. A case study of the activities of one prison discipline committee suggests that these external pressures have had less impact on decision-making than such internal pressures as overcrowding. Due process requirements have not greatly inhibited the exercise of discretion in the prison discipline process.Abstract [Introduction] / Background of the Study / Prison Discipline in Indiana / Case Study of an Indiana Prison Discipline Committee / Discussion / Figures / Notes / References / Cases / Appendix: List of Violation