Customized Learning Sequences (CLS) by Metadata.

In response to a longterm research program for a didactical ontology, this report intends to present the results and methods for representing didactical models from the ontology we developed. The question is: How can computer technology be used to support the communication of knowledge in an educational context? This question cannot be answered by psychological experiments that ignore the core of educational behaviour: the transmission of meaning (Hönigswald 1927). Therefore this article focuses on the didactical tradition. Computer technology as a medium requires a special form of knowledge organisation, which allows learners to go individually and in a reflective way through the content (Customized Learning Sequences), thus requiring teachers to produce individually navigable hypertexts. Individualization does not mean offering "pureâ€? self-directed learning, as learning presupposes instruction by others. We have to aid teachers in reorganizing knowledge to hypertexts that allows individual navigation. Supporting learners in finding their individual path is also a crucial factor.How to aid teachers and how to set up meaningful navigation aids will be discussed in four steps:\ud 1.) Theoretical considerations; 2.) First step of Web-Didactics: Decontextualisation; 3.) Second step of Web-\ud Didactics: Recontextualisation; 4.) Research. Which theoretical considerations are eternal for Web-Didactics

Review Essay: Basil Bernstein (1996). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity

This paper reviews Basil Bernstein’s (1996) book Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity, focussing specifically on the usefulness of Bernstein’s concepts for an analysis of curricular justice in schooling. The review details five concepts from Bernstein’s model and demonstrates the relevance of these to analyses of equity policies and curricular justice in Queensland schools. These five concepts include: (1) classification and framing; (2) instructional and regulative discourse; (3) recontextualisation; (4) micro-politics of curricular justice and (5) pedagogic models. The paper also links theory to empirical data demonstrating how the Bernsteinian theoretical corpus is illustrative of adaptive theory – simultaneously cumulative and evolving, macro and micro, deductive and inductive

Taking a stance: resistance, faking and Muddling Through

This article focuses on project-based learning in media practice education, identifying three themes of interest. The first questions the recontextualisation of practice from the professional to a pedagogic environment. The second theme questions how much we know about what goes on inside a project and contrasts the ways in which students ‘do’ projects with the ways in which educators idealise project work as a mirror of professional practice. The final theme questions whether processes and procedures external to a project environment may result in a decoupling between professional practice and the everyday formulations of practice enacted by students. While educators may seek to encourage students to simultaneously adopt academic, professional and creative identities, as part of an active and purposeful approach to doing projects, this article questions whether tensions between these identities may actually encourage students to engage in decoupling behaviour. The article aims to encourage media practice educators to reflect on their own use of projects and question the ways in which the identities students claim as learners align with educator's beliefs and values

Regulating Reprogenetics: Strategic Sacralisation and Semantic Message

This paper forms part of the feminist critique of the regulatory consequences of biomedicine's systematic exclusion of the role of women's bodies in the development ofreprogenetic technologies. I suggest that strategic use of notions of the sacred to decontextualise and delimit disagreement fosters this marginalisation. Here conceptions of the sacred a sacralisation afford a means by which pragmatic consensus over regulation may be achieved, through the deployment of a bricolage of dense images associated with cultural loyalties to solidify support or to exclude contradictory elements. Hence an explicit renegoation of the symbolic order structuring salient debates is necessary to disrupt and enrich the entrenched and exclusionary dominant discourse over reprogenetic regulation of infertility treatment and embryo research in the UNited Kingdom, the cultural anthropology of biomedicine and feminist ethnographies of reprogenetics to illustrate these claims

Mathematics teachers' positions and practices in discourses of assessment

Mathematics teachers ’ positions and practices in discourses of assessmen

Double image : the Hughes-Plath relationship as told in Birthday letters : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in English at Massey University

Proceeding from a close reading of both Birthday Letters and the poems of Sylvia Plath, and also from a consideration of secondary and biographical works, I argue that implicit within Birthday Letters is an explanation for Sylvia Plath's death and Ted Hughes's role in it. Birthday letters is a collection of 88 poems written by Ted Hughes to his first wife, the poet Sylvia Plath, in the years following her death, There are two aspects to the explanation Ted Hughes provides. Both are connected to Sylvia Plath's poetry. Her development as a poet not only causes her death as told in Birthday Letters, but it also renders Ted Hughes incapable of helping her, because through her poetry he is made to adopt the role of Plath's father. This explanation is possible because Hughes conflates Sylvia Plath's self with the personae of her poems

How is vocational knowledge recontextualised?

This paper sets out to examine how vocational knowledge is recontextualised in curricula, pedagogy and workplaces, by learners, and to ensure the availability of valuable and relevant knowledge for vocational practice. Starting from Bernstein’s notion of recontextualisation, and with reference to literature in the sociology of educational knowledge, studies of workplace learning and learning theory, recontextualisation is understood here as a socio-epistemic process which is influenced by the interrelation between the distinct structures of different knowledge types and the social dynamics of vocational education infrastructure. Various aspects of recontextualisation are considered, including whether the overall process can be disaggregated to reveal a series of separate elements, how knowledge is transformed and concepts are developed, and influences on the character of recontextualisation. Potential tensions that may affect recontextualisation in vocational environments are identified, and some conditions for reconciling these are briefly discussed