At the eye of the storm: Researching schools and their communities enacting National Standards. 2013 Herbison Lecture

It is with enormous pleasure that I deliver the 24th Herbison Lecture. I thank the NZARE Council for inviting me and I acknowledge those in the audience who have previously given the Herbison. Today I'm talking about my research and academic activism around National Standards and there's a nice circularity about giving this lecture in the South Island. It was at the NZARE conference in Christchurch back in 2007 that I gave my first conference paper on the National Standards, little knowing that responding to this policy would consume me for the next six years. But the RAINS project has been a high point of my career and as they say down here in the Mainland - "good things take time”. The paper I gave back in 2007 was called "The proposed National Standards for New Zealand's primary and intermediate pupils: Any better than national testing?" (Thrupp, 2007). It's a question we now have a few answers to I think. In my lecture today I'm interested in developing the metaphor of the "eye of the storm" as a kind of refuge, a quiet place where you can get on and do some good work despite the academic and political storm that swirls around. So I offer a case study of someone trying to muddle through various academic issues and dealing with the difficult politics of doing policy-relevant research. I also want to get to the substantive findings of the final RAINS report that we are launching after my lecture today

A nui wave encountering psychology from the shores of the Pacific

The worldview of Pacific nations which lie within the vast ocean of the South Pacific is yet to be uncovered in the world of psychology. Since the first wave of migrants to the shores of Aotearoa,/New Zealand, many differing pathways have evolved for the children of the Pacific sojourners. Pasefika youth are emerging as an influential force in youth culture today. However, these highly visible pockets of Pasefika talent mask the reality of overcrowded housing, poor health, lowincomes, tailend educational achievement, and the frequent experience of issues to do with cultural identity and values (Tiatia, 1988; Taule’alea’usumai, 1997). Within these areas of concern Pasefika people will encounter ‘helping professions’ such as psychology. It is a discipline which has historically been devoted to understanding the human ‘psyche’ or ‘soul’. Most of this body of knowledge however is derived from European contexts. The South Pacific has now produced a generation of Pasefika academics that are crisscrossing the globe with pioneering theoretical frameworks specific to our region. It is within this framework that I present to you my current thinking and its intent of ‘claiming our legitimate space’

The arrival of MOOCs: Massive Open Online Courses

Summary: Internationally, a number of emerging technologies and associated developments are becoming available that could have far‐reaching effects on the delivery of tertiary education. One of these developments is Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The opportunities MOOCs present include the ability for institutions to extend their brand and reach to large international audiences, experiment with innovative pedagogical approaches, an ability to offer niche provision at scale, and a potential reduction of costs. Its challenges and risks include that they are not widely recognised as formal qualifications, the absence of an established business model, and their pedagogical approaches. We have developed this paper as the start of a conversation between and among government agencies, institutions, employers and learners on the appropriate policy settings and ways to support the introduction of these emerging technologies in the delivery of tertiary education. This paper also supports the 2014 Innovations in Tertiary Education Delivery Summit, being held in Auckland on 5 and 6 June 2014, which looks at the future of tertiary education and the role of technology in it

The gown and the korowai: Maori doctoral students and the spatial organization of academic knowledge

This paper draws on 38 student interviews carried out in the course of the team research project Teaching and Learning in the Supervision of Māori Doctoral Students. Māori doctoral thesis work takes place in the intersections between the Māori (tribal) world of identifications and obligations, the organisational and epistemological configurations of academia, and the bureaucratic requirements of funding or employing bureaucracies. To explore how students accommodate cultural, academic and bureaucratic demands, we develop analytical tools combining three intellectual traditions: Māori educational theory, Bernstein’s sociology of the academy, and Lefebvre’s conceptual trilogy of perceived, conceived, and lived space

Teaching and learning of performance measurement in OR/MS degrees

A review of existing UK MS/OR undergraduate programmes was completed to assess the extent and nature of performance measurement teaching. In addition, a survey of performance measurement practitioners was undertaken to obtain views on what should be taught in relation to performance measurement. A survey of 23 undergraduate MS/OR degrees in the UK revealed that all the academic respondents supported the inclusion of PM teaching. However, only four distinct PM classes could be found amongst these degrees. The PM techniques taught were broadly similar although the wider context of PM was taught in only 2 of the classes. A survey of a small number of PM practitioners revealed that the Balanced Scorecard and Benchmarking were the two most commonly applied PM techniques with the majority of respondents learning about PM from personal experience and reading rather than through formal education. It appears that there is an opportunity for MS/OR teaching to make a major contribution to the development of PM as a discipline. However, academic respondents whose MS/OR degree course did not teach PM indicated that lack of staff expertise in PM combined with an already full syllabus were the main barriers to introducing a PM class

An Intelligent Tutoring System for Teaching the 7 Characteristics for Living Things

Recently, due to the rapid progress of computer technology, researchers develop an effective computer program to enhance the achievement of the student in learning process, which is Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS). Science is important because it influences most aspects of everyday life, including food, energy, medicine, leisure activities and more. So learning science subject at school is very useful, but the students face some problem in learning it. So we designed an ITS system to help them understand this subject easily and smoothly by analyzing it and explaining it in a systematic way. In this paper, we describe the design of an Intelligent Tutoring System for teaching science for grade seven to help students know the 7 characteristics for living things smoothly. The system provides all topics of living things and generates some questions for each topic and the students should answer these questions correctly to move to the next level. In the result of an evaluation of the ITS, students like the system and they said that it is very useful for them and for their studies