The Link between BPR, Evolutionary Delivery and Evolutionary Development

In this paper we intend to show how the challenges of managing a Business Process Reengineering (BPR) project are consistent with the ones of a Systems Development project. As traditional management techniques were no longer appropriate in the changing business environment, companies employed BPR to achieve elevated business performance. Similarly, as traditional systems development approaches delivered disappointing results, system developers experimented with other models, including Evolutionary Delivery and Evolutionary Development, in order to enable successful technology exploitation by businesses. Both these business and systems initiatives embrace elements of cultural change, management flexibility, empowerment, organisational readiness, and technology introduction in a changing environment. We will present the similarities of the two initiatives and show how progress in one initiative could contribute in the progress of the other

Schools Can't Wait: Accelerating the Redesign of University Principal Preparation Programs

Reviews recent efforts by 22 universities to provide higher quality training programs for school leaders. Includes examples of effective redesign practices and outlines an action plan for implementing successful educational leadership initiatives

Learning Meta Model for Zero- and Few-shot Face Anti-spoofing

Face anti-spoofing is crucial to the security of face recognition systems. Most previous methods formulate face anti-spoofing as a supervised learning problem to detect various predefined presentation attacks, which need large scale training data to cover as many attacks as possible. However, the trained model is easy to overfit several common attacks and is still vulnerable to unseen attacks. To overcome this challenge, the detector should: 1) learn discriminative features that can generalize to unseen spoofing types from predefined presentation attacks; 2) quickly adapt to new spoofing types by learning from both the predefined attacks and a few examples of the new spoofing types. Therefore, we define face anti-spoofing as a zero- and few-shot learning problem. In this paper, we propose a novel Adaptive Inner-update Meta Face Anti-Spoofing (AIM-FAS) method to tackle this problem through meta-learning. Specifically, AIM-FAS trains a meta-learner focusing on the task of detecting unseen spoofing types by learning from predefined living and spoofing faces and a few examples of new attacks. To assess the proposed approach, we propose several benchmarks for zero- and few-shot FAS. Experiments show its superior performances on the presented benchmarks to existing methods in existing zero-shot FAS protocols.Comment: Accepted by AAAI202

Health system redesign for equity in maternal and newborn health must be codesigned, country led, adapted to context and fit for purpose.

No Abstract available. Commen

Concepts of school engagement in the context of geographic isolation

This case study research represents an attempt to gain a better understanding of conceptions of school engagement in a rural, isolated, agricultural mid-western community. Local school administrators, in collaboration with a regional university, chose to make student engagement the focus of deep inquiry in order to better address student concerns, improve teaching, and student outcomes (Association of Teacher Educators, 2007). Researchers interviewed students, teachers, and parents in a local high school, using an interview protocol specifically designed for each constituency. The study results point to a mostly behavioral, or compliance driven concept of engagement among all groups interviewed, but further examination of data also show that students tended to voice a desire for a higher degree of agentic engagement, along with a strong need for positive relationships with teaching faculty. This points to a need for teacher educators to more deeply address preservice students’ understanding of engagement, as well as a potential to shift to a conceptual understanding of student engagement that is more agentic in nature. Implications include avenues toward broadening conceptions of engagement among staff, students, and parents; increased understanding and implementation of educational strategies designed to increase engagement at both the classroom and school levels; and catalyzing changes in educator preparation programs that improve candidates’ understanding of and ability to be effective in isolated rural school communities

“This Wonderful Machine”: How Should We Teach Humanities Texts like Gulliver’s Travels in the Time of ChatGPT?

The quoted phrase in the essay title comes from a passage in Jonathan Swift\u27s Gulliver’s Travels in which a Grand Academy of Lagado professor demonstrates a “wonderful Machine” that can generate scores of books “without the least Assistance from Genius or Study.” The essay explore the challenge for teaching classic humanities texts like Gulliver that the (perhaps not so) “wonderful Machine” called ChatGPT poses. Student Owen Terry’s Chronicle essay (May 12, 2023) identifies two crucial aspects of that challenge: “We don’t fully lean into AI and teach how to best use it, and we don’t fully prohibit it to keep it from interfering with exercises in critical thinking.” The essay explains my rationale not to “lean into AI but to prohibit it and to promote instead “critical thinking

Mobile Learning Revolution: Implications for Language Pedagogy

Mobile technologies including cell phones and tablets are a pervasive feature of everyday life with potential impact on teaching and learning. “Mobile pedagogy” may seem like a contradiction in terms, since mobile learning often takes place physically beyond the teacher's reach, outside the walls of the classroom. While pedagogy implies careful planning, mobility exposes learners to the unexpected. A thoughtful pedagogical response to this reality involves new conceptualizations of what is to be learned and new activity designs. This approach recognizes that learners may act in more self-determined ways beyond the classroom walls, where online interactions and mobile encounters influence their target language communication needs and interests. The chapter sets out a range of opportunities for out-of-class mobile language learning that give learners an active role and promote communication. It then considers the implications of these developments for language content and curricula and the evolving roles and competences of teachers

Working collaboratively on the digital global frontier

An international online collaborative learning experience was designed and implemented in preservice teacher education classes at the University of Calgary, Canada and the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. The project was designed to give preservice teachers an opportunity to live the experience of being online collaborators investigating real world teaching issues of diversity and inclusivity. Qualitative research was conducted to examine the complexity of the online collaborative experiences of participants. Redmond and Lock’s (2006) flexible online collaborative learning framework was used to explain the design and the implementation of the project. Henri’s (1992) content analysis model for computer-mediated communication was used for the online asynchronous postings and a constant comparative method of data analysis was used in the construction of themes. From the findings, the authors propose recommendations for designing and facilitating collaborative learning on the digital global frontier