Learning communities : schools, parents and challenges for wider community involvement in schools

This presentation will focus, for the most part, on a project of parental involvement in a state primary school located in a predominantly working-class area in a Mediterranean country. It will draw briefly on qualitative empirical work carried out with a colleague (Carmel Borg). The presentation gives an account of the socio-economic context of the school, and foregrounds, through empirical data culled from transcribed semi-structured interviews, the voices of parents, administrators, school-council members and teachers. It will be argued that, if this project is to develop into a genuine exercise in democratic participation, parents must begin to be conceived of not as “adjuncts”, but “subjects”. The parents interviewed in this empirical work see themselves as such, and derive confidence from the fact that, at the time of the interview, their claims and recommendations were translating into concrete developments. The second part of the presentation will discuss the issue of parental involvement in schools within the context of a wider discussion on ‘changing the face of the school’ by helping it develop into a community learning centre. Insights from the work of Paulo Freire and his Education Secretariat, when he served as Education Secretary in the Municipal Government of São Paulo, Brazil, and from SMED in Porto Alegre, Brazil, will be drawn upon.peer-reviewe

Rare tau Decays in R-parity Violating Supersymmetry

We constrain, from rare tau decays, several combinations of $\lambda$ and $\lambda'$ type couplings coming from Supersymmetry without R-parity. The processes that we consider are tau --> l M, tau --> l_i l_j l_k, and tau --> l gamma, where l stands for either e or mu, and M is the generic symbol for a meson. We update several existing bounds, and provide a few new ones too.Comment: 12 pages, no figure

How Push-To-Talk Makes Talk Less Pushy

This paper presents an exploratory study of college-age students using two-way, push-to-talk cellular radios. We describe the observed and reported use of cellular radio by the participants. We discuss how the half-duplex, lightweight cellular radio communication was associated with reduced interactional commitment, which meant the cellular radios could be used for a wide range of conversation styles. One such style, intermittent conversation, is characterized by response delays. Intermittent conversation is surprising in an audio medium, since it is typically associated with textual media such as instant messaging. We present design implications of our findings.Comment: 10 page

‘What it is Like’ Talk is not Technical Talk

‘What it is like’ talk (‘WIL-talk’) — the use of phrases such as ‘what it is like’ — is ubiquitous in discussions of phenomenal consciousness. It is used to define, make claims about, and to offer arguments concerning consciousness. But what this talk means is unclear, as is how it means what it does: how, by putting these words in this order, we communicate something about consciousness. Without a good account of WIL-talk, we cannot be sure this talk sheds light, rather than casts shadows, on our investigations of consciousness. The popular technical account of WIL-talk (see e.g. Lewis, 1995, and Kim, 1998) holds that WIL-talk involves technical terms — terms which look like everyday words but have a distinct meaning — introduced by philosophers. I argue that this account is incorrect by showing that the alleged technical terms were not introduced by philosophers, and that these terms do not have a technical meaning

Noisy talk

We investigate strategic information transmission with communication error, or noise. Our main finding is that adding noise can improve welfare. With quadratic preferences and a uniform type distribution, welfare can be raised for almost every bias level by introducing a sufficiently small amount of noise. Furthermore, there exists a level of noise that makes it possible to achieve the best payoff that can be obtained by means of any communication device. As in the model without noise, equilibria are interval partitional; with noise, however, coding (the measure of the message space used by each interval of the equilibrium partition of the type space) becomes critically important.Communication, information transmission, cheap talk, noise

Noisy Talk

We examine the possibilities for communication between agents with divergent preferences in a noisy environment. Taking Crawford and Sobel’s [4] (noiseless) communication game as a reference point, we study a model in which there is a probability e ? (0, 1) that the received message is a random draw from the entire message space, independent of the actual message sent by the sender. Just as in the CS model, we find that all equilibria are interval partitional; but unlike in CS, coding (the proportion of the message space used by any given set of types) is of critical importance. Via the appropriate coding scheme, one can construct equilibria that induce finitely many, a countable infinity or even an uncountable infinity of actions. Furthermore, for a given number of actions, there is typically a continuum of equilibria that induce that many actions. Surprisingly, the possibility of error can improve the prospects for communication. We show that for small noise levels there is a simple class of equilibria that are almost always welfare superior to the best CS equilibrium. There exists an optimal noise level for which these equilibria achieve the efficiency bound for general communication devices. Furthermore, for a range of biases introducing any amount of noise can be beneficial.Communication, information transmission, cheap talk, noise.