18 research outputs found

    The educational politics of curriculum policy in Vocational Education and Training in Australia

    Full text link
    This research investigates the effects of the 1987 federal government’s Vocational Education and Training (VET) policy on curriculum development on NSW TAFE by undertaking a critical policy analysis and utilising interview data. Drawing on Foucault’s (1980, 1982) power/knowledge nexus, the study examines the complexities of social and structural relations to power and knowledge and how the state regulates the acquisition of knowledge. Foucault (1972a) saw curriculum as one form of social regulation that connects the citizen to the state. The VET policies embodied power relations by prescribing new practices that regulates the individual in a manner that is interrelated with the multiple demands of the new neoliberal economy and the expanding control of the state. VET became a mechanism for social and macroeconomic reform by being tied to youth employment, skills formation, human capital and Australia’s global economic competitiveness. This study also draws on Popkewitz’s (1987, 1991, 1997) notion that the state exploits curriculum as a converting ordinance. Technical curriculum postulates the forms of knowledge which frame and classify the world, the nature of work and in turn organises and shapes individual identity and citizenship (Olson et al. 2015). Through a case study I demonstrate how the VET policy initiatives introduced mechanisms that privileged certain political and professional actors to dominate knowledge and thereby impose their identity in the construction of educational policy, and how other stakeholders have been disadvantaged by the selection, organisation and control of curriculum intellectual property in TAFE NSW. The dominant educational philosophies in VET aim to inculcate people to adapt to these social forms rather than critically interrogate them. The federal government privatised the writing and ratifying of VET course content by contracting Industry Skills Councils to produce training packages, which specified the learning outcomes and required competencies embedded in the competency-based VET qualifications (Goozee 2001). The VET curriculum was also rationalised by the removal of the cognitive and behavioural attributes of knowledge to permit the awarding of qualifications via the Recognition of Prior Learning (Buchanan et al. 2004). The study concludes that there is no embedded curriculum in VET or TAFE NSW courses. This afforded NSW TAFE, and the for-profit sector, the privilege to determine the volume-of-learning, student/teacher ratios and modes of delivery, which allowed the student-centred citizenship paradigm of VET to be replaced with an economic, human-capital model

    Guessing human-chosen secrets

    Get PDF
    Authenticating humans to computers remains a notable weak point in computer security despite decades of effort. Although the security research community has explored dozens of proposals for replacing or strengthening passwords, they appear likely to remain entrenched as the standard mechanism of human-computer authentication on the Internet for years to come. Even in the optimistic scenario of eliminating passwords from most of today's authentication protocols using trusted hardware devices or trusted servers to perform federated authentication, passwords will persist as a means of "last-mile" authentication between humans and these trusted single sign-on deputies. This dissertation studies the difficulty of guessing human-chosen secrets, introducing a sound mathematical framework modeling human choice as a skewed probability distribution. We introduce a new metric, alpha-guesswork, which can accurately models the resistance of a distribution against all possible guessing attacks. We also study the statistical challenges of estimating this metric using empirical data sets which can be modeled as a large random sample from the underlying probability distribution. This framework is then used to evaluate several representative data sets from the most important categories of human-chosen secrets to provide reliable estimates of security against guessing attacks. This includes collecting the largest-ever corpus of user-chosen passwords, with nearly 70 million, the largest list of human names ever assembled for research, the largest data sets of real answers to personal knowledge questions and the first data published about human choice of banking PINs. This data provides reliable numbers for designing security systems and highlights universal limitations of human-chosen secrets

    European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN). Conference Proceedings

    Get PDF
    Erasmus+ Programme of the European UnionThe powerful combination of the information age and the consequent disruption caused by these unstable environments provides the impetus to look afresh and identify new models and approaches for education (e.g. OERs, MOOCs, PLEs, Learning Analytics etc.). For learners this has taken a fantastic leap into aggregating, curating and co-curating and co-producing outside the boundaries of formal learning environments – the networked learner is sharing voluntarily and for free, spontaneously with billions of people.Supported by Erasmus+ Programme of the European Unioninfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    B!SON: A Tool for Open Access Journal Recommendation

    Get PDF
    Finding a suitable open access journal to publish scientific work is a complex task: Researchers have to navigate a constantly growing number of journals, institutional agreements with publishers, funders’ conditions and the risk of Predatory Publishers. To help with these challenges, we introduce a web-based journal recommendation system called B!SON. It is developed based on a systematic requirements analysis, built on open data, gives publisher-independent recommendations and works across domains. It suggests open access journals based on title, abstract and references provided by the user. The recommendation quality has been evaluated using a large test set of 10,000 articles. Development by two German scientific libraries ensures the longevity of the project

    Brownfield reclamation and the mitigation of spatial injustice in Amman, Jordan

    Get PDF
    This thesis is part of ongoing research examining the interconnections between human geography and urban planning; simultaneously, it is part of a wider research agenda aiming to address gaps between Western and Non-Western literatures. Under the broader theme of spatial justice, understood as the manifestation of social justice in space, this thesis looks at two urban phenomena in the Middle Eastern context of Amman, Jordan: derelict and underutilised spaces known as brownfields, and; the practice aiming to revitalise vacant spaces in urban areas known as temporary urbanism. Over the past few decades, these two urban phenomena have been extensively investigated in Western contexts using methods and tools designed in and for those contexts and using Western-centric theoretical frames. As highlighted by this study, in the Middle Eastern context, there is little or no work investigating brownfields, temporary urbanism or spatial justice; as a result planning practices and frameworks fail to address them. Accordingly, this thesis seeks to establish the debate on these three central themes and the links between them in Arabic literature and Middle Eastern planning frameworks. By examining both the brownfield sites and temporary uses that perforate Amman’s urban fabric, a Lefebvrian and Lefebvrian-influenced critical spatial perspective is adopted that emphasises the social production of space and the right to the city. This thesis thereby argues that the reclamation of brownfield sites through temporary urbanism may enhance spatial justice within a wider global quest for just cities and just communities

    Book of proceedings:3th Conference of Interdisciplinary Research on Real Estate (CIRRE)

    Get PDF
    corecore