Preparing Higher Education Tutors for Delivering Online Courses

This paper identifies that academic staff need to be suitably prepared to deliver wholly online courses, and outlines the steps taken towards achieving this, at one Higher Education institution in the UK. E-learning, whether partially (blended) or wholly online, is not simply about the technology, but also requires an understanding of the pedagogical considerations, and the skills that are needed, to effectively facilitate them. Through the use of a formal questionnaire, and collation of informal comments made on a social network, evaluation is made of a staff development course designed specifically to promote effective facilitation of high quality online courses. The results determined that the course is fit for purpose and achieves its aims. Future cohorts are already over-subscribed as a result of positive commentary by participants. Further developments will be made, based upon constructive feedback by participants. Whilst possibly not unique, this course demonstrates action being taken in an educational institution to recognise that effective online delivery requires specific knowledge and skills that are different from those used in the traditional classroom

Geographies of asylum: legal knowledge and legal practices

Law and legal discourses are an integral part of social life, a central means of producing social identities and exercising social power in day to day life. Critically informed geographical perspectives on law have illustrated in a number of ways how the legal and social (and therefore the spatial) are mutually constitutive. This paper argues that perspectives from critical legal geography can offer insights into the operation of asylum and immigration law in the UK in the late 1990s. This paper argues that legal practices and relations are organised in hegemonic and counter-hegemonic ways in different places and institutional contexts in London. In addition law and legal practices comprise a particularly important way in which ‘community’ can be constructed simultaneously across a variety of different scales in ways that can marginalise and exclude relatively powerless groups like asylum seekers. Thus refugee identities offer a particularly clear example of how social realities are constituted by law and legal practice

Reading the news: Representations of asylum seekers in British Newspapers

Research by geographers on using news media in the classroom has tended to concentrate on either content or discourse analysis of newspapers. These approaches hold in common an implicit understanding that what news stories say happened is not as important as the language, metaphors, images and representations used in news stories. In this paper the author discuss Bell's (1999) approach to analysing news stories, which lies somewhere between content and discourse analysis. This approach works through emphasizing the ‘event’ and ‘time’ structure of stories as they are presented to us in newspapers. Through building up the ‘event’ and time structure of news stories about asylum we can put ourselves in a position to see what the story does—and does not—say. In turn this approach shows how our understandings of seemingly simple news stories are often based on assumptions, ambiguities and discrepancies that support and are based within exploitative power relationships

Safe places and unsafe places:Geography and the 1996 asylum and immigration act in the United Kingdom

Over the last decade and a half the international refugee régime, as enshrined by the 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol has come under sustained attack in western states. This is because of implicit assumptions about the universalism of the refugee identity and the rootedness of national identities by the framers, drafters and subsequent commentators on international refugee law (see Malkki 1992, and Hyndman 1998). Critical approaches to international refugee law have sufered from underdeveloped ideas about space and about the relationship between geography and law. In this paper I point to geographical and geopolitical assumptions and thinking that lies behind the passage and enforcement of accelerated asylum determination and appeal procedures in the United Kingdom. I conclude by suggesting how the moral landscape of refugee and asylum law might be re-oriented to stress connections between the United Kingdom and persecuted and oppressed peoples rather than stress the protection of the UK's boundarie

Every Wednesday I am happy: childhoods in an Irish asylum centre

In Ireland, asylum seekers are placed into a system of dispersed ‘direct provision’ reception centres across the country. This paper argues that the frequently contradictory and ambiguous positions created for children living within the Irish asylum system reflect the uncertainties and ambiguities surrounding them as immigrants (as part/not part of host societies), children (as child/not adult), and asylum seekers (as separated-out populations in dispersal centres). Based on research in a specific asylum dispersal centre, this paper will explore the ways in which the spatialities of the children's lives reflect and constitute these contradictions and ambiguities in a host of different ways

Oxygen Absorption in Cooling Flows

The inhomogeneous cooling flow scenario predicts the existence of large quantities of gas in massive elliptical galaxies, groups, and clusters that have cooled and dropped out of the flow. Using spatially resolved, deprojected X-ray spectra from the ROSAT PSPC we have detected strong absorption over energies ~0.4-0.8 keV intrinsic to the central ~1 arcmin of the galaxy, NGC 1399, the group, NGC 5044, and the cluster, A1795. These systems have amongst the largest nearby cooling flows in their respective classes and low Galactic columns. Since no excess absorption is indicated for energies below ~0.4 keV the most reasonable model for the absorber is warm, collisionally ionized gas with T=10^{5-6} K where ionized states of oxygen provide most of the absorption. Attributing the absorption only to ionized gas reconciles the large columns of cold H and He inferred from Einstein and ASCA with the lack of such columns inferred from ROSAT, and also is consistent with the negligible atomic and molecular H inferred from HI, and CO observations of cooling flows. The prediction of warm ionized gas as the product of mass drop-out in these and other cooling flows can be verified by Chandra, XMM, and ASTRO-E.Comment: 4 pages (2 figures), Accepted for publication in ApJ Letters, no significant changes from previous submitted versio

GLOBAL SEAWATER REDOX TRENDS DURING THE LATE DEVONIAN MASS EXTINCTION DETECTED USING U ISOTOPES OF MARINE CARBONATES

The Late Devonian extinction ranks as one of the ‘big five’ Phanerozoic extinctions affecting up to 80% of marine species and occurred during five distinct pulses spanning /or widespread marine anoxia. We test the marine anoxia hypothesis by analyzing uranium isotopes (δ238U) across a ~7 My interval of well-dated Upper Devonian marine carbonates from the Devil’s Gate Limestone in Nevada, USA. The measured δ238U curve shows no co-variation with local anoxic facies, water-depth dependent facies changes, redox-sensitive metals, TOC, or diagnostic elemental ratios indicating the δ238U curve was not controlled by local depositional or diagenetic processes and represents global seawater redox conditions. Two negative δ238U shifts (indicating more reducing seawater) are observed with durations of ~3.8 My (late Frasnian) and ~1.1 My (early Famennian), respectively. Steady-state modeling of the observed -0.2 to -0.3‰ shifts in δ238U points to a ~5-15% increase in the total area of anoxic seafloor during these excursions. The late Frasnian negative shift is broadly coincident with the first extinction pulse (late rhenana Zone or lower Kellwasser event), whereas the early Famennian negative shift (lower-middle triangularis zones) does not coincide with the most intense Frasnian-Famennian boundary (F-F) extinction pulses (upper Kellwasser event). Compilations of local sediment redox conditions from Upper Devonian marine deposits with conodont zone-level age control indicates that the extinction pulses were coincident with widespread anoxic deposits accumulating in subtropical epeiric sea and some open-ocean settings supporting previous interpretations that widespread marine anoxia had an important influence on the Late Devonian extinction. The temporal relationships between global ocean redox trends represented by the δ238U curve and the newly compiled subtropical marine redox sediment trends indicates Late Devonian global oceans and epeiric seas were in relatively good redox communication for the majority of the study interval except for a brief interval (\u3c500 \u3eky) spanning the F-F boundary