Engagement in course development by employers not traditionally involved in Higher Education: student and employer perceptions of its impact

The aim of the research was to improving understanding of employers' engagement in Higher Education and identify its impact. In particular, the review looked at engagement by employers that have not traditionally been involved in Higher Education. The research involved a systematic review that identified research in the UK and synthesised the eight most robust research studies

Libraries as Bridges across the Digital Divide: Partnerships and Approaches Used in the U.S. Technology Opportunities Program, 1994-2005

The purpose of the poster is to show how libraries used government funds and community partnerships to close the digital divide in the United States. Part of the mission of libraries is to bridge the digital divide. As an answer to the digital divide, the U.S. government started a grant program in 1994. Over ten years, the Technologies Opportunities Program (TOP) awarded $230 million to 600 communities to promote network technology and community partnership. The digital divide is a rich concept rather than a simple binary divide. It?s something that is nuanced, multidimensional and ever-changing. Everyone is immersed in the digital divide in one respect or another because none of us are on the same plane of learning and expertise. We have learned much from the plethora of research that has taken place in communities in the United States and abroad. This study sheds like on the digital divide and how libraries have addressed it. Of the 600 projects funded by TOP, 25 were library-led: approximately 10 took place in public libraries, three in academic libraries, and 12 in library networks or other settings. This research uses the TOP Data Archive, which we created with the help of others including the U.S. Department of Commerce itself, to examine these 25 projects. We have constructed tables and word clouds to find trends and analyze the projects and partnerships and will use established network analytical methods as well. Interviews with key leaders in each of the projects will help ascertain how each project developed over time. Our governing theory is that social capital and social networks contribute to ICT use. Our questions include: How did the partnerships between the library and other organizations affect each project? How did they define success, and did they achieve it? Our first finding is that libraries adapted the grant program to their own strategic activities and did not set library work aside. Second, the libraries took three main approaches: to build computer networks with wires and fiber-optics, to build the human-computer infrastructure known as a Freenet, or to create new library programs to help their community use technology. We will also present data on the programs and the size and shape of the partnerships that carried them out. Our research has found a total of 80 partnerships across 25 separate library-led TOP projects. Each project had an average of 4.3 partnerships; with the maximum being 11 and the minimum number of partnership being one. Our analysis included a typology of partners: education, corporations, government, and organization. Educational partners include schools, colleges, universities, and other educational organizations. Corporate entities are defined as businesses or companies. Government partners maybe municipal, city, state or national government entities. Lastly, organization is a broad category that fits every type of non-profit organization, whether it be community, environmental, educational, etc. There are also four sub-categories: library, health, art, and communications. Library partners may be local, state, college, or university libraries. Health institutions are any health organization, whether government or community, or hospitals. Art partners involve art museums, local art organizations, etc. Lastly, communications partners are communication corporations, TV or radio stations, or government communication entities. The categories will allow us to investigate the relationship between the type of partners in each project and the scope and outcome of each project. The data includes 33 education partners, 28 government, 23 organization, 8 libraries, 8 communications 6 corporation, 5 health, and 3 art. In December and January we will use NetDraw to create a visual representation of the egocentric network of a library and its partners, and look for patterns. We will also carry out telephone interviews with the leaders of each project. The phone interviews will tell us about long-term projects outcomes and how the partnerships advanced or impeded each project. This poster will provide insights and suggestions to libraries that are working on the digital divide or on building partnerships. Since the U.S. has yet to catch up with the rest of the world in terms of broadband speed and utilization, the government has started another round of grants called the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program; our findings will also inform that work. Libraries have the responsibility to serve increasingly disparate populations and our poster provides an analysis of an important group of library projects which have never been presented to an international audience. This topic will be of interest to many people in the library profession, especially those dedicated to serving the public through the use of innovative technology. Relevant links: TOP archive at the University of Michigan: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/f/findaid/findaid-idx?c=sclead&idno=umich-spc-Power-Top Broadband Technology Opportunities Program: http://www.ntia.doc.gov/broadbandgrants

The ‘Lost’ Church of Bix Gibwyn: The Human Bone

Recent research for the Victoria County History (VCH) highlighted the presence of a ‘lost’ medieval church in Bix, a Chilterns parish north-west of Henley-on-Thames. The building, formerly the parish church of Bix Gibwyn, was abandoned in the late sixteenth or seventeenth century and has left no standing remains. Archaeological investigation by the South Oxfordshire Archaeological Group (SOAG) and Reading University has confirmed its location in a close called ‘Old Chapel’ in Bix Bottom, in the north of the parish. The rediscovery of the site – which contains the foundations of a hitherto unknown Romano-British stone building – sheds new light on long-term changes in local communications, settlement, and economic conditions. In the Middle Ages Bix Gibwyn church was a focus of religious and social life for a small rural community in the south Oxfordshire Chilterns. After the Reformation it was neglected, demolished, and finally all but forgotten. Its location has been a matter of speculation for over a hundred years,1 but in 2007–10 its churchyard was identified through a combination of historical research and archaeological fieldwork. Confirmation of the church’s location in the remote Bix Bottom valley provides important evidence about the medieval settlement pattern in Bix, which was very different from the modern one, and offers an opportunity to reassess the development of settlement in the southern Chilterns more generally. The archaeological findings also supply new evidence about Roman activity in the area

It is Time to Stop Talking and Start Doing: The Views of People with Learning Disability on Future Research

There is a need for people with learning disabilities to be involved in directing research to ensure that the research is meaningful to those it concerns. This paper describes a scoping exercise to determine the research priorities for the field of learning disabilities for the next ten years. It focuses specifically on the role of people with learning disabilities in setting this research agenda and describes the methodology used, which involved a series of consultation workshops. Analysis of the data from these generated six priority themes: access to health care; getting good support; the right to relationships; housing options; work and personal finance; inclusion in the community. The findings showed that it is possible for people with learning disabilities to participate in setting a research agenda and there was agreement between the different stakeholders on the fundamental priorities. Moreover, the inclusion of people with learning disabilities provided a perspective that could not be adequately represented by other stakeholder groups. People with learning disabilities were concerned that research has a meaningful impact and can lead to demonstrable improvements in care. In order for this to happen there is a need for widespread dissemination of accessible outputs that reach the relevant stakeholders

Fats and oils in cookery. Cooking temperatures, 14:47

At head of title: ... Department of Household Science

Report to HEFCE on student engagement

This study, commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), explored the extent and nature of student engagement in the higher education sector in England. The study was concerned with institutional and student union processes and practices – such as those relating to student representation and student feedback – which seek to inform and enhance the collective student learning experience, as distinct from specific teaching, learning and assessment activities that are designed to enhance individual students’ engagement with their own learning. The study found that institutions view student engagement as central to enhancing the student experience, but the emphasis seems to be placed on viewing students as consumers. For student unions, the emphasis is on viewing them as partners in a learning community. The latter notion seems to be stronger in certain subject areas (for example, Art and Design and Performing Arts) than others. The majority of HEIs and FE colleges rate their student engagement processes – comprising a basic model of student feedback questionnaires and student representation systems – as reasonably or very effective; student unions are less likely to do so. Detailed discussions with staff and students within a diverse range of HE providers showed that actual practices vary between and within institutions and that their effectiveness could be improved. Higher education institutions, student unions and further education colleges with significant higher education provision were surveyed to establish a baseline measure of the nature and extent of student engagement processes. Further exploration of institutions’ formal and informal processes and their effectiveness was undertaken through fieldwork with a number of higher education providers and student unions

On Nonregularized Estimation of Psychological Networks.

An important goal for psychological science is developing methods to characterize relationships between variables. Customary approaches use structural equation models to connect latent factors to a number of observed measurements, or test causal hypotheses between observed variables. More recently, regularized partial correlation networks have been proposed as an alternative approach for characterizing relationships among variables through off-diagonal elements in the precision matrix. While the graphical Lasso (glasso) has emerged as the default network estimation method, it was optimized in fields outside of psychology with very different needs, such as high dimensional data where the number of variables (p) exceeds the number of observations (n). In this article, we describe the glasso method in the context of the fields where it was developed, and then we demonstrate that the advantages of regularization diminish in settings where psychological networks are often fitted ( p≪n ). We first show that improved properties of the precision matrix, such as eigenvalue estimation, and predictive accuracy with cross-validation are not always appreciable. We then introduce nonregularized methods based on multiple regression and a nonparametric bootstrap strategy, after which we characterize performance with extensive simulations. Our results demonstrate that the nonregularized methods can be used to reduce the false-positive rate, compared to glasso, and they appear to provide consistent performance across sparsity levels, sample composition (p/n), and partial correlation size. We end by reviewing recent findings in the statistics literature that suggest alternative methods often have superior performance than glasso, as well as suggesting areas for future research in psychology. The nonregularized methods have been implemented in the R package GGMnonreg