Le mentorat en début de carrière : retombées sur la charge professorale et conditions de mise en œuvre d’un programme en milieu universitaire

Cette synthèse d’écrits a été menée dans le but de faire état des retombées du mentorat en milieu éducatif, plus précisément, le mentorat destiné aux enseignants universitaires en début de carrière et des conditions de mise en œuvre d’un programme. Les principaux constats tirés de cette synthèse montrent que la question du mentorat informel par rapport au mentorat formel reste sans réponse définitive quant à la supériorité d’une forme sur l’autre. De plus, en dépit des divergences de points de vue dans la littérature, il ressort que le mentorat joue un rôle positif dans le développement professionnel des nouveaux enseignants pour l’ensemble des fonctions composant leur charge professorale, incluant la fonction enseignement. Enfin, les expériences menées dans différents établissements nous permettent d’examiner des modalités d’implantation et de fonctionnement ainsi que de proposer un modèle de mentorat en trois étapes.This review of the literature was carried out in order to assess the impact of mentoring in educational settings and in particular mentoring addressing faculty in early stages of their academic career and the necessary requirements for implementing programmes. The main issues raised by our study indicate that as far as informal mentoring and formal mentoring are concerned there is no definite answer regarding the efficiency of one over the other. Furthermore despite contrasted views in the literature, it seems that mentoring does have a positive impact on professional development of early stage academics for most of the components of their professorial function including teaching. Last of all experiences carried out in various institutions allowed us to examine implementation and practise in mentoring and to devise a framework comprising three steps

Quasi-analyticity and determinacy of the full moment problem from finite to infinite dimensions

This paper is aimed to show the essential role played by the theory of quasi-analytic functions in the study of the determinacy of the moment problem on finite and infinite-dimensional spaces. In particular, the quasi-analytic criterion of self-adjointness of operators and their commutativity are crucial to establish whether or not a measure is uniquely determined by its moments. Our main goal is to point out that this is a common feature of the determinacy question in both the finite and the infinite-dimensional moment problem, by reviewing some of the most known determinacy results from this perspective. We also collect some properties of independent interest concerning the characterization of quasi-analytic classes associated to log-convex sequences.Comment: 28 pages, Stochastic and Infinite Dimensional Analysis, Chapter 9, Trends in Mathematics, Birkh\"auser Basel, 201

Defining a self-evaluation digital literacy framework for secondary educators: the DigiLit Leicester project

Despite the growing interest in digital literacy within educational policy, guidance for secondary educators in terms of how digital literacy translates into the classroom is lacking. As a result, many teachers feel ill-prepared to support their learners in using technology effectively. The DigiLit Leicester project created an infrastructure for holistic, integrated change, by supporting staff development in the area of digital literacy for secondary school teachers and teaching support staff. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how the critique of existing digital literacy frameworks enabled a self-evaluation framework for practitioners to be developed. Crucially, this framework enables a co-operative, partnership approach to be taken to pedagogic innovation. Moreover, it enables social and ethical issues to underpin a focus on teacher-agency and radical collegiality inside the domain of digital literacy. Thus, the authors argue that the shared development framework constitutes a new model for implementing digital literacy aimed at transforming the provision of secondary education across a city

Explicit formulae in probability and in statistical physics

We consider two aspects of Marc Yor's work that have had an impact in statistical physics: firstly, his results on the windings of planar Brownian motion and their implications for the study of polymers; secondly, his theory of exponential functionals of Levy processes and its connections with disordered systems. Particular emphasis is placed on techniques leading to explicit calculations.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures. To appear in Seminaire de Probabilites, Special Issue Marc Yo

Employing the Metabolic “Branch Point Effect” to Generate an All-or-None, Digital-like Response in Enzymatic Outputs and Enzyme-Based Sensors

Here, we demonstrate a strategy to convert the graded Michaelis−Menten response typical of unregulated enzymes into a sharp, effectively all-or-none response. We do so using an approach analogous to the “branch point effect”, a mechanism observed in naturally occurring metabolic networks in which two or more enzymes compete for the same substrate. As a model system, we used the enzymatic reaction of glucose oxidase (GOx) and coupled it to a second, nonsignaling reaction catalyzed by the higher affinity enzyme hexokinase (HK) such that, at low substrate concentrations, the second enzyme outcompetes the first, turning off the latter’s response. Above an arbitrarily selected “threshold” substrate concentration, the nonsignaling HK enzyme saturates leading to a “sudden” activation of the first signaling GOx enzyme and a far steeper dose−response curve than that observed for simple Michaelis−Menten kinetics. Using the well-known GOx-based amperometric glucose sensor to validate our strategy, we have steepen the normally graded response of this enzymatic sensor into a discrete yes/no output similar to that of a multimeric cooperative enzyme with a Hill coefficient above 13. We have also shown that, by controlling the HK reaction we can precisely tune the threshold target concentration at which we observe the enzyme output. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of this strategy for achieving effective noise attenuation in enzyme logic gates. In addition to supporting the development of biosensors with digital-like output, we envisage that the use of all-or-none enzymatic responses will also improve our ability to engineer efficient enzyme-based catalysis reactions in synthetic biology applications