Development of adult education

I. INTRODUCTORY - Early efforts to establish Adult education - philanthropy - great educationalists of the Nineteenth Century. pp 1 - 36. • II. THE INFLUENCE OF THE MECHANICS' INSTITUTIONS. pp.37 - 56. • III. THE CONTINUATION SCHOOL SYSTEM - rise of technical schools - establishment of Department of Education. pp.57 - 82. • IV. UNIVERSITY EXTENSION. pp.83 - 105. • V. WORKERS' EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATION. pp.106 - 135. • VI. RECENT DEVELOPMENTS - W.E.A. work Continued - education within factories - Birmingham University and Trade Unions - Misfits in industry. pp.136 - 154. • VII. ADULT EDUCATION ABROAD - European Countries - America - The Colonies - Australia - Conclusion. pp.155 - 177.In conclusion one might add that although there yet remains a great deal to he done in the educational world, yet education alone and unaided can never bring about the longed-for reforms which many enthusiasts would claim. Education alone can never raise to a high level the standard of living of certain classes. We no longer believe with Socrates that knowledge is virtue. Indeed education alone can never affect to any great degree those who are apathetic, who do not spontaneously take advantage of what it offers. All that can be done in the realm of adult education is to provide a means to betterment mentally, morally, and physically for those who will of their own accord accept of it. Education can never be thrust upon adults. It must be provided in response to a spontaneous demand. In that respect therefore, adult education depends upon primary and secondary education. If they are unsuccessful adult education is almost an impossibility. Again, if education is to achieve anything very much it must co-operate with other arts and sciences which have to deal with human beings. "At present the educational campaign to direct our energies to better advantage is carried on by various field services, which, working without any knowledge of the general purpose and scope of other operations, are marked by much confusion of intention and enormous waste of energy. The responsibility for this disadvantage must lie in the patch-work character of most of our schemes of educational reform, social improvement and betterment of living conditions. Real progress towards such betterment demands a biological point of view, and intensive co-operation in the numerous departments of research. The word life should be associated with words suggesting the commonest phases of human behaviour - home, school, college, social and political life,the life of the courts, prisons, reformatories, and of individual persons and groups, such as the life of a community, nation and race

The Development of Teaching Skills to Support Active Learning in University Science (ALIUS)

This paper describes an Australian Learning and Teaching Council funded project for which Learning Design is encompassed in the broadest sense. ALIUS (Active Learning In University Science) takes the design of learning back to the learning experiences created for students. ALIUS is not about designing a particular activity, or subject, or course, but rather the development of a method, or process, by which we have re-designed the way in which learning occurs in large university classrooms world wide

ASELL : the advancing science by enhancing learning in the laboratory project

Most science educators and researchers will agree that the laboratory experience ranks as a major factor that influences students’ attitudes to their science courses. Consequently, good laboratory programs should play a major role in influencing student learning and performance. The laboratory program can be pivotal in defining a student\u27s experience in the sciences, and if done poorly, can be a major contributing factor in causing disengagement from the subject area. The challenge remains to provide students with laboratory activities that are relevant, engaging and offer effective learning opportunities

The ACELL project: Student participation, professional development, and improving laboratory learning

The Australian Physical Chemistry Enhanced Laboratory Learning (APCELL) project (Barrie, Buntine, Jamie and Kable 2001a, 2001b, 2001c), and its all-of-chemistry successor, ACELL (Read, 2006a) are examples of contemporary efforts to meet the challenge of engaging students in laboratory activities which are both chemically and educationally sound. The project is collaborative; it overcomes many of the significant constraints imposed by the unavailability of time from individual teachers, by drawing on the resources and expertise of multiple institutions as well as chemical and pedagogical expertise. The project continues to produce a range of tangible outcomes, including chemistry education research publications, a database of freely available tested experiments, and pedagogical design tools (all available from http://acell.chem.usyd.edu.au/). Objective evidence is required to support the putative notion that the A(P)CELL concept is of benefit to educators as they design and evaluate laboratory programs; collection and evaluation of such empirical data is essential if views such as those of Hawkes (2004) are to be effectively challenged. In this paper we report on the views of staff and student delegates to the February 2006 ACELL Educational Workshop

Incorporating Social Context and Domain Knowledge for Entity Recognition

Recognizing entity instances in documents according to a knowl-edge base is a fundamental problem in many data mining applica-tions. The problem is extremely challenging for short documents in complex domains such as social media and biomedical domains. Large concept spaces and instance ambiguity are key issues that need to be addressed. Most of the documents are created in a social context by common authors via social interactions, such as reply and citations. Such social contexts are largely ignored in the instance-recognition liter-ature. How can users ’ interactions help entity instance recognition? How can the social context be modeled so as to resolve the ambi-guity of different instances? In this paper, we propose the SOCINST model to formalize the problem into a probabilistic model. Given a set of short document