FDTL voices : drawing from learning and teaching projects

This publication draws on insights and experiences from individuals and teams within learning and teaching development projects in higher education. It considers lessons learnt from the processes, outcomes and tangible outputs of the projects across the spectrum of the FDTL initiative, with the intention that colleagues can draw on and benefit from this experience. The overriding theme at the heart of every FDTL project has been the desire to achieve some form of positive and meaningful change at the level of the individual, institution or discipline. The continuing legacy of the programme has been to create wider community involvement as projects have engaged with the higher education sector on multiple levels - personal, institutional, practice, and policy. This publication has remained throughout a collaborative endeavour, supported by Academy colleagues. It is based around the four themes emerging from the initiative as a whole: • Sectoral/Organisational Change • Conceptual Change • Professional and Personal Development Partnership and • Project Managemen

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Practitioner articleIn the fields of business organisation and management much has been written and spoken about values and beliefs. However, we find ourselves entering a fresh and novel phase of experience, a new spirituality-linked epoch we can describe as a “postsecular” era in which the secularisation of society has given way to renewed attention to the values of faith, religion and spirituality

Framework for a technology-watch relay station

At the centre of the PRIME Faraday Partnership’s Technology Watch service is a growing series of technology and market reviews for managers and engineers in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) producing ‘smart’ products. Its aim is to help them maintain their awareness of new technologies and markets and thereby seize opportunities to innovate they might otherwise miss. The service has attracted considerable interest among users and observers. In this paper the authors outline the process behind the development of Technology Watch’s library of publications with a view to encouraging others to critique and adapt it for deployment in other industrial sectors

Conceptual frameworks and terminology in doctoral nursing research

Aim: To define conceptual frameworks and their inherent dichotomies, and integrate them with concomitant concepts to help early nursing doctoral researchers to develop their understanding of and engage with discourse further, so that nursing can demonstrate its ability to contribute to the meta-theoretical debate of doctoral research alongside other practices and theory-based disciplines. Background: Conceptual frameworks are central to nursing doctoral studies as they map and contextualise the philosophical assumptions of the research in relation to paradigms and ontological, epistemological and methodological foundations. They shape all aspects of the research design and provide a structure for theorising. They can also be a challenge for researchers and are under-discussed in the literature. Review methods: Literature review. Discussion: The key aspects of the conceptual framework debate in terms of objectivist, subjectivist paradigms and the wider paradigm debate, including retroduction and abduction, are reviewed here together with consideration of how these apply to nursing doctoral research. Conclusion: Conceptual frameworks are pivotal to nursing doctoral research as they clarify and integrate philosophical, methodological and pragmatic aspects of doctoral thesis while helping the profession to be seen as a research-based discipline, comfortable with the language of meta-theoretical debate. Implications for research/practice: Conceptual frameworks should form the methodological foundation for all nursing doctoral research

Backarc basin and ocean island basalts in the Narooma Accretionary Complex, Australia: setting, geochemistry and tectonics

The Cambrian-Ordovician Wagonga Group contains basalts at Melville Point and Barlings Beach, 20 km south of Batemans Bay, New South Wales. At Melville Point, the succession has basal altered basalts overlain by chert and interbedded siliceous mudstone of the Wagonga Group, in turn overlain by turbidites and chert of the Adaminaby Group with a latest Cambrian to earliest Ordovician age. By contrast, at Barlings Beach, basalt is associated with highly disrupted chert (tectonic mélange), various slivers of mudstone and turbidites, and turbidites of the Adaminaby Group. Immobile elements in the basalts show consistent patterns that allow the magmatic affinity and tectonic setting to be determined in spite of pervasive hydrothermal alteration and subsequent lower greenschist facies metamorphism that accompanied strong folding and multiple foliation development. The Melville Point basalts show Ti/V ratios transitional between arc and MORB and therefore may have formed in either a forearc or backarc basin setting. However, these rocks have higher Ti/V ratios, LREE, Th and Nb than found in forearc basalts and are therefore considered to have formed in a backarc basin setting. In contrast to Melville Point, most basalts at Barlings Beach have a geochemical signature distinctive of ocean island settings like those reported from elsewhere in the Wagonga Group. We believe these rocks developed in a Cambrian backarc basin setting. In the Early to Middle Ordovician, much of the ocean basin was inundated by quartzose turbidites followed by basin destruction with accretion/underplating at a Late Ordovician-early Silurian Benambran subduction zone and formation of the Narooma Accretionary Complex

Remote sensing of glacier change (1965 - 2021) and identification of surge-type glaciers on Severnaya Zemlya, Russian High Arctic

Glaciers in the Russian High Arctic have undergone accelerated mass loss due to atmospheric and oceanic warming in the Barents-Kara Seas region. Most studies have concentrated on the western Barents-Kara sector, despite evidence of accelerating mass loss as far east as Severnaya Zemlya. However, long-term trends in glacier change on Severnaya Zemlya are largely unknown and this record may be complicated by surge-type glaciers. Here, we present a long-term assessment of glacier change (1965-2021) on Severnaya Zemlya and a new inventory of surge-type glaciers using declassified spy-satellite photography (KH-7/9 Hexagon) and optical satellite imagery (ASTER, Sentinel-2A, Landsat 4/5 TM & 8 OLI). Glacier area reduced from 17,053 km2 in 1965 to 16,275 in 2021 (-5%; mean: -18%, max: -100%), with areal shrinkage most pronounced at land-terminating glaciers on southern Severnaya Zemlya, where there is a recent (post-2010s) increase in summer atmospheric temperatures. We find that surging may be more widespread than previously thought, with three glaciers classified confirmed as surge-type, eight as likely to have surged and nine as possible, comprising 11% of Severnaya Zemlya’s 190 glaciers (37% by area). Under continued warming, we anticipate accelerated retreat and increased likelihood of surging as basal thermal regimes shift