LITERACY FOR LEARNING IN FURTHER EDUCATION IN THE UK: A SYMPOSIUM

The Literacies for Learning in Further Education (LfLFE) project, a collaboration between two universities – Stirling and Lancaster – and four further education colleges – Anniesland, Perth, Lancaster and Morecambe, and Preston, funded for three years from January 2004 as part of Phase 3 of the TLRP. The project draws on work already done on literacy practices engaged in by people in schools, higher education and the community and seeks to extend the insights gained from these studies into further education. It aims to explore the literacy practices of students and those practices developed in different parts of the curriculum and develop pedagogic interventions to support students’ learning more effectively. This project involves examining literacy across the many domains of people’s experiences, the ways in which these practices are mobilised and realised within different domains and their capacity to be mobilised and recontextualised elsewhere to support learning. A project such as this raises many theoretical, methodological and practical challenges, not least in ensuring validity across four curriculum areas in four sites drawing upon the collaboration of sixteen practitioner researchers. This symposium of four papers examines some of the challenges and findings from the first eighteen months of the project. The first paper explores some of the findings regarding students’ literacy practices in their everyday lives and those required of them in their college studies. The second focuses on one approach adopted by the project as a method through which to elicit student literacy practices. The other two papers focus on different aspects of partnership within the project, in particular the attempts to enable students and lecturers to be active researchers rather than simply respondent

Apparatus for damping operator induced oscillations of a controlled system

Flight control-related apparatus for damping operator induced oscillations of a controlled system responding to an operator controlled signal is described. The device utilizes a lag-lead filter for frequency and amplitude estimation of the control input, and a rectification and smoothing filter for producing a signal proportional to the absolute value of the frequency and amplitude estimate for use in suppression of the control system output signal. In one embodiment, this is accomplished by computing a correction signal in a correction generating section. In a second embodiment, a second rectification and smoothing filter produces a signal proportional to the absolute value of the controlled input signal. A ratio of the outputs of the first and second rectification and smoothing filters is then used in a generator to generate a gain factor k sub q for the control system to reduce the gain of the output signal of the control system, thereby to provide a damped control output signal without rate limiting the controlled element

Cash Rental Rates for Iowa -- 2004 Survey

Typical cash rental rates for cropland in each Iowa county are presented.

Open Science Happens Somewhere: Exploring the use of Science OER in Schools

This paper concerns a pilot exploring the use of openly licensed content in secondary schools. Specifically it looks at the use of the Open University’s (OU) OpenScienceLab (OSL) in two remote rural schools in the West Highlands of Scotland. OSL is a series of online experiments openly licensed for anyone to use, they are about learning through experimentation, and are part of a wider OU interest in how to support and develop inquiry based learning at a distance (Scanlon 2012). This area is of particular relevance to Scottish schools, as the underlying pedagogy of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) promotes interdisciplinary thinking and learning through inquiry (Macintyre 2014). The idea of the pilot was to work on how “open content” might be used in schools to understand what openness might mean in and for educational practice. While our initial intention was simply to run these in schools after the first workshops it became apparent while the technical and licences were open and it was relatively clear how to do the experiments, people were uncertain how to use them in their educational practice. Emphasising the need to attend to Educational Practice as well as Openness in OEP. The pilot took a participatory design approach (Sanders and Westerlund 2011; Mor et.al 2012), to developing and support practices around the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) in classroom. Through a series of workshops and schools visits we looked to solve these problems from the classroom out, using the teachers experience to develop learning journeys that worked for teachers and pupils. With teachers we created a learning journey using the OU’s free platform OpenLearnWorks to wrap the experiments in a mixture of existing and newly developed OER. Two journeys were created, these will be run in two locations with with two sets of teachers in December 2014. The paper will report on the outcomes for pupils and teachers of this final stage. In doing so it will reflect on the participatory design process, highlighting the practices developed to support the use of open content, drawing out broader conclusions might support the use open materials in the classroom

Design of a nonlinear adaptive filter for suppression of shuttle pilot-induced oscillation tendencies

Analysis of a longitudinal pilot-induced oscillation (PIO) experienced just prior to touchdown on the final flight of the space shuttle's approach landing tests indicated that the source of the problem was a combination of poor basic handling qualities aggravated by time delays through the digital flight control computer and rate limiting of the elevator actuators due to high pilot gain. A nonlinear PIO suppression (PIOS) filter was designed and developed to alleviate the vehicle's PIO tendencies by reducing the gain in the command path. From analytical and simulator studies it was shown that the PIOS filter, in an adaptive fashion, can attenuate the command path gain without adding phase lag to the system. With the pitch attitude loop of a simulated shuttle model closed, the PIOS filter increased the gain margin by a factor of about two

Identification of Carbohydrate Metabolism Genes in the Metagenome of a Marine Biofilm Community Shown to Be Dominated by Gammaproteobacteria and Bacteroidetes

Polysaccharides are an important source of organic carbon in the marine environment and degradation of the insoluble and globally abundant cellulose is a major component of the marine carbon cycle. Although a number of species of cultured bacteria are known to degrade crystalline cellulose, little is known of the polysaccharide hydrolases expressed by cellulose-degrading microbial communities, particularly in the marine environment. Next generation 454 Pyrosequencing was applied to analyze the microbial community that colonizes and degrades insoluble polysaccharides in situ in the Irish Sea. The bioinformatics tool MG-RAST was used to examine the randomly sampled data for taxonomic markers and functional genes, and showed that the community was dominated by members of the Gammaproteobacteria and Bacteroidetes. Furthermore, the identification of 211 gene sequences matched to a custom-made database comprising the members of nine glycoside hydrolase families revealed an extensive repertoire of functional genes predicted to be involved in cellulose utilization. This demonstrates that the use of an in situ cellulose baiting method yielded a marine microbial metagenome considerably enriched in functional genes involved in polysaccharide degradation. The research reported here is the first designed to specifically address the bacterial communities that colonize and degrade cellulose in the marine environment and to evaluate the glycoside hydrolase (cellulase and chitinase) gene repertoire of that community, in the absence of the biases associated with PCR-based molecular techniques

Embedding information literacy skills as employability attributes

There is clear evidence that graduates, in general, lack the personal skills, attitudes and behaviors needed for success in the workplace. For university students, gaining employability skills such as information literacy, reflective thinking and writing skills throughout their education is now more important than ever. British Universities have been increasingly investing in various strategies to ensure that their graduates are fully equipped with knowledge and transferable skills and are able to respond to the changing needs of the job market. With the heightened need for our graduates to be employable, the focus has grown from academic literacy to include 'workplace literacy'. However, these two should not be considered separate entities but rather a development from one to the other. At Middlesex University an intra-university team has built a framework to target the development of academic and information literacy as well as graduate employability. The team comprises staff from the School of Engineering and Information Sciences (EIS), the Learner Development Unit (LDU) and Learning Resources (LR). This paper aims to share our experiences at Middlesex University in devising such a collaborative strategy. We will also discuss the results of our work so far, including the changes which have been made and the results of a survey to show the impact on the students’ progress

Embedding information literacy skills as employability attributes

There is clear evidence that graduates, in general, lack the personal skills, attitudes and behaviors needed for success in the workplace. For university students, gaining employability skills such as information literacy, reflective thinking and writing skills throughout their education is now more important than ever. British Universities have been increasingly investing in various strategies to ensure that their graduates are fully equipped with knowledge and transferable skills and are able to respond to the changing needs of the job market. With the heightened need for our graduates to be employable, the focus has grown from academic literacy to include 'workplace literacy'. However, these two should not be considered separate entities but rather a development from one to the other. At Middlesex University an intra-university team has built a framework to target the development of academic and information literacy as well as graduate employability. The team comprises staff from the School of Engineering and Information Sciences (EIS), the Learner Development Unit (LDU) and Learning Resources (LR). This paper aims to share our experiences at Middlesex University in devising such a collaborative strategy. We will also discuss the results of our work so far, including the changes which have been made and the results of a survey to show the impact on the students’ progress

Medicaid and CHIP Strategies for Improving Child Health

Explains state programs' need for child health measures that focus on outcomes; are standardized across programs, agencies, and states; and reward performance through provider reimbursement. Points out opportunities for foundation and government support