Displaced but not replaced: the impact of e-learning on academic identities in higher education.

Challenges facing universities are leading many to implement institutional strategies to incorporate e-learning rather than leaving its adoption up to enthusiastic individuals. Although there is growing understanding about the impact of e-learning on the student experience, there is less understanding of academics’ perceptions of e-learning and its impact on their identities. This paper explores the changing nature of academic identities revealed through case study research into the implementation of e-learning at one UK university. By providing insight into the lived experiences of academics in a university in which technology is not only transforming access to knowledge but also influencing the balance of power between academic and student in knowledge production and use, it is suggested that academics may experience a jolt to their ‘trajectory of self’ when engaging with e-learning. The potential for e-learning to prompt loss of teacher presence and displacement as knowledge expert may appear to undermine the ontological security of their academic identity

Technology and Discourse: A Comparison of Face-to-face and Telephone Employment Interviews

Very little research has investigated the comparability of telephone and face-to-face employment interviews. This exploratory study investigated interviewers' questioning strategies and applicants' causal attributions produced during semi structured telephone and face-to-face graduate recruitment interviews (N=62). A total of 2044 causal attributions were extracted from verbatim transcripts of these 62 interviews. It was predicted that an absence of visual cues would lead applicants to produce, and interviewers to focus on, information that might reduce the comparative anonymity of telephone interviews. Results indicate that applicants produce more personal causal attributions in telephone interviews. Personal attributions are also associated with higher ratings in telephone, but not face-to-face interviews. In face-to-face interviews, applicants who attributed outcomes to more global causes received lower ratings. There was also a non-significant tendency for interviewers to ask more closed questions in telephone interviews. The implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed

Interplay between edge states and simple bulk defects in graphene nanoribbons

We study the interplay between the edge states and a single impurity in a zigzag graphene nanoribbon. We use tight-binding exact diagonalization techniques, as well as density functional theory calculations to obtain the eigenvalue spectrum, the eigenfunctions, as well the dependence of the local density of states (LDOS) on energy and position. We note that roughly half of the unperturbed eigenstates in the spectrum of the finite-size ribbon hybridize with the impurity state, and the corresponding eigenvalues are shifted with respect to their unperturbed values. The maximum shift and hybridization occur for a state whose energy is inverse proportional to the impurity potential; this energy is that of the impurity peak in the DOS spectrum. We find that the interference between the impurity and the edge gives rise to peculiar modifications of the LDOS of the nanoribbon, in particular to oscillations of the edge LDOS. These effects depend on the size of the system, and decay with the distance between the edge and the impurity.Comment: 10 pages, 15 figures, revtex