Computer program documentation user information for the MPAD trajectory tape print program (TRJPR1)

The Trajectory Tape Print Program (TRJPR1) was developed to print applicable information from a Space Trajectory tape created by the Mission Planning and Analysis Division (MPAD) in the MPAD Common Format for the on-orbit phase of the Mission. Instructions for TRJPR1's use are given

A transdisciplinary currere

In the shifting of universities towards a more clearly economic imperative rather than social good, the relationship between higher education teaching and professional practice has become more apparent in the courses offered by universities and their relationship with employment and employers. This paper envisions all high-levelvocational education as professional and discusses how an understanding of the phenomenology of transdisciplinary practice could help define how it might be structured, and with whom, in professional practice. Specifically, the paper considers a phenomenological understanding of how knowing can be conceived of a patterning of causes which forms the basis of the concept of a lifelong curriculum, or currere, might reconceptualise the curriculum from a course outline to what Pinar calls ‘a complicated conversation’ (Pinar, 2011)

Happiness and education: troubling students for their own contentment

Currently higher education strategies seem to concentrate on the expedient, developing skills that can secure employment in the world of work. Following Dreyfus and Spinosa (2003), this may have immediate advantages, but in totalising pedagogic practices it may restrict our openness to people and to our own contentment with ourselves. Valuable as this may be as a way to satisfy politico-economic policy imperatives, it strays from education as an edifying process where personal development represents, through the facing up to distress and despair, an unsettling of our developing identity and a negation of our immediate desire satisfaction. Such an unsettling is not intended to give pleasure or satisfaction in the normative way in which the imperative of happiness has been used in student satisfaction surveys or in the wider societal context that this totalisation represents (Ahmed 2010). What I propose for higher education is not a dominant priority to feed the happiness for others but a mission to personal contentment revealed through realising student potentialities to them and so recognising their limitations as part of seeking an attunement to contentment

A transcending a single reality

The discourse of a neo-liberal ideology founded on a notion of universal truth and the values or a western tradition have been enshrined in a persistent colonisation of educational institutions and their practices. Global meaning has abused anthological knowledges and ecologies forcing notions of education as pedagogy and curriculum onto communities which do nothing to enable flourish but attempt to develop a form a sanction well-being which is contra to emancipation, self-respect and community support. This colonisation is managed through access to technological connectivity as an ameliorator of change through-narrative of wealth and power. As such the post-modern is a simulacrum for a hidden continuity of privilege that remerges in the present

Why academics should have a duty of truth telling in an epoch of post-truth?

In this article, I advocate that university education has at its core a mission to enable its communities of scholars (staff and students) to make judgements on what can be trusted, and that they, themselves, should be truth-tellers. It is about society being able to rely upon academic statements, avoiding deliberate falsehoods. This requires trust in oneself to make those judgements; an obligation to do so; and the courage to speak out when such judgements might be unpopular, risky or potentially unsafe. I suggest it should be a duty placed on academics to be truth-tellers and to educate potentially gullible others in what it is to have worthy and reliable self-trust in their own judgements

Quality in work based studies not lost, merely undiscovered

The argument made in this paper is that good quality is subsumed into the practices of skilful participants and that institutions should act upon their consciences. This is particularly important in the complex blending of the workplace and the academy, where codified quality may disrupt learning rather than support a flourishing environment for all stakeholders. Following Heidegger's notion of referential totalities it is proposed that what should be sought is concealment of quality and for its discovery only in times of genuine concern. Ultimately this means trusting the expertise of those involved, not the precepts to control activities

Should contentment be a key aim in higher education?

Higher education institutions are major concentrations of political, social, economic, intellectual and communicative resources. They reach freely across populations and cultures, and connect to government, professions, industry and the arts. The neo-liberal logic of markets has entered the realm of (higher) education. Marketing functions centre on the creation, codification and transmission of knowledge, and the certification of graduates and the nature of education are commercialised, both in provision and in curriculum content. This leads to discourse on the benefits of education being positioned almost exclusively in terms of their effect on income. The perspective taken in the paper is the development of a happiness motive which asks education to challenge what it is to be a member of society: what moral and ontological stance one will seek to take in developing one’s future. The satisfied student perpetuates the current lifeworld in which they find themselves, seeking to improve the quality of the services provided. It is proposed that an overly-emphasised desire-satisfaction culture inhibits the edifying mission of universities. This is not to argue against high quality service provision but to differentiate it from the edifying role of personal challenge, determination and social responsibility conceptualised here as profound happiness or contentment, and the university’s role in its development. It calls for a different and more refreshing approach to higher education, which is losing its shape and ‘morphing’ into socially-experienced training provision

The three goods of higher education; as education, in its educative and in its institutional practices

Although there has been considerable debate in contemporary literature on the erosion of the public good in higher education, most of it has been concentrated on the word ‘public’ rather than on the notion of ‘good’. Further, the idea of higher education and the organisations for its delivery have become conflated through a focus on the ‘good’ as inherent, intrinsic and instrumental. An idea is proposed, developed from a framework devised by Audi (2004): that higher education is intrinsically good; that aspects of its practice are feasibly inherently good; and institutional practices are instrumentally good. These three goods are commonly conflated rather than interwoven in our policymakers’ understanding of the contribution that higher education has for human flourishing and what contribution higher education providers make to the economics of society