Some Examples of Best Practice in Open Educational Resources

The examples of best practice in Open Educational Resources (OER) that follow typify a change in learning and teaching practices that has been ushered in with the development of and increased access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). These developments have been occurring over the past fifteen to twenty years in tertiary educational institutions around the world. Open courseware, open access, open practices, that use OER, have become a state of the art orientation towards teaching and learning for many teaching and research practitioners and students. This is the case above all in the area of distance education, where online and electronic delivery of courses has become commonplace. Of course, debates have arisen over the nature of open learning, open educational resources, open courseware, open access, open practices. What do such terms mean? What implications does 'open' have for tertiary education, for educators, authors and researchers, and for students? What theory can underpin OER? What does OER mean in relation to distance education? What does online and open education mean for studentlecturer relations (Anderson, 2011)? Such debates are not unusual in educational theory. If they follow the pattern of other educational debates, they will reach their peak, ferment, be dismissed and glossed over, be resurrected, be transformed. Whatever the case, they occupy an important place in the pedagogical imagination, particularly in light of the marketing of education within a global context. And marketing is an important issue in itself: funding, sustainability, advertising and promotion, all have implications for the integrity of teaching and learning, and for attracting students. Along with this is the idea of the student as a consumer or as a client, language transferred across from the consumerist society in which many of us live. OER does not exist in a morally neutral world. This is reflected in the socio-ethical concerns of the four cases of OER practices presented. Each of the four providers of OER is deeply aware of their social obligations to indigenous and/or disadvantaged groups within their sphere of educational influence and interest. A recurring theme is that education ought to be available to everyone, that such education ought to be the best available, and that it ought to be free. This amounts to what could be seen as profound idealism. Such idealism is especially evident in the documentation and web-sites of Athabasca and OpenLearn. That said, the examples of practice in OER discussed here reveal implicit assumptions about the ubiquitous nature of information and communication technologies. It is not the case that information and communication technologies are available equally, or even at all, in every place in the world. Class, race, ethnic and gender distinctions operate in many societies. These distinctions preclude universal availability of education of any kind to every social group, never mind those that rely on computers and computer technologies (themselves dependent on the availability of electricity and other services regarded as basic to the privileged in affluent societies). Nor is it the case that everyone actually wants a tertiary education. These are debates not addressed here. Further information about each subject in these examples of OER adoption can be found by following up the bibliographic information. The examples of practice in OER are an explicit result of the availability of open access to various web-sites and documents on the web. Hence, there is a direct relation between what each institution aims to do and the possibility of producing a document such as this: open-ness in terms of freely available enabled this research and is an indication of what can be done within an educational research environment that is committed to collaboration and dissemination of information and insight. Four examples of best practice in OER are explored in this document. They are: Athabasca Open CourseWare from Athabasca University in Canada, OpenLearn initiative from the Open University in the United Kingdom, Otago Polytechnic OER from the Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand, and OpenCourseWare UOC from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalunya) in Spain. Each example follows a similar structure. A rationale for choosing these examples was that these were successful cases of OER adoption at the time of this research. Also, it is believed that these institutions represented a diverse range of educational providers located in different countries and continents. Thus, they also provide a diverse, and so richer, range of insights in relation to the adoption of OER.</p

Instructing Judges: Ethical Experience and Educational Technique

Most professional responsibility textbooks do not discuss judicial conduct, and not surprisingly, many judges find themselves unprepared for the ethical dilemmas they face when they make the transition from partisan advocate to neutral arbiter. Gray and Zemans discuss the nine-topic curriculum for judicial educators to use to teach judicial ethics to judges at programs for new judges, continuing judicial education courses and judicial conferences

Instructing Judges: Ethical Experience and Educational Technique

Most professional responsibility textbooks do not discuss judicial conduct, and not surprisingly, many judges find themselves unprepared for the ethical dilemmas they face when they make the transition from partisan advocate to neutral arbiter. Gray and Zemans discuss the nine-topic curriculum for judicial educators to use to teach judicial ethics to judges at programs for new judges, continuing judicial education courses and judicial conferences

The subject/object distinction in mystical experiencing

For human beings, consciousness is that which determines and constitutes the content, order and form of all of our experience. It is consciousness which generates our awareness as our own. Both experience and awareness provide the ontological basis to all that is possible for us. The conscious experience that we have - our thoughts, our feelings, our being aware of our existence in the world and our behaviour- either as isolatable goings-on, or in a more general everyday sense, can be divided into the rational and the intuitive. This is a rough division only, and is meant to represent the mediating or non-mediating role which consciousness plays in our experience, in terms of the structures which consciousness imposes to constitute the experience as it is. Generally speaking, rational experience is that which is bounded and constructed by the constraints of logic and language. Rational experience provides the framework within which nearly all of our thinking and behaving is manifested. At a very basic level this is seen in the simple stimulus/response mechanism with which we are all very familiar.(For example, when we are hungry, we know that the hunger can be satisfied by eating.) At a more sophisticated level, it is manifested in the complicated mental processes we might go through in order to solve a mathematical problem

A temperate river estuary is a sink for methanotrophs adapted to extremes of pH, temperature and salinity

River Tyne (UK) estuarine sediments harbour a genetically and functionally diverse community of methane-oxidizing bacteria (methanotrophs), the composition and activity of which were directly influenced by imposed environmental conditions (pH, salinity, temperature) that extended far beyond those found in situ. In aerobic sediment slurries methane oxidation rates were monitored together with the diversity of a functional gene marker for methanotrophs (pmoA). Under near in situ conditions (4-30°C, pH 6-8, 1-15gl-1 NaCl), communities were enriched by sequences affiliated with Methylobacter and Methylomonas spp. and specifically a Methylobacter psychrophilus-related species at 4-21°C. More extreme conditions, namely high temperatures ≥40°C, high ≥9 and low ≤5 pH, and high salinities ≥35gl-1 selected for putative thermophiles (Methylocaldum), acidophiles (Methylosoma) and haloalkaliphiles (Methylomicrobium). The presence of these extreme methanotrophs (unlikely to be part of the active community in situ) indicates passive dispersal from surrounding environments into the estuary

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mesmer and His Legacy: Literature, Culture, and Science

The second half of the eighteenth century saw the emergence of Franz Anton Mesmer's theories and therapies concerning the curative power of animal magnetism, an innate force that he claimed could be harnessed and directed to great healing effect. Formally dismissed by a French Royal Commission in 1784, the many positive treatment outcomes were attributed to the patient's own imagination. This acknowledgement by the scientific fraternity that imagination alone could effect cures signalled that Mesmer's work had uncovered new, exciting and even dangerous possibilities about the power of the mind. Always a controversial subject, those who chose to examine animal magnetism, or its later incarnations of mesmerism or hypnosis, were always at risk of social and professional criticism, even disgrace and exclusion, which raises the question of how and why respected members of the social and scientific community would approach this multifarious topic. By selecting as case studies three previously neglected figures in the mesmerism scholarship, namely, Ada Lovelace and two physician-writers, Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as incorporating a cutting-edge discussion of Mesmer's life, 'art', and complicated relationship with the scientific community, this thesis offers new perspectives through which to re-examine the complex phenomenon of mesmerism, its possible medical applicability, and the manifold literary representations it elicited. Drawing upon archival sources, scientific texts, letters, non-fictional and fictional works, this interdisciplinary study combines close textual analysis with an examination of scientific, social and cultural contexts. Through this pluralistic critical approach, and by seeking to understand the endurance of what may now be considered a protoscience rather than a pseudoscience, the thesis concludes that while Mesmer's work paved the way for a serious research into the constructs of the mind, the qualities of vision, observation and communication are essential to the re-evaluation of new ideas and their interpretation

Cobaltocene-mediated catalytic monooxygenation using holo and heme domain cytochrome P450 BM3

The feasibility of replacing NADPH with 1,1′-dicarboxycobaltocene in the catalytic cycle of cytochrome P450 BM3 has been explored. Using the holoprotein, the surrogate mediator was observed to reduce both the FAD and FMN in the reductase domain, as well as the iron in the heme domain. In an electrochemical system, the mediator was able to support lauric acid hydroxylation at a rate of 16.5 nmol product/nmol enzyme/minute. Similar electron transfer and catalysis were observed for the heme domain alone in the presence of the metallocene; the turnover rate in this case was 1.8 nmol product/nmol enzyme/minute. Parallel studies under the same conditions using a previously reported cobalt sepulchrate mediator showed that the two systems give similar results for both the holoenzyme and the heme domain