Negotiating the Culture of the Academy: Chinese Graduate Students in Canada

This paper presents the process and results of a narrative inquiry into the stories of eight Chinese international graduate students. Results show three main commonalities in participants’ education narratives in China: parental influence, the exam system and independent study. In the Canadian setting, specific aspects of the academic culture are experienced as permeable (written work, lab work, tests and reading ability) or impermeable (in-class discussions, oral presentations, group work, oral discourse, communicating with local people). Discussion articulates participants’ use of unique personal resources, which results in distinctive trajectories of entry into and navigation within this new academic culture. Cet article présente le processus et les résultats d\u27une enquête narrative de huit étudiants internationaux chinois de troisème cycle. Les résultats montrent les trois éléments communs dans la narration des participants: l\u27influence des parents, le système des examens, et l\u27étude individuelle. Dans le cadre canadien, les participants ont reconnu des aspects spécifiques de la culture académique comme perméables (travaux écrits, travaux de laboratoire,les examens et compétence en lecture) ou imperméables (discussions en classe, présentations orales, travaux en groupes, entretiens oraux, et communication avec les habitants locaux). La discussion clarifie l\u27usage d\u27uniques ressources personnelles par chaque participant La discussion clarifie l\u27usage d\u27uniques ressources personnelles par chaque participant dont le résultat définit des trajectoires distinctifs d\u27entrée et de navigation au coeur de cette nouvelle culture académique

Leading the Leaders: Embedded Educational Leadership Initiatives at the University of Windsor

This project explored the impact and scope of embedded educational leadership initiatives (EELIs) at the University of Windsor. EELIs are programs through which individual members of the campus community autonomously and often collaboratively develop and pursue educational improvement projects within their own contexts. Such initiatives are quite common at Canadian universities, and can include, for example, small grants schemes, teaching chairs, and peer observation of teaching networks. They serve many needs at universities, and are widely believed to be an effective approach to improving teaching and learning, driving innovation, building leadership capacity, and communicating the value institutions place on quality teaching. There has been comparatively little empirical research on the outcomes of these programs, and infrastructure for their evaluation for improvement of productivity or strategic alignment tends to be limited. Moreover, despite their strong potential, without a coordinated approach, it is hard to capitalize on the expertise created over time, to bring groups together to address joint concerns through collaborative initiatives, or to establish mechanisms to identify and further support projects whose expansion or duplication would be of benefit to other units on campus.https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/ctlreports/1002/thumbnail.jp

The Ontario Universities’ Teaching Evaluation Toolkit: Feasibility Study

This feasibility study (the first of three phases) sought to develop a framework for improvement-oriented formative and summative assessment of teaching in Ontario. It is intended to inform future developments in teaching evaluation in the Province, and to offer a well-contextualized understanding of what the goals of teaching evaluation ought to be, what the challenges are, and the kinds of initiatives and infrastructure that would best promote the evolution of a data- informed and inquiry-inspiring approach to evaluating and improving teaching. Our institutionally-based project teams identified and examined leading teaching evaluation practices in use internationally, compared to those in use in the Ontario context, and identified a range of aggregate data and technical tool elements to be considered when moving forward.https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/ctlreports/1003/thumbnail.jp

Shared Modular Course Development: A Feasibility Study

This project evaluated the viability of shared course development (SCD) and identified the necessary baseline mechanisms, principles, policies, and procedures for future joint course development collaborations. Although collaborative course design is still relatively new in Ontario, our institutionally-based project teams identified and researched a number of successful examples from Australia, Canada, Europe, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These successful models demonstrated the transformative possibilities of blended learning, expanded course variety, maintained or enhanced the breadth of course offerings, and reduced institution-specific development costs while maintaining delivery autonomy. They also focused on enhancing student learning and produced momentum for instructional improvement and course re-design among collaborating institutions. This report concludes that there is considerable value to the development of collaborative institutional cultures in and of itself, and that collaborative capacity will become an increasingly important core competency in the more differentiated and change-oriented university sector that is emerginghttps://scholar.uwindsor.ca/ctlreports/1000/thumbnail.jp

‘Mobile phones and the internet, mate’ : (Social) media, art, and revolution in Omar Robert Hamilton’s The City Always Wins

In Omar Robert Hamilton’s novel about the Arab Spring The City Always Wins (2017), readers observe that the phone charger has become as much of an essential as water to the protestors. Although the alternative media possess mass engagement, a global reach, and threaten power, over the course of his novel Hamilton traces the crushing of ‘Twitter revolution’ and the rise of a disillusionment and despair among the revolutionaries. This downward trajectory is typified both in the appellative journey from Hamilton’s non-profit media collective Mosireen – ‘those who insist’ – to the novel’s similar group, portentously named Chaos; and in the text’s tripartite reverse-chronological structure of ‘Tomorrow’, ‘Today’, and ‘Yesterday’. Hamilton’s cousin, the blogger and revolutionary activist Alaa Abd el Fattah, was arrested in March 2013 and sentenced to five years in jail in October 2014 for his role in protests. This detention on trumped-up charges inspired the hashtag #FreeAlaa and multimedia campaigns for his release, but the young man may now face a sentence extended by six months to three years due to his Facebook activity early on in the Egyptian revolution. Hamilton dedicates The City Always Wins to Alaa, writing that it ‘would have been a better book if I’d been able to talk to you’. Meanwhile, the author uses Twitter as an archive of an alternative, resistant history of revolutionary struggle; he embeds Tweets in the fabric of this experimental novel; and social media posts interrupt and punctuate the narrative as in the real life of these millennials. In this paper I explore the novel’s representations of (social) media and the impact these have both on everyday lives and modes of protest. Despite promising beginnings, the internet ultimately turns ‘toxic’ and is depicted as a Pandora’s box of dis- and misinformation, conspiracy theories, fake news, and the manipulations of state media mukhabarat. A more lasting alternative to media may be ‘creative insurgency’ (Kraidy 2016: 206−207). As such, I conclude this article by discussing what art can achieve that (citizen) journalism cannot, and how this applies to the novel’s portrayals of art, particularly music

New technologies for diagnosing active TB: the VANTDET diagnostic accuracy study

BackgroundTuberculosis (TB) is a devastating disease for which new diagnostic tests are desperately needed.ObjectiveTo validate promising new technologies [namely whole-blood transcriptomics, proteomics, flow cytometry and quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR)] and existing signatures for the detection of active TB in samples obtained from individuals with suspected active TB.DesignFour substudies, each of which used samples from the biobank collected as part of the interferon gamma release assay (IGRA) in the Diagnostic Evaluation of Active TB study, which was a prospective cohort of patients recruited with suspected TB.SettingSecondary care.ParticipantsAdults aged ≥ 16 years presenting as inpatients or outpatients at 12 NHS hospital trusts in London, Slough, Oxford, Leicester and Birmingham, with suspected active TB.InterventionsNew tests using genome-wide gene expression microarray (transcriptomics), surface-enhanced laser desorption ionisation time-of-flight mass spectrometry/liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (proteomics), flow cytometry or qRT-PCR.Main outcome measuresArea under the curve (AUC), sensitivity and specificity were calculated to determine diagnostic accuracy. Positive and negative predictive values were calculated in some cases. A decision tree model was developed to calculate the incremental costs and quality-adjusted life-years of changing from current practice to using the novels tests.ResultsThe project, and four substudies that assessed the previously published signatures, measured each of the new technologies and performed a health economic analysis in which the best-performing tests were evaluated for cost-effectiveness. The diagnostic accuracy of the transcriptomic tests ranged from an AUC of 0.81 to 0.84 for detecting all TB in our cohort. The performance for detecting culture-confirmed TB or pulmonary TB was better than for highly probable TB or extrapulmonary tuberculosis (EPTB), but was not high enough to be clinically useful. None of the previously described serum proteomic signatures for active TB provided good diagnostic accuracy, nor did the candidate rule-out tests. Four out of six previously described cellular immune signatures provided a reasonable level of diagnostic accuracy (AUC = 0.78–0.92) for discriminating all TB from those with other disease and latent TB infection in human immunodeficiency virus-negative TB suspects. Two of these assays may be useful in the IGRA-positive population and can provide high positive predictive value. None of the new tests for TB can be considered cost-effective.LimitationsThe diagnostic performance of new tests among the HIV-positive population was either underpowered or not sufficiently achieved in each substudy.ConclusionsOverall, the diagnostic performance of all previously identified ‘signatures’ of TB was lower than previously reported. This probably reflects the nature of the cohort we used, which includes the harder to diagnose groups, such as culture-unconfirmed TB or EPTB, which were under-represented in previous cohorts.Future workWe are yet to achieve our secondary objective of deriving novel signatures of TB using our data sets. This was beyond the scope of this report. We recommend that future studies using these technologies target specific subtypes of TB, specifically those groups for which new diagnostic tests are required.FundingThis project was funded by the Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation (EME) programme, a MRC and NIHR partnership

The HNF4A R76W mutation causes atypical dominant Fanconi syndrome in addition to a β cell phenotype

types: JOURNAL ARTICLEMutation specific effects in monogenic disorders are rare. We describe atypical Fanconi syndrome caused by a specific heterozygous mutation in HNF4A. Heterozygous HNF4A mutations cause a beta cell phenotype of neonatal hyperinsulinism with macrosomia and young onset diabetes. Autosomal dominant idiopathic Fanconi syndrome (a renal proximal tubulopathy) is described but no genetic cause has been defined.This article presents independent research supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Exeter Clinical Research Facility. The research is funded by a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award, (grant number 098395/Z/12/Z).Wellcome Trus