Communities of Practice Along the Texas-Mexico Border: A University and School District Leadership Partnership

This chapter focuses on how one university leadership preparation program along the Texas-Mexico border made a deliberate and concerted effort to build a principal pipeline by establishing a local university school partnership with several local school districts along a border that is bilingual, bicultural, and binational. The preparation program focused on realigning to national standards, actively sought out collaborative feedback from district partners on the development of course assessments, the co-design of clinical experiences, establishing accessible in-district program scheduling, course instruction provided by highly qualified faculty, developing and implementing multiple program and course assessments, and established and implemented dispositions

Reflections on the impact of social technologies on lecturers in a pathway institution

Education has evolved over time from face-to-face teaching to computer-supported learning, and now to even more sophisticated electronic tools. In particular, social technologies are being used to supple- ment the classroom experience and to ensure that students are becoming increasingly engaged in ways that appeal to them. No matter how educationally beneficial, however, new technology is affected by its users. To investigate this, lecturers at the Eynesbury Institute of Business and Technology (EIBT)—a Higher Education pathway provider—were surveyed to determine their perception and application of social technolog(ies) in their personal, but predominantly ‘professional’ lives. Utilising a qualitative and autoethnographic approach, one author provides an insight into their own attitude toward social technologies, coupled with responses to three open-ended questions. Thereafter, the same questions were posed to EIBT academic staff to understand their willingness or reluctance to use social technologies in their practice as part of their first-year pathway course(s)

Autonomous systems in a military context (part 1) : A survey of the legal issues

While some are reluctant to admit it, we are witnessing a fundamental shift in the way that advanced militaries conduct their core business of fighting. Increasingly autonomous ‘unmanned' systems are taking on the ‘dull, dirty and dangerous' roles in the military, leaving human war fighters to assume an oversight role or focus on what are often more cognitively demanding tasks. To this end, many military forces already hold unmanned systems that crawl, swim and fly, performing mine disposal, surveillance and more direct combat roles. Having found their way into the military force structure quite rapidly, especially in the United States, there has been extensive debate concerning the legality and ethicality of their use. These topics often converge, but what is legal will not necessarily be moral, and vice versa. The authors' contribution comes in clearly separating the two parts. In this paper, they provide a detailed survey of the legality of employing autonomous weapons systems in a military context