Tri-Institutional Library Support: A Lesson in Forced Collaboration

This paper discusses the trials and tribulations of three separate institutional libraries supporting one new graduate-level academic program. In January 2002, a new distance graduate program in Applied Psychology began with technical, administrative, and academic support provided by three separate institutions. While one institution was initially charged with providing the bulk of library services, in reality, libraries at all three have contributed one service or another. The lead library provides remote database access and document delivery, and initially provided electronic reserves. After the first semester and several glitches, electronic reserves were moved to institutional library #2, which was also hosting the course management system. In the fall of 2002, institutional library #3 began to contribute with an information literacy module that has been incorporated into the orientation for all new students

Working with student expectations of tutor support in distance education: testing an expectations‐led quality assurance model

Action research studies in the United Kingdom with Open University students have shown that students come to distance education courses with variable expectations of the levels of service and support they will receive from their tutors. It has been further suggested that a specific expectations-led quality assurance process that enables the sharing of these expectations before a course starts could be of mutual benefit to the student and the tutor, as well as generally improving the overall quality of tutor support provided by the distance learning organisation. This process, it is argued, would be appreciated by the students, have beneficial effects on student satisfaction with tutor support, reducing student drop-out and increasing course completion rates. Could such a process that asks tutors to collect student expectations before a course begins be instituted effectively into a distance learning organisation and how would students and tutors respond to it? This paper reports on a large-scale project carried out by Oscail (the Irish National Distance Education Centre) aimed at developing and testing how students and tutors valued being involved in just such an Open and Distance Learning expectations-led quality assurance process. In the study reported here, all 96 tutors on an Oscail B.A. distance learning programme were asked two weeks before their course began to circulate the student expectations questionnaire to the 950 students on their tutorial lists. Tutors were asked to collect the questionnaires, reflect on the expectations of the students and consider how their tutorial practice and student support might change as a result of the exercise. Tutor and student views on the effectiveness of the exercise were also gathered through questionnaires and focus group meetings. The findings suggested that the majority of students and tutors involved in the study did see the value of the process and that it did help tutors (especially newly appointed ones) consider and respond to the type of support students hoped to receive. The practice of issuing student expectation questionnaires has now been embedded in Oscail introductory courses

EEF: Exponentially Embedded Families with Class-Specific Features for Classification

In this letter, we present a novel exponentially embedded families (EEF) based classification method, in which the probability density function (PDF) on raw data is estimated from the PDF on features. With the PDF construction, we show that class-specific features can be used in the proposed classification method, instead of a common feature subset for all classes as used in conventional approaches. We apply the proposed EEF classifier for text categorization as a case study and derive an optimal Bayesian classification rule with class-specific feature selection based on the Information Gain (IG) score. The promising performance on real-life data sets demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach and indicates its wide potential applications.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, to be published in IEEE Signal Processing Letter. IEEE Signal Processing Letter, 201

Reading and the Very Young Deaf Child

In recent years, educators have placed more and more emphasis on the importance of reading. If reading is this important, especially for the deaf child, why should it be postponed until he begins his formal education? The purpose of this paper is to investigate early reading and its advantages for the young deaf child. In this paper the writer will discuss the following questions: What is reading? What are the pre-requisites for reading? At what age are children ready to read? What advantages does early reading offer the deaf child? How can reading be taught to the very young deaf child

Great Plains Research Introduction - Vol. 2, No. 2, 1992

Most Americans possess an image of the Great Plains derived, I suspect, from a high-speed window. The interstate highways, those great passing through routes, provide constricted views; I-80, for example, trapped in the Platte River Valley across much of Nebraska, leads one to think of the Plains as flat. The image from 30,000-plus feet is no less informative, to the untrained observer, of the web of life below; even the giant circles of the center pivots bespeak large empty spaces. Neither viewing platform is sufficient to reveal the intricacies of the Plains, let alone the concerns of those who live here. When Frank Popper and Deborah Popper published their analysis showing a large number of distressed counties in the Great Plains, it was probably a conditioned evocation of such superficial images that enabled them to suggest a policy of planned depopulation and return to a Buffalo Commons

The Absence of Canadian Women in the Silent Picture Industry

How would women’s film history be written if there were no women filmmakers? This problem is not entirely hypothetical in the case of Canada because Canadian film history cannot be centered on film production, the model of so many other national film histories, because there was relatively little film production in Canada in the first decades. The dearth of Canadian domestic film production, whether with men or women in creative control, however, stands in stark contrast to a rich film-going culture in the silent era in Canada. The possibility of a history of Canadian women filmmakers from the silent era thus grapples with the processes that integrated moving pictures into the Canadian social formation, despite their imported status, most notably from the U.S. Because of this foundation of “history from below” rather than from the motion picture studio “down,” the Canadian Women’s Film History Project provides a significant and atypical historiographical intervention in the Women Film Pioneers project as well as film history generally (Morris 1978; Lacasse 1988; Gaudreault et al. 1996). In order to study the particularities of the Canadian case, the project inverts traditional power dynamics between production and consumption, filmmaking and film-going, and film as an aesthetic expression of authorship versus film as a popular pastime

When do health and well-being interventions work?:managerial commitment and context

Health and well-being interventions are increasingly assessed as complex processes rather than randomized controlled trials. In this study the health and wellbeing interventions refer to voluntary actions and are not in response to any regulatory requirement. This paper looks specifically at managerial commitment to these interventions and at the organisational context in which they occur. Ex-ante study predictions as to the effects of commitment in three organisations were made and then followed up. This commitment was positively associated with employee perceptions of health promotion campaigns. But broader impacts, such as commitment to the organisation and a sense of autonomy, were not evident. The explanation lies in wider features of the organisation of work: permanent constraints such as job design and shift systems ran against the aims of the health interventions. Relating well-intentioned interventions to such features of organisational life remains a challenge for many organisations

DevA, a GntR-like transcriptional regulator required for development in streptomyces coelicolor

The gram-positive filamentous bacterium Streptomyces coelicolor has a complex developmental cycle with three distinct phases: growth of the substrate mycelium, development of reproductive structures called aerial hyphae, and differentiation of these aerial filaments into long chains of exospores. During a transposon mutagenesis screen, we identified a novel gene (devA) required for proper development. The devA mutant produced only rare aerial hyphae, and those that were produced developed aberrant spore chains that were much shorter than wild-type chains and had misplaced septa. devA encodes a member of the GntR superfamily, a class of transcriptional regulators that typically respond to metabolite effector molecules. devA forms an operon with the downstream gene devB, which encodes a putative hydrolase that is also required for aerial mycelium formation on R5 medium. S1 nuclease protection analysis showed that transcription from the single devA promoter was temporally associated with vegetative growth, and enhanced green fluorescent protein transcriptional fusions showed that transcription was spatially confined to the substrate hyphae in the wild type. In contrast, devAB transcript levels were dramatically upregulated in a devA mutant and the devA promoter was also active in aerial hyphae and spores in this background, suggesting that DevA might negatively regulate its own production. This suggestion was confirmed by gel mobility shift assays that showed that DevA binds its own promoter region in vitro