Study design and methodology

A considerable body of recent literature describes the profound changes occurring as societies move from agricultural and industrial economies to a highly interconnected global knowledge economy (see, for example, Dertouzos, 1997; Tapscott & Williams, 2006). In the industrial age, the pace at which new knowledge evolved was relatively slow and a major role of schooling was to ensure that students mastered a well-defined set of knowledge and skills. However, with the advent of the 21st century, people are finding such abilities no longer sufficient when facing the everyday realities of the workplace. These realities demand making rapid decisions based on incomplete information when tackling novel situations, an aptitude for working through a plethora of information of varying levels of accuracy when tackling ill-defined problems, and the capacity to collaborate with a diverse team that may be distributed globally when endeavoring to accomplish personal and organizational goals (Peters, 1997).\ud \ud A strong theme running through these projects is that curricular and pedagogical changes need to take place if schools are to successfully help students develop these learning outcomes. The role of ICT is envisaged not simply as a technical skill or as a means of improving learning effectiveness but also as a way of transforming the goals and processes of education. In fact, there is increasing evidence that young people who have always been surrounded by and interacted continuously with ICT develop a different approach to learning and knowledge management from students who have not had this opportunity (Pedró, 2006). The OECD is conducting a study on these “new millennium learners” to examine the challenges they pose and the extent to which their emergence will contest prevailing views of interpersonal communications, knowledge management, and learning within schools

Diffuse Scattering and Monte Carlo Studies or Relaxor Ferroelectrics

A renewed interest in the field of ferroelectricity has taken place in recent years since the finding of exceptional piezoelectric properties in the lead-oxide class of relaxor ferroelectric materials typified by the disordered perovskite PbZn1/3Nb2/3O3 (PZN). Although PZN and numerous related materials have been extensively studied over a long period, a detailed understanding of the exact nature of their polar nanostructure has still not emerged. In this article, we describe the development of Monte Carlo computer models, which seek to account for the detailed three-dimensional (3-D) diffuse neutron scattering data that have been recorded from a single crystal of PZN. It has been established that the observed diffuse patterns are due to planar nanodomains oriented normal to the six 〈110〉 directions, but there is still some uncertainty concerning the direction of the local Pb ionic shifts, which remains an area of controversy. It is argued that further detailed analysis and experiments in which data are recorded with the crystal in an applied field should allow these remaining issues to be resolved