Key pedagogic thinkers: Anton Makarenko

This article gives an introduction to the life and work of the Ukrainian social pedagogue and educational theorist Anton Makarenko. In the early part of the 1920s, he formulated a theory that he further developed while helping orphans under the most difficult and dramatic conditions. When he died, aged only 51 years old, Makarenko left behind a multifaceted theory, or a system of theories, that deals with many aspects of social pedagogy. Unfortunately, this source is ignored by most professionals in the Western countries. Those embarking on this substantial body of work will experience exciting reading. Most likely they will also acquire new insights and perspectives, which may be useful when trying to help young people. Makarenko's theory is directly inspired by his background and life experiences. In order to fully understand and thereby be able to assess his texts one needs thorough insight into the difficult political and social conditions under which he lived. The initial part of this article describes some of the key events in his life and also provides an overview of his most important texts. The subsequent part describes the essence of the theory and links its different elements to contemporary professional discourse. In the concluding part the holism and dialectics in Makarenko's reasoning and his intellectual kinship with John Dewey are highlighted

Graduate employment in the knowledge society Norwegian mastergrade-level graduates

In Norway, as in most other countries, even most educational researchers and politicians agrees that knowledge worker jobs will be plentiful in the new knowledge economy and that new graduates from higher education not will have large problems in finding relevant employment in spite of their increasing numbers, there is still some disagreement about this. In Norway, the development on the graduate labour market is monitored by NIFU using graduate-surveys. According to the surveys, most graduates still find "relevant employment” after graduation. In this article we have explored the content of "relevant employment” by looking at various indicators for the skill level for those graduates who are in "relevant employment”; economic activity, sector, wages, and information-related work. This has been analysed for four fields of study; humanities, law, economics and science&technology, and by comparing the 1989/91- cohorts with the 2005/07-cohorts. All the indicators seem to indicate that "relevant employment” for the large part still is high-skill employment, and that there not is substantial deskilling or overqualification. Firstly, the large part of growth in graduate numbers has been absorbed by typical high-skill economic activities. This was however not mainly traditional academic work areas, but different types of "knowledge-intensive service production”. Especially important was ”professional and technical services” and information&communication. 43 per cent of the growth in recruitment occurred within these two economic activities. Wages in these two economic activities were also higher than in the traditional academic sector, indicating that the shift in recruitment to these two economic activities not should be interpreted as deskilling. For two other relatively important "new” work areas, for these groups of graduates, "cultural and other personal services” and "health care and social services”, however, and especially the first group, average wages was lower than in other economic activities, especially for the first group, which may indicate that the skill level is lower than in the traditional academic areas. Another important signal of large demand for graduates is that the business sector, which generally is thought of as more attractive than the public sector, accounted for three quarters of the increase in the number of employed graduates. This was not only because it was economic activities within the business sector domain that increased recruitment the most; there was also a general trend towards increased recruitment in business sector organization irrespective of economic activity. Lastly, nearly a third of the growth in recruitment was information-related work, also usually thought of as typical skilled work.

"Needless to Say My Proposal Was Turned Down": The Early Days of Commercial Citation Indexing, an "Error-making" Activity and Its Repercussions Till Today

In today’s neoliberal audit cultures university rankings, quantitative evaluation of publications by JIF or researchers by h-index are believed to be indispensable instruments for “quality assurance” in the sciences. Yet there is increasing resistance against “impactitis” and “evaluitis”. Usually overseen: Trivial errors in Thomson Reuters’ citation indexes produce severe non-trivial effects: Their victims are authors, institutions, journals with names beyond the ASCII-code and scholars of humanities and social sciences. Analysing the “Joshua Lederberg Papers” I want to illuminate eventually successful ‘invention’ of science citation indexing is a product of contingent factors. To overcome severe resistance Eugene Garfield, the “father” of citation indexing, had to foster overoptimistic attitudes and to downplay the severe problems connected to global and multidisciplinary citation indexing. The difficulties to handle different formats of references and footnotes, non-Anglo-American names, and of publications in non-English languages were known to the pioneers of citation indexing. Nowadays the huge for-profit North-American media corporation Thomson Reuters is the owner of the citation databases founded by Garfield. Thomson Reuters’ influence on funding decisions, individual careers, departments, universities, disciplines and countries is immense and ambivalent. Huge technological systems show a heavy inertness. This insight of technology studies is applicable to the large citation indexes by Thomson Reuters, too

Biotechnology business in Norway: Peripheral advantage, or just periphery?

Research on biotechnology related firms has long been associated with the agglomeration of “dedicated biotechnology firms” and partners such as large corporations, research institutes and venture capital firms. At the same time it is acknowledged that such agglomeration trends may be most closely associated with medical biotechnology. This paper shows that there are more than 130 firms which may be classified as biotechnology related firms in Norway. Furthermore they are spread out throughout the country, albeit with more than half being located in the Eastern part. While there is indeed a great preoccupation with medical biotechnology also in Norway, the survey shows that two other distinct traits are present: a concentration of firms being focused on diagnostics and drug delivery rather than on therapeutics, and a focus on marine biotechnology (more than one third of the firms) within nutrition related products rather than or in addition to medical products. In addition to contributing these descriptive findings the paper thus opens up the agglomeration discussion, and suggests that foci on such niches as those which are prevalent in Norway may function with geographical distribution patterns different from those prevalent within the current medical biotechnology focused literature.

Iraqi Prisoners in Norway: Educational Background, Participation, Preferences and Barriers to Education

The article aimed to develop knowledge of the educational background, participation and preferences of Iraqi prisoners in Norwegian prisons and obstacles to participating in education. The study is based on interviews with 17 prisoners in three prisons. An important finding is that war and political unrest appear to have been significant causes for respondents to leaving education at various stages. As a result only half of them have as much as one final exam and only three respondents have a certificate of education. Even if the respondents want an education while in prison, and although education is offered in all prisons there is a lack of information about educational opportunities in an understandable language and long waiting time for a place at school. An implication of the study is that the criminal administration system and the educational authorities must take into account the multicultural reality by facilitating education and training offers accordingly

Negative concord and (multiple) agree: a case study of West Flemish

This paper examines the formalization of negative concord in terms of the Minimalist Program, focusing entirely on negative concord in West Flemish. It is shown that a recent analysis of negative concord which advocates Multiple Agree is empirically inadequate. Instead of Multiple Agree, it is argued that a particular implementation of the simpler and less powerful binary Agree is superior in deriving the data in questio

Implementing and evaluating empirically based family and school programmes for children with conduct problems in Norway

This paper discusses the implementation and evaluation of two family and community based intervention programmes for children and young people implemented in Norway, namely Parent Management Training (PMTO) (Ogden and Amlund Hagen in press) and Multisystemic Therapy (Ogden and Halliday-Boykins 2004; Ogden and Amlund-Hagen 2006), and a school-wide intervention programme, PALS (Sørlie and Ogden 2007). In PALS universal interventions are combined with treatment by offering PMTO to the parents of the high risk children. The Norwegian experiences and results also illustrate how evidence-based programs developed in the US have been transported across geographical and language borders, implemented nationwide, evaluated for their effectiveness in regular practice and examined for sustainability. This paper describes this national strategy, and the main components and immediate outcomes of the PMTO- and PALS-programmes in Norway.peer-reviewe

Benefits of past inventory data as prior information for the current inventory

When auxiliary information in the form of airborne laser scanning (ALS) is used to assist in estimating the population parameters of interest, the benefits of prior information from previous inventories are not self-evident. In a simulation study, we compared three different approaches: 1) using only current data, 2) using non-updated old data and current data in a composite estimator and 3) using updated old data and current data with a Kalman filter. We also tested three different estimators, namely i) Horwitz-Thompson for a case of no auxiliary information, ii) model-assisted estimation and iii) model-based estimation. We compared these methods in terms of bias, precision and accuracy, as estimators utilizing prior information are not guaranteed to be unbiased.202

What is best and at what cost? Cross-national differences in the treatment of ageing-related diseases Norwegian perspective from a comparative OECD-project

Aggregated medical spending differs widely across countries and large variations exist in the frequency and the mix of medical services provided, as well as the type of technology applied. The outcomes (mostly measured as survival rates) do not, however vary to the same extent as the spending. Policy makers in many countries compare their spending to each other, with no clear consensus about how systems are effective in treating patients. In each of these debates the issue of what medical care is buying arises: When countries spend more or less on health care, how does that affect resource allocation in the medical sector and ultimately the health outcomes? The goal of the project1 was to examine how different medical care systems will affect the allocation of resources in the medical sector. As the existing available macro data at an international level does not allow for satisfactory answers to such questions, this project wanted to use a microeconomic approach. An international comparison of treatments of conditions in older populations that lead to high expenditures could help to identify treatments that might be more effective in improving outcomes at lower cost. Therefore the project focused on international comparisons of treatments for a spectrum of conditions in older populations with high aggregate medical spending, well identified episodes of care, high prevalence and high policy relevance. Norway participated in studies on myocardial infarction and breast cancer 2. The choice of focus on older patients was partly motivated by the fact that in the future the elderly will probably take an increasingly proportion of the total spending in the health care sector. See documentation from the main project: http://www.oecd.org/EN/document/0,,EN-document-194-5-no-27-32316-0,00.htmlMedical care; allocation of resources; acute myocardial infarction; breast cancer; international comparisons of treatments