Ready for membership? Voices from the 2014 Australian Quaker Survey

The 2014 national survey of Australian Quakers included two questions about application for Membership, with responses from 250 Members and 89 Attenders. This article summarises these views into 54 topics and 14 key themes, considers them in relation to various sociological perspectives and compares the results to those from previous surveys in Britain and the USA. The most common reasons for Membership application were feelings of belonging and wanting to commit, to make a public declaration, and a desire to take on responsibilities and contribute. The reasons Attenders did not apply included the belief that it was unnecessary, an inability to attend Meetings regularly, concerns about some Quaker processes – including the Member/Attender distinction – and an unwillingness to commit more time and support. Further education about the expectations for Membership and more personal invitations may assist in reducing the current decline in the ratio of Members to Attenders in Meetings in Australia and Britain

PROFITABILITY OF GEOGRAPHIC DIVERSIFICATION STRATEGY

Agribusiness,

Using learning design as a framework for supporting the design and reuse of OER

The paper will argue that adopting a learning design methodology may provide a vehicle for enabling better design and reuse of Open Educational Resources (OERs). It will describe a learning design methodology, which is being developed and implemented at the Open University in the UK. The aim is to develop a 'pick and mix' learning design toolbox of different resources and tools to help designers/teachers make informed decisions about creating new or adapting existing learning activities. The methodology is applicable for designers/teachers designing in a traditional context – such as creation of materials as part of a formal curriculum, but also has value for those wanting to create OERs or adapt and repurpose existing OERs. With the increasing range of OERs now available through initiatives as part of the Open Courseware movement, we believe that methodologies, such as the one we describe in this paper, which can help guide reuse and adaptation will become increasingly important and arguably are an important aspect of ensuring longer term sustainability and uptake of OERs. Our approach adopts an empirically based approach to understanding and representing the design process. This includes a range of evaluation studies (capturing of case studies, interviews with designers/teachers, in-depth course evaluation and focus groups/workshops), which are helping to develop our understanding of how designers/teachers go about creating new learning activities. Alongside this we are collating an extensive set of tools and resources to support the design process, as well as developing a new Learning Design tool that helps teachers articulate and represent their design ideas. The paper will describe how we have adapted a mind mapping and argumentation tool, Compendium, for this purpose and how it is being used to help designers and teachers create and share learning activities. It will consider how initial evaluation of the use of the tool for learning design has been positive; users report that the tool is easy to use and helps them organise and articulate their learning designs. Importantly the tool also enables them to share and discuss their thinking about the design process. However it is also clear that visualising the design process is only one aspect of design, which is complex and multi-faceted

Bert Salwen\u27s Involvement with Historical Archaeology and Cultural Resource Management, Late 1960s-1988

A note on Bert Salwen\u27s work in historical archaeology and cultural resource management

What kind of home is your care home? A typology of personalised care provided in residential and nursing homes

This paper examines how care home managers in England conceptualised the approach to delivering personalised care in the homes they managed. We conducted interviews with care home managers and mapped the approaches they described on two distinct characterisations of personalised care prominent in the research and practitioner literature: the importance of close care relationships and the degree of resident choice and decision-making promoted by the care home. We derived three ‘types’ of personalised care in care homes. These conceptualise the care home as an ‘institution’, a ‘family’ and a ‘hotel’. We have added a fourth type, the ‘co-operative’, to propose a type that merges proximate care relationships with an emphasis on resident choice and decision-making. We conclude that each approach involves trade-offs and that the ‘family’ model may be more suitable for people with advanced dementia, given its emphasis on relationships. While the presence of a range of diverse approaches to personalising care in a care home market may be desirable as a matter of choice, access to care homes in England is likely to be constrained by availability and cost