Actitudes y percepciones de los docentes universitarios en el proceso de adopción de una innovación. La iniciativa OpenCourseWare en la Universidad de Valencia (España)

El proyecto OpenCourseWare, repositorio de recursos educativos en abierto, se inició en la Universidad de Valencia en 2008 y en 2009, sólo incluía 10 asignaturas, ninguna de ellas del área de ciencias de la salud. El objetivo de este trabajo es investigar las actitudes de los docentes de esta área así como sus percepciones con relación a este repositorio para determinar cuáles son las estrategias necesarias para extender su uso. Se parte de la teoría de la difusión de las innovaciones de Rogers (2003) y de un enfoque cualitativo a través del muestreo teórico, entrevistas semiestructuradas y codificación abierta. Los resultados indican la existencia de dos grandes grupos de profesores. Los adoptantes tempranos con una predisposición alta a participar en la iniciativa y con una percepción positiva de sus atributos y los mainstream o corriente principal más reacios a participar y con una percepción negativa respecto a alguno de sus atributos. La identificación de las características de estos dos grandes grupos marca las líneas de acción y de investigación futura en el ámbito del marketing y difusión, formación, sensibilización y motivación para extender el uso del OCW. The OpenCourseWare project, an open learning resource repository, was set up at the University of Valencia between 2008 and 2009. It initially consisted of only 10 subjects, none of which was in the field of health sciences. The objective of this research is to investigate the attitudes and perceptions of teaching staff in the field of health sciences with regard to the project in order to identify strategies to increase its use and expand its coverage. The diffusion of innovations theory as propounded by Rogers is used, along with a qualitative approach using theoretical sampling, semi-structured interviews and open coding. The results indicate the existence of two categories of teaching staff. Firstly, those who adopt an innovation early, have a marked inclination to participate in the initiative and a positive perception of the characteristics of the innovation. Secondly, a larger category of those more reluctant to participate in it and with a negative perception of one or more of its characteristics. Identifying the nature of these two groups provides guidelines for future action and research in the marketing and distribution of such projects, and the training, awareness and motivation required in order to extend the use of OCW

Spin dynamics in semiconductors

This article reviews the current status of spin dynamics in semiconductors which has achieved a lot of progress in the past years due to the fast growing field of semiconductor spintronics. The primary focus is the theoretical and experimental developments of spin relaxation and dephasing in both spin precession in time domain and spin diffusion and transport in spacial domain. A fully microscopic many-body investigation on spin dynamics based on the kinetic spin Bloch equation approach is reviewed comprehensively.Comment: a review article with 193 pages and 1103 references. To be published in Physics Reports

The Accessibility Assessment of National Transportation Network and Analysis of Spatial Pattern

The accessibility assessment is an effective way to qualify the performance of transportation network. This paper assesses China's transportation system with many impact factors, which are calculated using gravity model respectively, and then calculate the indicator of transport convenience with the method of weighted superposition. For better understanding of the spatial distribution pattern of transport accessibility and its relationship with socioeconomic status, statistical analysis and spatial autocorrelation analysis are made. The results show that accessibility of the national transportation presents an 'east high, west low' spatial distribution pattern and has a positive correlation to regional economic development and population density. Besides, the spatial pattern of transport accessibility has a significant spatial aggregation, especially evident in some eastern cities, while the western part of the China doesn't have an apparent spatial aggregation, which also shows the considerable differences between the east and the west, revealing economic development and transport accessibility drive and promote each other synchronously. So accelerating the development of regional transport infrastructure construction and boosting local economies are good ways to reduce regional differences. ? 2012 Springer-Verlag.EI

Evolution Characteristics for Water Eco-Environment of Baiyangdian Lake with 3S Technologies in the Past 60 Years

Part 1: GIS, GPS, RS and Precision FarmingInternational audienceKeeping water eco-environment health and virtuous circle of lake-wetland, and letting lakes recuperate and reproduce has become a common view all over the world. Although a great deal of research results were obtained, such as lake-wetland ecosystem management and eco-hydrological mechanism of eco-environment evolution, there are few researches about comprehensive analysis on evolution trend and driven mechanism of lake-wetland water eco-environment. Baiyangdian, the biggest grass-type lake-wetland in North China, was chosen as the research object in this paper. Based on the long-term and field observations of water environmental quality and analysis for remote sensing images of water ecological landscape pattern, the evolution trend and driving mechanism for water eco-environment of Baiyangdian in the past 60 years have been studied systematically. The results showed that the average annual water level fluctuated greatly with a decreasing tendency as a whole. During 1974 and 2007, there was a general pattern of land use types, which the emergent plants, water body and cultivated land were the main, and the residential area, forest land, grass land and unused land were distributed as flower arrangement state. During the periods, the water body and emergent plants areas were decreased respectively by 28.7% and 20.8%, while the cultivated land areas were increased by 69.7%. The main pollutants (NH4+-N, CODMn, BOD5, TP, and TN) concentrations in Baiyangdian Lake were changed greatly with spatiotemporal variation and the pollutant concentrations were increased obviously. In the three polluted regions (north zone, south zone, and mixed zone), the north zone was polluted most seriously. The main pollutants concentrations were fluctuated obviously over a year, and the pollution was more serious in summer of normal and dry years, while the pollution was serious at the beginning of summer flood in wet years, and then became less. At last, the evolution trend and driven mechanism of water eco-environment of Baiyangdian was analyzed from three aspects, including typical climate indexes (such as precipitation, evaporation, air temperature, and solar radiation), ecological/environmental hydrology regime in upstream watershed of Baiyangdian, and human activities. It would provide some references to the comprehensive treatment of water eco-environment in Baiyangdian Lakes