The challenges of implementing and sustaining an adult and vocational education curriculum on an isolated island

The island of Cascara is a dependent overseas territory of a European metropole. Access to the island is currently only by sea though there are plans to construct an airport. To prepare the island for the economic-related activities that will arise from air access, an Adult and Vocational Education Strategy was developed. This Strategy paved the way for the establishment of the island’s Adult and Vocational Education Service and informed the contents of the curriculum it provided. The purpose of this study was to investigate the challenges associated with implementing and sustaining the curriculum on this isolated island. In order to do this, the study examined the curriculum on offer; its current state of implementation and its associated challenges within the Adult and Vocational Education Service; it also investigated the extent to which the current curriculum met the needs of the island by aiding workforce development to support economic growth; and finally, it explored the challenges relating to the sustainability of the Adult and Vocational Education Service in providing a relevant vocational curriculum. A qualitative research approach was adopted using case study methodology. The purposive research sample comprised stakeholders across the public and private sectors at various levels. Qualitative research elicitation instruments were employed to gather data. These included questionnaires, unstructured, semi-structured and focus group interviews. In addition to these instruments, various official documents were analysed and the island’s local print and audio media were used to gather data. The research findings indicated that there needs to be more integration of resources (human, physical and financial) in the provision of adult and vocational learning. The data also showed that the integration of available resources has the potential to aid in more sustainable and meaningful learning that will benefit both the individuals and the economy. The data further suggested that a collaborative approach should aid in stabilising and expanding the provision of adult learning on the island. The need to improve the provision of distance learning opportunities with more internationally accredited courses being offered locally; the need for quality in the provision of learning to be formalised; and the need for the curriculum and staffing structures of the Adult and Vocational Education Service to be reconsidered were also highlighted. The research findings have already begun to serve as the basis for addressing the priorities of the Adult and Vocational Education Service on the island. By informing future learning policy and the contents of the curriculum on offer, the research findings could also potentially benefit the provision of adult and vocational education on other islands, small states and rural communities with limited human and financial resources.Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2012.Education Management and Policy StudiesUnrestricte

Why are some learners more successful than others in the completion of an ABET course? - a case study at a publishing company

The provision of Adult Basic Education and Training (ABET) in South Africa has evolved over time to meet the needs of political agendas of the day. Presently, ABET policy aims to redress the inequalities of education created by the apartheid and Bantu Education systems. To this end, government has established policies and frameworks to encourage learning in both formal and informal environments. ABET learners usually have a very specific sociological and historical autobiography. Their needs and responsibilities are different to those of younger learners. So, with this andragogical consideration in mind, I posed the question: “Why are some learners more successful than others in the completion of an ABET course? I conducted a case study at Belmont Publishers1. My primary research participants were company management, the ABET facilitator and the ABET learners. To gather data from these participants, I used qualitative research tools that included: questionnaires; interviews; focus group interviews; group work activities; and observations. My study focussed on the investigation of intrinsic and extrinsic factors that impact ABET success at the Belmont site. The views of the various research participants (the manager; the ABET facilitator and the ABET learners) are presented as either factors that contribute to learner failure at both intrinsic and extrinsic levels or factors that contribute to learner success at either an intrinsic or extrinsic level. 1 Name changed for reasons of confidentiality. From the findings that emerged from the case study of Belmont Publishers, recommendations are made to relevant stakeholders about factors that could potentially enhance ABET learning in South Africa. The study concludes with suggestions of other ABET related issues which could be researched

Deep Machine Learning Techniques for the Detection and Classification of Sperm Whale Bioacoustics

We implemented Machine Learning (ML) techniques to advance the study of sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) bioacoustics. This entailed employing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to construct an echolocation click detector designed to classify spectrograms generated from sperm whale acoustic data according to the presence or absence of a click. The click detector achieved 99.5% accuracy in classifying 650 spectrograms. The successful application of CNNs to clicks reveals the potential of future studies to train CNN-based architectures to extract finer-scale details from cetacean spectrograms. Long short-term memory and gated recurrent unit recurrent neural networks were trained to perform classification tasks, including (1) “coda type classification” where we obtained 97.5% accuracy in categorizing 23 coda types from a Dominica dataset containing 8,719 codas and 93.6% accuracy in categorizing 43 coda types from an Eastern Tropical Pacific (ETP) dataset with 16,995 codas; (2) “vocal clan classification” where we obtained 95.3% accuracy for two clan classes from Dominica and 93.1% for four ETP clan types; and (3) “individual whale identification” where we obtained 99.4% accuracy using two Dominica sperm whales. These results demonstrate the feasibility of applying ML to sperm whale bioacoustics and establish the validity of constructing neural networks to learn meaningful representations of whale vocalizations

The violent frontline: space, ethnicity and confronting the state in Edwardian Spitalfields and 1980s Brixton

This article discusses in comparative terms the relationship between space, ethnic identity, subaltern status and anti-state violence in twentieth century London. It does so by comparing two examples in which the control of the state, as represented by the Metropolitan Police, was challenged by minority groups through physical force. It will examine the Spitalfields riots of 1906, which began as strike action by predominantly Jewish bakers and escalated into a general confrontation between the local population and the police, and the Brixton riots of 1981, a response to endemic police harassment of mainly Caribbean youth and long-term economic discrimination in that area of South London. It will begin by dissecting the association of physical metropolitan space with the diasporic ‘other’ in the Edwardian East End and post-consensus South London, and how this ‘othering’ was influenced both by the state and the anti-migrant far right. It will then interrogate the difficult relationship between the Metropolitan Police and Jewish and Caribbean working class communities, and how this deteriorating relationship exploded into in extreme violence in 1906 and 1981. The article will conclude by assessing how the relationships between space, identity and violence influenced long-term national and communal narratives of Jewish and Caribbean interactions with the British state

Georges Dyens : Big Bang II

Dyens explains holographic processes; essayists address the impact of the artist's environmental sculpture which incorporates holography, fibre optics and electronic music. Biographical notes. Circa 10 bibl. ref