Developing strategic learning alliances: partnerships for the provision of global education and training solutions

The paper describes a comprehensive model for the development of strategic alliances between education and corporate sectors, which is required to ensure effective provision of education and training programmes for a global market. Global economic forces, combined with recent advances in information and communication technologies, have provided unprecedented opportunities for education providers to broaden the provision of their programmes both on an international scale and across new sectors. Lifelong learning strategies are becoming increasingly recognized as an essential characteristic of a successful organization and therefore large organizations have shown a preparedness to invest in staff training and development. The demands for lifelong learning span a wide range of training and educational levels from school-level and vocational courses to graduate-level training for senior executive

Inquiry in question

What follows is the transcript of an inquiry which takes itself as its object: an inquiry into its own inquiry. It opens out of a mere marking of its questioning, `?', and proceeds by questioning that mark, and the progress of its inquiry as transcription of something `open' into marks and questions - such transcription itself marked as only one thing open to the `writer'. Each successive attempt to transcribe into words the opening transition into `words', `text', `book', from some textually marked `context' in which the transition is open, simply leads into a questioning of each such attempted transcription, the bringing of its terms `into question'. The first section of the inquiry closes having marked out an internal `logical' space and time of these opening questions, coordinated around the initial question of marking a question: so many `dimensions' of lines of questioning `question' - in particular the external `physical' dimension of a `space' and `time' in which marking or transcription is (physically) open, and a `poetic' or figural dimension in which that `external' physical open-ness or space provides, like the `internal' logical space of logical, physical and poetic questions, and `image' for those three coordinate dimensions in whose textual and contextual interplay their transcription into a logical space and time of questions is open

Improving assessment tasks through addressing our unconscious limits to change

Despite widespread recognition of the need to improve assessment in higher education, assessment tasks in individual courses are too often dominated by conventional methods. While changing assessment depends on many factors, improvements to assessment ultimately depend on the decisions and actions of individual educators. This paper considers research within the ‘heuristics and biases’ tradition in the field of decision-making and judgement which has identified unconscious factors with the potential to limit capacity for such change. The paper focuses on issues that may compromise the process of improving assessment by supporting a reluctance to change existing tasks, by limiting the time allocated to develop alternative assessment tasks, by underestimating the degree of change needed or by an unwarranted overconfidence in assessment design decisions. The paper proposes countering these unconscious limitations to change by requiring justification for changing, or not changing, assessment tasks, and by informal and formal peer review of assessment task design. Finally, an agenda for research on heuristics and biases in assessment design is suggested in order to establish their presence and help counter their influence

The shallow shelf approximation as a "sliding law" in a thermomechanically coupled ice sheet model

The shallow shelf approximation is a better ``sliding law'' for ice sheet modeling than those sliding laws in which basal velocity is a function of driving stress. The shallow shelf approximation as formulated by \emph{Schoof} [2006a] is well-suited to this use. Our new thermomechanically coupled sliding scheme is based on a plasticity assumption about the strength of the saturated till underlying the ice sheet in which the till yield stress is given by a Mohr-Coulomb formula using a modeled pore water pressure. Using this scheme, our prognostic whole ice sheet model has convincing ice streams. Driving stress is balanced in part by membrane stresses, the model is computable at high spatial resolution in parallel, it is stable with respect to parameter changes, and it produces surface velocities seen in actual ice streams.Comment: 12 pages of text; 4 tables; 27 figures; submitted to JGR Earth Surfac