Wrestling and wrangling with a worrisome wiki: an account of pedagogical change in the use of a Web 2.0 technology in a first year education course

The delivery of higher education in online and blended modes has implications across a range of contexts – economic, pedagogic, technical and social. This article explores the tensions and contradictions of teaching in a blended learning environment in terms of its pedagogic implications. It reports on how a specific Web 2.0 technology (a wiki) was used over a four-year period with and by students in an Education Course to enhance their learning outcomes during their first year of university study. Student feedback (qualitative and quantitative), and the personal reflections of the first author regarding her teaching approach, kept over a four-year period, provide the dataset for this article. Analysis of these data builds a story of how the wiki developed from an extraneous, inauthentic component of the course to an integral component of a successful teaching and learning experience for both the lead author and the students in the course. This story illustrates how an early career academic wrestled to develop appropriate approaches to adult education; wrangled with largely untested Web 2.0 technologies in higher education; and reaped the rewards of the use of such technologies in enhancing the educational experience of both the students and the lecturer. Although a highly personal account of wrestling, wrangling and reaping, the article provides valuable insights into the importance of establishing and maintaining authentic pedagogic relationships in increasing online educational environments. It cautions that the development of technical skills alone is insufficient to guarantee improved outcomes for students

Holding European Parliament elections concurrently with local elections increases turnout and benefits certain parties

The UK will hold hold elections for the European Parliament on 22 May, alongside the local government elections also taking place in many areas. Kevin Larkin has analysed the effect of holding these types of election on the same day, and finds that it leads to a small but significant increase in voter turnout. It may also hand an advantage to particular parties, with Labour most likely to benefit in May because of the pattern of local elections taking place

Face recognition using principal component analysis

Current methods of face recognition use linear methods to extract features. This causes potentially valuable nonlinear features to be lost. Using a kernel to extract nonlinear features should lead to better feature extraction and, therefore, lower error rates. Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA) will be used as the method for nonlinear feature extraction. KPCA will be compared with well known linear methods such as correlation, Eigenfaces, and Fisherfaces

Using transactional distance theory to redesign an online mathematics education course for pre-service primary teachers

This paper examines the impact of a series of design changes to an online mathematics education course in terms of transactional distance between learner and teachers, pre-service education students' attitudes towards mathematics, and their development of mathematical pedagogical knowledge. Transactional distance theory (TDT) was utilised to investigate and describe the interactions among course structure, course dialogue and student autonomy in an online course over a two-year period. Findings indicate that Web 2.0 technologies, when used thoughtfully by teachers, can afford high levels of structure and dialogue. Feedback from pre-service teachers indicated an improved attitude towards mathematics and an increase in their mathematical pedagogical content knowledge. These findings have implications for universities moving towards the delivery of teacher education courses entirely online

Acoustic attenuation probe for fermion superfluidity in ultracold atom gases

Dilute gas Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC's), currently used to cool fermionic atoms in atom traps, can also probe the superfluidity of these fermions. The damping rate of BEC-acoustic excitations (phonon modes), measured in the middle of the trap as a function of the phonon momentum, yields an unambiguous signature of BCS-like superfluidity, provides a measurement of the superfluid gap parameter and gives an estimate of the size of the Cooper-pairs in the BEC-BCS crossover regime. We also predict kinks in the momentum dependence of the damping rate which can reveal detailed information about the fermion quasi-particle dispersion relation.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. Revised versio

A regression based transmission/disequilibrium test for binary traits: the power of joint tests for linkage and association

BACKGROUND: In this analysis we applied a regression based transmission disequilibrium test to the binary trait presence or absence of Kofendred Personality Disorder in the Genetic Analysis Workshop 14 (GAW14) simulated dataset and determined the power and type I error rate of the method at varying map densities and sample sizes. To conduct this transmission disequilibrium test, the logit transformation was applied to a binary outcome and regressed on an indicator variable for the transmitted allele from informative matings. All 100 replicates from chromosomes 1, 3, 5, and 9 for the Aipotu and the combined Aipotu, Karangar, and Danacaa populations were used at densities of 3, 1, and 0.3 cM. Power and type I error were determined by the number of replicates significant at the 0.05 level. RESULTS: The maximum power to detect linkage and association with the Aipotu population was 93% for chromosome 3 using a 0.3-cM map. For chromosomes 1, 5, and 9 the power was less than 10% at the 3-cM scan and less than 22% for the 0.3-cM map. With the larger sample size, power increased to 38% for chromosome 1, 100% for chromosome 3, 31% for chromosome 5, and 23% for chromosome 9. Type I error was approximately 7%. CONCLUSION: The power of this method is highly dependent on the amount of information in a region. This study suggests that single-point methods are not particularly effective in narrowing a fine-mapping region, particularly when using single-nucleotide polymorphism data and when linkage disequilibrium in the region is variable