Digital or Diligent? Web 2.0's challenge to formal schooling

This paper explores the tensions that arise for young people as both 'digital kids' and 'diligent students'. It does so by drawing on a study conducted in an elite private school, where the tensions between 'going digital' and 'being diligent' are exacerbated by the high value the school places on academic achievement, and on learning through digital innovation. At the school under study, high levels of intellectual and technological resourcing bring with them an equally high level of expectation to excel in traditional academic tasks and high-stakes assessment. The students, under constant pressure to perform well in standardised tests, need to make decisions about the extent to which they take up school-sanctioned digitally enhanced learning opportunities that do not explicitly address academic performance. The paper examines this conundrum by investigating student preparedness to engage with a new learning innovation – a student-led media centre – in the context of the traditional pedagogical culture that is relatively untouched by such digital innovation. The paper presents an analysis of findings from a survey of 481 students in the school. The survey results were subjected to quantitative regression tree modelling to flesh out how different student learning dispositions, social and technological factors influence the extent to which students engage with a specific digital learning opportunity in the form of the Web 2.0 Student Media Centre (SMC) designed to engage the senior school community in flexible digital-networked learning. What emerges from the study is that peer support, perceived ease of use and usefulness, learning goals and cognitive playfulness are significant predictors of the choices that students make to negotiate the fundamental tensions of being digital and/or diligent. In scrutinising the tensions around a digital or a diligent student identity in this way, the paper contributes new empirical evidence to understanding the problematic relationship between student-led learning using new digital media tools and formal schooling

Effect of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor and angiotensin receptor blocker initiation on organ support-free days in patients hospitalized with COVID-19

IMPORTANCE Overactivation of the renin-angiotensin system (RAS) may contribute to poor clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19. Objective To determine whether angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor or angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB) initiation improves outcomes in patients hospitalized for COVID-19. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS In an ongoing, adaptive platform randomized clinical trial, 721 critically ill and 58 non–critically ill hospitalized adults were randomized to receive an RAS inhibitor or control between March 16, 2021, and February 25, 2022, at 69 sites in 7 countries (final follow-up on June 1, 2022). INTERVENTIONS Patients were randomized to receive open-label initiation of an ACE inhibitor (n = 257), ARB (n = 248), ARB in combination with DMX-200 (a chemokine receptor-2 inhibitor; n = 10), or no RAS inhibitor (control; n = 264) for up to 10 days. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES The primary outcome was organ support–free days, a composite of hospital survival and days alive without cardiovascular or respiratory organ support through 21 days. The primary analysis was a bayesian cumulative logistic model. Odds ratios (ORs) greater than 1 represent improved outcomes. RESULTS On February 25, 2022, enrollment was discontinued due to safety concerns. Among 679 critically ill patients with available primary outcome data, the median age was 56 years and 239 participants (35.2%) were women. Median (IQR) organ support–free days among critically ill patients was 10 (–1 to 16) in the ACE inhibitor group (n = 231), 8 (–1 to 17) in the ARB group (n = 217), and 12 (0 to 17) in the control group (n = 231) (median adjusted odds ratios of 0.77 [95% bayesian credible interval, 0.58-1.06] for improvement for ACE inhibitor and 0.76 [95% credible interval, 0.56-1.05] for ARB compared with control). The posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitors and ARBs worsened organ support–free days compared with control were 94.9% and 95.4%, respectively. Hospital survival occurred in 166 of 231 critically ill participants (71.9%) in the ACE inhibitor group, 152 of 217 (70.0%) in the ARB group, and 182 of 231 (78.8%) in the control group (posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitor and ARB worsened hospital survival compared with control were 95.3% and 98.1%, respectively). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE In this trial, among critically ill adults with COVID-19, initiation of an ACE inhibitor or ARB did not improve, and likely worsened, clinical outcomes. TRIAL REGISTRATION ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT0273570

Jonathan Livingstone, I Presume: Teaching as a 'High-Flying' Profession

This paper points to a new discursive order in teacher education policy and professional development practice which is actively producing teachers as 'corporatising' professionals. The authors note certain rhetoric shifts in Australian teacher education policy which, they argue, constitute quite a radical departure from notions of the professional worker which proliferated less than a decade ago. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of the discursive nature of knowledge and identity formation, they discuss the implications of this rhetorical shift in terms of its impact on the 'professional' identity of the teacher

Teacher Im/material: academic teaching and the new pedagogics of instructional design

The authors critique the increasingly technologized teaching and learning environment of higher education. They argue that fresh pedagogical understandings are needed to inform thinking about instructional design.While the imperative to use communication technologies to increase learner access is laudable, the question of ‘access to what’ should also be addressed in all its complexity. Disparate terrains of new literature about teaching and learning, technology and corporeality can bring fresh perspectives to bear on the nature of pedagogical work. However such literatures are rarely brought together. In this paper the authors work across aspects of learning theory, critical theory and post structuralism to explore the question ‘access to what’. In so doing they raise important questions about the embodied nature of teaching and learning, and the potential of both ‘embodied’ and ‘disembodied’ teaching to produce and counter marginalization. The argument is that all decisions about the appropriateness of particular pedagogical practices must engage with such questions

After methodolatry : epistemological challenges for ‘risky’ educational research

The chapter explores the relationship between educational research and risk as a "moral climate of politics" (Giddens, 2002: 29) impacting powerfully on educational policy and processes. In exploring this question, the chapter mounts a cautious argument that the epistemological challenges attending such new global imperatives as risk are yet to be taken up in any substantial way in mainstream educational research. This is so despite the flurry of activity around diversifying social scientific inquiry, and the growing numbers of people who now engage in research activity within and outside universities. It is contended that this is due in no small part to the failure of educational researchers to think about thinking about research and to take this thinking forward to the consideration of questions of methodology

The perfect corporate fit: New knowledge for new times

This study examines the impact of corporate practice on schooling and on teachers' professional development at the end of the millennium. It is argued that the production of new forms of knowledge is creating new sites of struggle over who owns educational knowledge, and this has profound implications for professional identity formation in all areas of social and economic endeavour, including education. As schools are re-shaped into corporations, school administrators and teachers are under increasing pressure to improve their productivity and to develop themselves as enterprising leaders and managers. To do so they are drawing more and more heavily on the growing non-academic literature of selfimprovement and self-development. Concern is expressed that such literature tends to value mindless optimism over radical doubt

On being accountable: Risk-consciousness and the doctoral supervisor

This paper analyses the imperative to greater accountability for doctoral supervisors as the effect of a regime of truth (Foucault, 1980) that we call risk management. It draws on new sociological theorising of risk to argue that risk management works as a moral climate that offers academics new ways of being properly professional by being more risk-conscious. Risk-conscious academics are increasingly on guard against student failure, declining standards and waste of resources. Thus they come to regulate themselves and their students in ways that are closely aligned to the ethos of the post-millennial university as a risk-conscious organisation. The paper considers the implications of this greater accountability for doctoral supervisors

Pedagogical practice after the information age

These chapters bare witness to various manifestations of an emerging global mind set that is marked not by coherence and a single story but by multiple and layered possibility. The authors all see, from often quite different positions, that the future health of society lies in diversity and a social activism that is grounded in the local actions of individuals. Education will play a central role in empowering this activism and it is to this multiple future that this book turns its attention

The Vulnerable Child as a Pedagogical Subject

This paper seeks to examine the ways in which the idea of the child as high vulnerable to risk is constituting new pedagogical subjects, ie, the teacher/caregiver as a professional risk-manager, and the child as a risk-management ‘case’. It does so by indicating how an expanded notion of the duty of care has reconstituted the child as a work-in-progress case rather than 'the concrete subject of [educational] intervention' (Castel, 1991: 288). It examines how the new teacher as a risk-conscious professional caregiver both needs and comes to acquire a new intimacy with the child not as a fleshly body but as a case of risk minimisation

The Promise of Education Revolution

In the context of the recent announcement of educational revolution as the promise of national Labor policy, we re-interrogate the promises that have been made by educational insiders (teachers and academics) and outsiders (eg politicians) about how social and economic problems can and should be solved through educational reform. For Rudd, the promise is very much rooted in the idea that education is for building human capital, which is in turn the fundamental building block of economic productivity. The promises that are made about education - and by implication about educational research - often come back to haunt politicians and academics alike. Rather than either lauding Labor for the promise of reform or damning Labor as collapsing educational rationales into economic ones, we seek to interrogate the practice of making promises for education. We argue that these practices are produced through twin fantasies about education: a widespread redemptive fantasy about the possibility and the imperative for education to solve problems of social and economic disadvantage; and an insider fantasy that educators can do this by themselves with the right resources. Through an examination of the 'de-sciencing' of education in the past decade or so, and its recent 're-sciencing', we conclude that, with all the promises that might be identified that pertain to educational research and to faculties of education, and with all the methodologies we have worked so hard to build and disseminate, we might have overlooked opportunities to engage in a broader conversation. Put simply, we are well practised in critique and less so in strategic public conversation. We take the current moral panic about obesity as just one instance of a challenge that needs to be overcome if we are in Rudd's terms to 'get... the best out of Australia's social infrastructure'. We seek to demonstrate how such an issue might be usefully interrogated so that we avoid the fantasy of redemption of the obese child through 'better education' and at the same time equip ourselves for engaging in strategic public conversation about obesity as a human capital issue