Universalization or localization? Issues of knowledge legitimation in comaprative education

The endeavor to unite the universal and the accidental in both, the physical and the social world into one theoretical framework – the idea of such a unity can be found already in the Chinese concept of Tao – dates back in the modern culture to the Enlightenment. Such a unified knowledge came to be understood as a potential tool of forecasting and controlling societal progress. All through the positivistic 19th century, comparativists followed Marc-Antoine Jullien de Paris, who thought educational comparison should become an exact science whose outcomes could be used anywhere and transplanted to any place. It was Michael Sadler who as the first comparative educationalist strictly refused the idea of cultural and institutional borrowing. Under his influence comparative education focused on the variations unique to the single countries and to the factors underlying these variations. Even the later emerging functionalist method remained in the tradition of a „one-dimensional logic“, which, as Marcuse alleged, was inseparably connected with the rationale of domination of nature and society. It is only the postmodern sight, which – without giving up the humanistic ideas of modernity which originated in Western modernization – opens possibilities to enter a cross cultural dialogue and to accept multiple theoretical realities. (DIPF/Orig.)Der Beitrag bietet einen breiten Überblick über grundlegende Tendenzen in der historischen Entwicklung von Vergleichender Erziehungswissenschaft. Dabei unterliegt der Darstellung implizit und explizit durchgängig das Bewußtsein, daß vergleichende Wissenschaft im weitesten Sinne weder ein Monopol der jüngsten Epoche noch etwa eines einzigen Kulturraums darstellt. Mit seiner analytischen, aber auch normativen Interpretation von gegenwärtigen Tendenzen postmodernen Denkens sieht er die Möglichkeit eines transkulturellen Dialogs über die Weiterentwicklung und Erweiterung der etablierten (westlichen) Vergleichenden (Erziehungs-)Wissenschaft. (DIPF/Orig.

Leading Undergraduate Students to Big Data Generation

People are facing a flood of data today. Data are being collected at unprecedented scale in many areas, such as networking, image processing, virtualization, scientific computation, and algorithms. The huge data nowadays are called Big Data. Big data is an all encompassing term for any collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process them using traditional data processing applications. In this article, the authors present a unique way which uses network simulator and tools of image processing to train students abilities to learn, analyze, manipulate, and apply Big Data. Thus they develop students handson abilities on Big Data and their critical thinking abilities. The authors used novel image based rendering algorithm with user intervention to generate realistic 3D virtual world. The learning outcomes are significant