Informal Learning, Practitioner Inquiry and Occupational Education An Epistemological Perspective

Informal Learning, Practitioner Inquiry and Occupational Education explores how practitioners in a variety of occupations perform their jobs and argues that working and learning are intricately connected. Drawing on theories around working and learning in informal, formal and lifelong settings, the book gives insights into how workers negotiate their occupational practices. The book investigates four related concepts – informal learning, practitioner inquiry, occupational education and epistemological perspectives. The combinations of theories and empirical case studies are used to provide a conceptual framework of inquiry where knowledge, abilities, experiences and skill sets play a significant aspect. It presents 11 case studies of professions ranging from conventional occupations of acting, detective work, international road transportation to emerging professions of boardroom consultancy, nutritional therapy and opinion leadership. This book will be of great interest for academics, scholars and postgraduate students who are engaged in the study of informal education, vocational education and occupation-related programmes. It will also offer significant insights for related education practitioners wanting to have greater understanding of their own journeys and practices

Simple threshold rules solve explore/exploit trade‐offs in a resource accumulation search task

How, and how well, do people switch between exploration and exploitation to search for and accumulate resources? We study the decision processes underlying such exploration/exploitation trade‐offs using a novel card selection task that captures the common situation of searching among multiple resources (e.g., jobs) that can be exploited without depleting. With experience, participants learn to switch appropriately between exploration and exploitation and approach optimal performance. We model participants' behavior on this task with random, threshold, and sampling strategies, and find that a linear decreasing threshold rule best fits participants' results. Further evidence that participants use decreasing threshold‐based strategies comes from reaction time differences between exploration and exploitation; however, participants themselves report non‐decreasing thresholds. Decreasing threshold strategies that “front‐load” exploration and switch quickly to exploitation are particularly effective in resource accumulation tasks, in contrast to optimal stopping problems like the Secretary Problem requiring longer exploration

Impurity segregation in graphene nanoribbons

The electronic properties of low-dimensional materials can be engineered by doping, but in the case of graphene nanoribbons (GNR) the proximity of two symmetry-breaking edges introduces an additional dependence on the location of an impurity across the width of the ribbon. This introduces energetically favorable locations for impurities, leading to a degree of spatial segregation in the impurity concentration. We develop a simple model to calculate the change in energy of a GNR system with an arbitrary impurity as that impurity is moved across the ribbon and validate its findings by comparison with ab initio calculations. Although our results agree with previous works predicting the dominance of edge disorder in GNR, we argue that the distribution of adsorbed impurities across a ribbon may be controllable by external factors, namely an applied electric field. We propose that this control over impurity segregation may allow manipulation and fine-tuning of the magnetic and transport properties of GNRs.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, submitte

Impacts of a professional practice doctorate: a collaborative enquiry

Doctoral education aims to benefit those who undertake it, but does it exert a wider influence? Professional doctorates are commonly designed to have an impact beyond the individual concerned, but is this influence realised? This paper focuses on a collaborative enquiry by a group of academics and doctoral alumni from non-discipline-specific professional doctorates. The enquiry examined how the professional practice of the graduates changed as a result of their studies and what influence this had on their work and their profession. It found that there was considerable impact on the wider context of the alumni, but that these effects were due more to the capacity-building effect of the doctorate than on the particular outcomes of the study undertaken. Key words: doctoral education, research impact, collaborative enquiry, professional practic

I can do that alone…or not? How idea generators juggle between the pros and cons of teamwork

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142333/1/smj2696_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142333/2/smj2696.pd

Spectral isolation of naturally reductive metrics on simple Lie groups

We show that within the class of left-invariant naturally reductive metrics $\mathcal{M}_{\operatorname{Nat}}(G)$ on a compact simple Lie group $G$, every metric is spectrally isolated. We also observe that any collection of isospectral compact symmetric spaces is finite; this follows from a somewhat stronger statement involving only a finite part of the spectrum.Comment: 19 pages, new title and abstract, revised introduction, new result demonstrating that any collection of isospectral compact symmetric spaces must be finite, to appear Math Z. (published online Dec. 2009

Documentation of Apollo 15 samples

A catalog is presented of the documentation of Apollo 15 samples using photographs and verbal descriptions returned from the lunar surface. Almost all of the Apollo 15 samples were correlated with lunar surface photographs, descriptions, and traverse locations. Where possible, the lunar orientations of rock samples were reconstructed in the lunar receiving laboratory, using a collimated light source to reproduce illumination and shadow characteristics of the same samples shown in lunar photographs. In several cases, samples were not recognized in lunar surface photographs, and their approximate locations are known only by association with numbered sample bags used during their collection. Tables, photographs, and maps included in this report are designed to aid in the understanding of the lunar setting of the Apollo 15 samples