Reflecting on Malaysian teacher trainees’ journals

Purpose – In this study, 37 English Language Teaching (ELT) teacher trainees from a Malaysian university conducted an action-research project to determine whether journals kept during their fieldwork in primary schools located in an area close to the university allowed them to reflect on their beliefs and behaviors in the classroom. Methodology – Themes were revealed using emergent coding in their journals. Van Manen’s (1977) three-stage model (practical, technical and critical) was used to determine the issues raised and the level of critical reflection reached in the journal entries Findings – The findings indicated that the teacher trainees demonstrated practical and technical level thinking, but rarely rose to the critical level of reflection. Nonetheless, they also demonstrated changes in their beliefs and behaviours, essential for professional development.Significance – Reflective thinking is critical to teaching and is important in the United States and in countries striving to replicate its pedagogical tools and techniques. However, many Western practices associated with the nurturing of critical thinking are not familiar to Malaysian teacher trainees.We conclude that prospective teachers here do use their journals to reflect on their educational practice, but not at the deepest levels of insight. Critical thinking must be taught to Malaysian teacher trainees and filtered through the local culture if it is to improve teaching and learning in the nation’s classrooms

Gen zeds : Arab women speaking with \u27still small voices\u27

The &lsquo;Gen Zeds&rsquo; are female Emirati students in their early twenties at Zayed University who oscillate between the traditional Islamic culture of their families, and the highly mediated global culture they experience at university and on the Inter-net. These students come almost entirely from prosperous families. On graduation, they are expected to assume leadership positions in the United Arab Emirates &ndash; a country in transition &ndash; despite living in a society that recently has not permitted women roles beyond that of mother and homemaker. This article considers whether the lessons and experiences they encounter at university &ndash; and their intense exposure to a technology-mediated world &ndash; will equip them for life in a society radically different from that of their mothers, and whether their &lsquo;still small voices&rsquo; will be heard in a new technology economy.<br /

Media life among Gen Zeds

The \u27Gen Zeds\u27 of the title are female Emirati students in their early 20s at Zayed University who oscillate between the traditional Islamic culture of their families and the high technology world they experience through the media. This article looks at when, where and how these students use media and what they are looking for when they use it. The research found that these women live a highly-mediated existence, spending more than 9.9 hours on average a day with the media - more time than they do sleeping. They spend as much time on the internet as they do in the combined activities of reading magazines, newspapers and books. They spend twice as much time on the internet as they do watching television. They use different media during different parts of the day and for different reasons. The internet and the telephone were the two most preferred media. The article concludes by looking at what these women\u27s highly mediated lives might mean for their future. Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications London

Faces in the news: Network television news coverage of Hurricane Hugo and the Loma Prieta earthquake

This study investigates the sourcing patterns characteristic of network television coverage of two natural disasters occurring within weeks of each other in the fall of 1989, Hurricane Hugo and the Loma Prieta earthquake. These results are compared to those from an earlier study of newspaper coverage of the same two events to make possible a cross-disaster, cross-media analysis of the way source utilization contributes to the social construction of disasters as news event

Restructuring Educational Institutions for Growth in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR): A Systematic Review

Industrial Revolutions basically have transformed human lives. We have gone from hand production to mechanized production into computerization or automation of concepts into products (Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)). However, 4IR urges the process of transferring data from digital domains and offline reality via interconnected systems to improve lives. The technologies in 4IR enter into varying areas, such as the economy, medicine and education. Educational institutions have contributed greatly to reshaping future technologies by being the test laboratories for innovations. In the meanwhile, there is an immense need for looking beyond the traditional educational approach. This can be achieved by strategically employing the trending technologies to prepare students and educators with the right kind of knowledge and set of skills. It is imperative to ask questions about how the delivery of education will be undertaken and how educational institutions will be restructured by the 4IR to prepare students for the challenges ahead

R-seecka model for research supervision and the effect on academic and career growth of international graduate students in Malaysia

Malaysia is committed to growing its research universities and its reputation as one of the world's largest educational service providers. Malaysia has sizable population of international students, and the country is recalibrating its strategy and planning to increase the number of international students to 200,000 by 2020. However, neither the Malaysian government nor the universities have created the synergy to increase the wellbeing of international students, their research progress and, most critically, academic supervision. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the direct effect of research supervision, that is, the supervisor’s encouragement, content knowledge, and availability, and campus environment and facilities on international students’ academic and career growth. This study proposes a model, called R-SEECKA (relationships, supervision, environment; encouragement; content knowledge and availability) for effective research supervision and practice in Malaysian public universities. The sample size consists of 450 international graduate students from different countries studying at six Malaysian public universities. It uses quantitative methods and SmartPLS for data analysis. Findings of this study reported the effect of encouragement, environment, relationship, availability and content knowledge on international graduate students’ academic and career growth. It is also reported that encouragement and motivation from the supervisor was the strongest predictor of academic and career growth, followed by campus environment/facilities. The paper offers recommendations and suggestions for future research to see how much research supervision has improved and international students have progressed in research in Malaysia. The authors note that the R-SEECKA model may be applied at universities in other countries and to other student populations to assess the impact of research supervision on their academic and career growth

The mass media and hurricane disaster alerts

John Ledingham, Lynne Masel-Walters. Preliminary report --P. [1].https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/nhcc/1015/thumbnail.jp

mass media and hurricane disaster alerts

John Ledingham, Lynne Masel-Walters. Preliminary report --P. [1].https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/nhcc/1015/thumbnail.jp

mass media and hurricane disaster alerts

John Ledingham, Lynne Masel-Walters. Preliminary report --P. [1].https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/nhcc/1015/thumbnail.jp