Search Results for
"learning"

This paper describes a research process that intends to develop a strategy to support initial programming learning. It is inspired in the theory of Matthew Lipman, as it was conceived through the redefinition of the concept of learning Communities, to assist the students to maximize their learning through the conscientious evaluation of their level of self-efficacy, while they develop a better behavior to study programming. We present the results of the preliminary tests made to the proposed strategy, and the changes in the strategy that result from those results. © IEEE.

This article contributes to a body of work that addresses the process of 'becoming a teacher' and focuses on the relationship of the higher education (HE) (theoretical) component of the teaching qualification to the (practical) placement experience that student teachers undertake. This study approaches the data through the concept of 'community of practice' aiming to interrogate its usefulness as a theoretical idea that can illuminate the experience of student teachers studying on a Post Graduate Certificate in Education, Post-Compulsory Education (PGCE PCE) for teachers of adult literacy course in the UK. The 'community of practice' concept has been widely used to describe the process whereby student teachers gain entry into a professional identity via 'situated learning'. The idea is attractive, suggesting as it does that there is a strongly communicative dimension to learning how to teach and that an apprenticeship-type relationship - in which culture and values are shared - is possible. This article originates from a small-scale research project that used a collaborative methodological approach. It considers some broad applications of the communities of practice concept from the literature as applied to post-compulsory education teacher education. Then, drawing on ethnographic data from a cohort of pre-service literacy student teachers, the article goes on to suggest an alternative model of such a community. The central perspective it posits is that it is possible to achieve shared understandings about what it means to be a literacy teacher in further education (FE) settings in a localised community of practice (the tutor group itself), but that one of the cohesive forces that helps sustain such a community is that it defines itself against many of the cultural norms that have taken root in the current culture of FE colleges in England, not least among Skills for Life teachers. © 2010 Taylor & Francis.

Problem based learning (PBL) arguably represents the most significant development in education over the past five decades. It has been promoted as the curriculum of choice, and since its introduction in the 1960's, has been widely adopted by many medical and dental schools. PBL has been the subject of much published literature but ironically, very little high quality evidence exists to advocate its efficacy and subsequently justify the widespread curriculum change. The purpose of this review is to classify and interpret the available evidence and extract relevant conclusions. In addition, it is the intent to propose recommendations regarding the relative benefits of PBL compared with conventional teaching. The literature was searched using PubMed, ERIC and PsycLIT. Further articles were retrieved from the reference lists of selected papers. Articles were chosen and included according to specific selection criteria. Studies were further classified as randomised controlled trials (RCTs) or comparative studies. These studies were then analysed according to intervention type: whole curricula comparisons and single educational interventions of shorter duration. At the level of RCTs and comparative studies (whole curricula), no clear difference was observed between PBL and conventional teaching. Paradoxically, it was only comparative studies of single PBL intervention in a traditional curriculum that yielded results that were consistently in favour of PBL. Further research is needed to investigate the possibility that multiple PBL interventions in a traditional curriculum could be more effective than an exclusively PBL programme. In addition, it is important to address the potential benefits of PBL in relation to life-long learning of health care professionals. © 2010 John Wiley & Sons A/S.

The chapters constituting this volume were all originally papers contributed to the Fifth International Basil Bernstein Symposium at Cardiff University, Wales in July 2008. They reflect the continuing vibrancy of the worldwide work that characterises the application of his ideas to educational policy and practice. Their diversity is evident, while their common thread is continuing devotion, noted in earlier volumes, to ‘putting Bernsteinian concepts to work’ (Moore et al., 2006). They could not possibly reflect the complete range of Fifth Symposium presentations but do illustrate how relevant Bernstein’s concerns are in offering insight to our contemporary troubles. More than a third of the papers offered at the symposium concerned aspects of crisis and change in higher education and almost all, in one way or another, addressed issues of identity and consciousness in relation to knowledge formation, transition and acquisition. This is reflected in the structure of this volume where most of this Introduction is devoted to anatomising aspects of Bernstein’s analysis of the origins of the university and its continuity with contemporary shifts from disciplinarity to trainability and in Part II, ‘Shifting cargo: from singulars to regions and generic knowledge forms’, where a series of empirical studies give accounts of changing knowledge structures in university contexts in teacher education in Greece, Engineering, Physics and Anthropology in Iceland, Media Studies and Journalism in South Africa and contrasting occupational preparation in higher education (HE) and Vocational Education and Training (VET) in Australia. These analyses rest foursquare on fundamental questions explored by Bernstein concerning what knowledge is and how it is produced and made available which are taken up by Maton, Muller and Frandji and Vitale, the contributors to Part I, ‘Knowledge and knowers in late modernity’, each focusing upon big, theoretical issues of what is thinkable in any particular era and its relationship to individual and group subjectivities and identities. Each, indicatively, argues for the greater theoretical, empirical and problem-solving power of Bernstein’s work than that of his contemporary Bourdieu. In turn, Part III, ‘Multiply anchored subjectivities’, focuses on elaborating some recent conceptual developments about pedagogic regulation, consciousness and embodiment that celebrate both the openness of Bernstein’s work to other disciplinary approaches and its anchorage in class inscription. These are illustrated by Lapping’s exploration of his use of Kleinian notions of identity, Evans and others’ claim that modification of his notion of the ‘pedagogic device’ provides new and interesting ways of relating biology and culture and Gamble and Hoadley’s analysis of classroom pedagogic control that, like the work of Morais and her associates, reminds us that the institutionalisation and operation of personal modalities in our schools will not necessarily secure access for all children to vertical knowledge forms. The outstanding characteristics of Bernstein’s vision of pedagogic processes concern their pervasiveness, connectedness and intimacy of relation to social and cultural hierarchy, power and control. He was very fond of saying that while the differences that marked the natural and social worlds were endless sources of fascination, it was the invidious ranking of the crucial categories of class, gender, race, region and religion that underlay our need to understand ‘both the creation, management and legitimation of specialized differences and the creation, management and legitimation of various social inequalities’ through schooling and other social agencies and that this involved ‘analyzing the complex inter-relations between education, stratification, economy and the various principles and arrangements of the State’ (Bernstein, 1981: n.p.). His own view of where the script for doing so should start, ‘even where the plot is not worked out and half the characters are missing’, lay in Durkheim’s representation of the contradictory dynamic ‘of the two discourses upon which the medieval university was founded, that of Christianity and that of Greek thought’ (Bernstein, 1996: 82). In a world where universities are required to service society and demonstrate their functional use, Bernstein’s sociology allows modern anxieties about shifts in conceptions of knowledge from sacred to secular, content to skills and text to hypermedia to be placed within a long historical trajectory. His work on the origins of knowledge in ancient Greek universities and changes in the classification and framing of formal knowledge across eras places the information revolution of late modernity in context. While contemporary educational policy rhetoric calls for a radical rethinking of school and university curricula by conjuring terms such as ‘generic skills’, a historical perspective grounds such debates in issues of subjectivity, learning and the limits to the possibilities for knowing in late modernity. Asking what kind of knowledge is needed for the future raises anxieties; knowing futures is an art that we have not yet mastered (Adam and Groves, 2007). Perhaps, instead, our starting point should be rethinking the question, ‘what is education for?' Bernstein (2001: 382) points out that education is controlled and increasingly micro-managed by the state. Whereas the last time we had a totally pedagogised society in the medieval period, when the Catholic Church dominated social life, now schools, universities and other statesponsored institutions increasingly serve the needs of government and remind us not to ‘confuse opportunity with democracy’ (ibid.). Pedagogic panic has masked moral panic and new discourses of pedagogy, ignoring content and focusing only on competencies, risk its reduction to technology and learning becoming completely decontextualised from the rest of acquirers’ life spans. What Bernstein feared most of all was the ‘socially empty’, neo-liberal notion of ‘trainability’ (ibid.: 366), inscribed in ‘life long learning’ rhetoric as ‘creativity and adaptability’ (ibid.: 368), reminding us that the need for pedagogy to be meaningful as well as relevant provides one of our greatest challenges, requiring us to reintroduce issues about content and epistemology into educational debates. In times of weak global and strong pedagogic states we need to look outside formal to informal, adult or popular education ‘outside of the State [where] there’s a possibility for change and initiative’ (ibid.: 382). It is in the interest of pursuing such themes that I now turn in this Introduction to a brief elaboration of Bernstein and other’s views of pedagogic origins, before returning to outline in more detail the nature of the other contributions contained in this volume, where Muller suggests that discussions within education about epistemology have tended to be limited to scientific knowledge, suggesting that we have not yet worked out the full ramifications of Durkheim’s discussion of the Greek curriculum. The humanities constitute the modern Trivium, and can be characterised as disciplines that develop inner consciousness or sensibility. The sciences are disciplines that investigate the outer world, and analyses of the two, involving changes both in knowledge and pedagogy, have not yet been properly conjoined. Even more importantly, what appears to have been left out of current debates and analysis about the purpose of education is the role it plays in the formation of consciousness. In asking what education is for we need to consider social organisation and knowledge more adequately. Knowledge that was produced outside the university in guilds and crafts is attracting increasing attention (e.g. Sennett, 2008) and apprenticeship is being reinvented as the way forward in many education policy documents. In this analysis, early forms of community and institutionalised educational practice, such as existed in monasteries and craft workshops, will be used to explore relationships between curriculum, pedagogy and consciousness that help us to think about knowledge and knowers in late modernity. © 2011 Gabrielle Ivinson, Brian Davies and John Fitz for selection and editorial material. Individual chapters, the contributors.

The aim of this paper is to present the design, implementation and evaluation of the methodology which focuses on the pedagogical utilization of Interactive Videoconferencing (IVC) in the contemporary elementary school. As part of the project "ODYSSEAS", during the school year 2007-2008, 46 students and 4 teachers from two elementary schools in Athens and Crete collaborated at a distance via IVC and, with the aid of the animation technique, designed and implemented constructive activities on the topic: "Environment-Climatic Changes". According to the findings of this paper, IVC under pedagogical conditions plays a significant role in supporting collaborative synchronous learning activities at a distance by strengthening the social relations among students and teachers of the local and the remote class at both schools. This survey brought to light that the combination of IVC and face-to-face learning activities consolidates the role of the modern school as a socialization agent. At the same time, it broadens students' opportunities for communication, collaboration and expression by strengthening their willingness to make new contacts all over the world. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A wide diversity of literature exists that is relevant to examining PD and understanding PL, making such investigation an interdisciplinary area of inquiry. This inquiry is located at the intersection of a number of areas of research and of policy. Research into the continuing learning of professionals can be informed by the literature from higher education and continuing professional education, workplace and informal learning, adult and community education and organisational learning and human resource management. Until recently, research from these areas was rarely integrated, let alone focused towards the particular concerns of the continuing learning of working professionals. © 2010, Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

Mobile devices are increasingly being used to support learning in work contexts. In exploring the emerging field of work-based mobile learning (WBML), researchers need to give consideration to the theoretical and empirical findings from mobile and work-based learning. In this paper, the authors provide an overview of key issues and dominant debates in these fields with the aim of providing a systematic introduction for mobile learning researchers interested in exploring the use of mobile devices for learning in work-based contexts. This paper's focus is aimed at scoping possible commonalities across mobile and work-based learning in order to establish a baseline for future conceptual work in empirical research towards WBML. © 2010, IGI Global. All rights reserved.

This paper examines the idea of a Work Oriented Mobile learning Environment (WOMBLE) and considers the potential affordances of mobile devices for supporting developmental and informal learning in the workplace. The authors look at the nature and pedagogy of work-based learning and how technologies are being used in the workplace for informal learning. The paper examines the nature of Work Process Knowledge and how individuals are shaping or appropriating technologies, often developed or designed for different purposes, for social learning at work. The paper goes on to describe three different use cases for a Work Oriented Mobile learning Environment. The final section of the paper considers how the idea of the WOMBLE can contribute to a socio-cultural ecology for learning, and the interplay of agency, cultural practices, and structures within mobile work-based learning. © 2010, IGI Global. All rights reserved.

Interest in economics is at an all-time high. Among the challenges facing the nation is an economy with rapidly rising unemployment, failures of major businesses and industries, and continued dependence on oil with its wildly fluctuating price. Economists have dealt with such questions for generations, but they have taken on new meaning and significance.Tackling these questions and encompassing analysis of traditional economic theory and topics as well as those that economists have only more recently addressed, 21st Century Economics: A Reference Handbook is a must-have reference resource.Key FeaturesProvides highly readable summaries of theory and models in key areas of micro and macroeconomics, helpful for students trying to get a "big picture" sense of the fieldIncludes introductions to relevant theory as well as empirical evidence, useful for readers interested in learning about economic analysis of an issue as well for students embarking on research projectsFeatures chapters focused on cutting-edge topics with appeal for economists seeking to learn about extensions of analysis into new areas as well as new approaches Presents models in graphical format and summarizes empirical evidence in ways that do not require much background in statistics or econometrics, so as to maximize accessibility to students. © 2010 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

This article reviews diverse representations of learning evident among published accounts of workplace learning across fields such as adult education, human resource development, management and organisation studies. The discussion critically addresses the question of how to mediate a multiplicity of definitional, ideological and purposive orientations. The argument here is that the issue is not perspectival, but ontological. The critical problem lies in mistaking learning as a single object when in fact it is enacted as multiple objects, as very different things in different logics of study and practice. Particularly in the contested arena of work as a site of economic conflict and production, learning needs to be appreciated as a messy object, existing in different states, or perhaps a series of different objects that are patched together through some manufactured linkages. © 2010 The author.