Design and delivery of a distance education programme : educating Vietnamese nurse academics from Australia

In 2008 a move away from medical staff providing nursing education in Vietnam saw the employment of many new nurse academics. To assist in the instruction of these novice academics and provide them with sound teaching and learning practice as well as curriculum design and implementation skills, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) successfully tendered an international grant. One of QUT’s initiatives in educating the Vietnamese academics was a distance learning programme. Developed specifically for Vietnamese nurse academics, the programme was designed for Australian based delivery to academics in Vietnam. This paper will present an overview of why four separate modules were utilised for the delivery of content (modules were delivered at a rate of one per semester). It will address bilingual online discussion boards which were used in each of the modules and the process of moderating these given comments were posted in both Vietnamese and English. It will describe how content was scaffolded across four modules and how the modules themselves modelled new teaching delivery strategies. Lastly, it will discuss the considerations of programme delivery given the logistics of an Australian based delivery. Feedback from the Vietnamese nurse academics across their involvement in the programme (and at the conclusion of their fourth and final module) has been overwhelmingly positive. Feedback suggests the programme has altered teaching and assessment approaches used by some Vietnamese nurse academics. Additionally, Vietnamese nurse academics are reporting that they are engaging more with the application of their content indicating a cultural shift in the approach taken in Vietnamese nurse education.

Factors that influence Chinese TEFL academics' research capacity building : an institutional case study

Research capacity building has become a prominent theme in higher education institutions across the world. To build research capacity, it is necessary to identify areas of challenges academics face within the academia. This case study focuses on Chinese teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) academics with the purpose of identifying factors that influence their research capacity building. Six TEFL academics from a Chinese national university were interviewed and institutional research documents were analysed. Findings showed that obstacles and difficulties in conducting research were more related to departmental factors than individual characteristics. The institution was keen on developing a research culture, and encouraged research and publications. Departmental support for research was improving, but it seems that it was more generic than tailored to individual needs. The findings of this study provide implications for research administrators in further supporting TEFL academics’ research capacity building.

Development of a survey instrument to measure TEFL academics' perceptions about, individual and workplace characteristics for conducting research

The Chinese Ministry of Education (MOE) initiatives to improve the English competence of college students, as well as increased proficiency level of entering college students (Cheng, 2002) have contributed to greater demands on Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) academics (MOE, 2004), as “the upgrading of national English proficiency, then, is predicated largely on the professional competence of the teaching force” (Hu, 2005, p. 655). For TEFL academics, one component of this competence is the capacity to conduct research (Shu, 2002), which also reflects other changes in Chinese higher education. The aspirations of higher education institutions at all levels have led to more rigorous recruitment policies and promotion requirements (Che, 2004; Wang, 2007), stressing research as an important indicator of academics’ performance (Shi, 2002; Pan, 2006). These changes highlight the role of research in higher education institutions’ efforts to raise their national status and world ranking (Zhang, Wang, & He, 2006), and have exerted influences on faculty’s academic role. Academics are obliged to engage in research activities, and this has posed challenges to teaching-oriented institutions and disciplines.

Towards equity in the futures market : curriculum as a condition of access

This article provides a consideration of the problem of equity in education. In the first part of the discussion, the author draws on philosophical and sociological literatures to consider what equity means and its implications for education. Drawing on work by Burbules, Lord & Sherman, she looks to curriculum as a condition of access and the importance of learning support structures in bringing about equitable educational outcomes, conceived in terms of Amy Gutmanns’s democratic threshold. The paper offers a conceptual-theoretical model for thinking about the resourcing and curricular requirements for equity in contemporary liberal democratic societies, contrasting the social and economic policy mixes employed by governments situated at different points along a liberty/equality continuum.

Wicked futures : metadesign, resilience and transformative classrooms

This paper presents an Australian case study entitled “Designing Futures”. It examines a six month multidisciplinary design program offered by a large co-educational, inner-city state school in Queensland in 2011. The program extended an already successful and innovative school-based design curriculum and involved students in Philosophy, Science, Mathematics and English classes, as well those in Art and Design. Additionally, there were 5 full-day workshops where students combined a wide range of skills to brainstorm, design and create sustainable solutions. The design thinking used in this program was based on the concepts of metadesign, design activism and design futuring. “Designing Futures” linked over 700 middle and secondary school students and staff with nine designers-in-residence from diverse disciplines, including bio-ethics. The program aimed to empower students from highly diverse cultural and social backgrounds to engage in authentic, participatory design processes, prepare them for future social and environmental challenges, and increase personal and community resilience. The research results will inform ongoing program development and research in K-12 design education, both within the school and in conjunction with university and community partnerships in Queensland.

Theories of learning mathematics

According to Karl Popper, widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science in the 20th century, falsifiability is the primary characteristic that distinguishes scientific theories from ideologies – or dogma. For example, for people who argue that schools should treat creationism as a scientific theory, comparable to modern theories of evolution, advocates of creationism would need to become engaged in the generation of falsifiable hypothesis, and would need to abandon the practice of discouraging questioning and inquiry. Ironically, scientific theories themselves are accepted or rejected based on a principle that might be called survival of the fittest. So, for healthy theories on development to occur, four Darwinian functions should function: (a) variation – avoid orthodoxy and encourage divergent thinking, (b) selection – submit all assumptions and innovations to rigorous testing, (c) diffusion – encourage the shareability of new and/or viable ways of thinking, and (d) accumulation – encourage the reuseability of viable aspects of productive innovations.

Surviving an avalanche of data

Open the sports or business section of your daily newspaper, and you are immediately bombarded with an array of graphs, tables, diagrams, and statistical reports that require interpretation. Across all walks of life, the need to understand statistics is fundamental. Given that our youngsters’ future world will be increasingly data laden, scaffolding their statistical understanding and reasoning is imperative, from the early grades on. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) continues to emphasize the importance of early statistical learning; data analysis and probability was the Council’s professional development “Focus of the Year” for 2007–2008. We need such a focus, especially given the results of the statistics items from the 2003 NAEP. As Shaughnessy (2007) noted, students’ performance was weak on more complex items involving interpretation or application of items of information in graphs and tables. Furthermore, little or no gains were made between the 2000 NAEP and the 2003 NAEP studies. One approach I have taken to promote young children’s statistical reasoning is through data modeling. Having implemented in grades 3 –9 a number of model-eliciting activities involving working with data (e.g., English 2010), I observed how competently children could create their own mathematical ideas and representations—before being instructed how to do so. I thus wished to introduce data-modeling activities to younger children, confi dent that they would likewise generate their own mathematics. I recently implemented data-modeling activities in a cohort of three first-grade classrooms of six year- olds. I report on some of the children’s responses and discuss the components of data modeling the children engaged in.

Problem solving in the primary school (K-2)

This article focuses on problem solving activities in a first grade classroom in a typical small community and school in Indiana. But, the teacher and the activities in this class were not at all typical of what goes on in most comparable classrooms; and, the issues that will be addressed are relevant and important for students from kindergarten through college. Can children really solve problems that involve concepts (or skills) that they have not yet been taught? Can children really create important mathematical concepts on their own – without a lot of guidance from teachers? What is the relationship between problem solving abilities and the mastery of skills that are widely regarded as being “prerequisites” to such tasks?Can primary school children (whose toolkits of skills are limited) engage productively in authentic simulations of “real life” problem solving situations? Can three-person teams of primary school children really work together collaboratively, and remain intensely engaged, on problem solving activities that require more than an hour to complete? Are the kinds of learning and problem solving experiences that are recommended (for example) in the USA’s Common Core State Curriculum Standards really representative of the kind that even young children encounter beyond school in the 21st century? … This article offers an existence proof showing why our answers to these questions are: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And: No. … Even though the evidence we present is only intended to demonstrate what’s possible, not what’s likely to occur under any circumstances, there is no reason to expect that the things that our children accomplished could not be accomplished by average ability children in other schools and classrooms.

Evaluation of the "reconceptualising early mathematics learning" project

The Pattern and Structure Mathematics Awareness Project (PASMAP) has investigated the development of patterning and early algebraic reasoning among 4 to 8 year olds over a series of related studies. We assert that an awareness of mathematical pattern and structure enables mathematical thinking and simple forms of generalisation from an early age. The project aims to promote a strong foundation for mathematical development by focusing on critical, underlying features of mathematics learning. This paper provides an overview of key aspects of the assessment and intervention, and analyses of the impact of PASMAP on students’ representation, abstraction and generalisation of mathematical ideas. A purposive sample of four large primary schools, two in Sydney and two in Brisbane, representing 316 students from diverse socio-economic and cultural contexts, participated in the evaluation throughout the 2009 school year and a follow-up assessment in 2010. Two different mathematics programs were implemented: in each school, two Kindergarten teachers implemented the PASMAP and another two implemented their regular program. The study shows that both groups of students made substantial gains on the ‘I Can Do Maths’ assessment and a Pattern and Structure Assessment (PASA) interview, but highly significant differences were found on the latter with PASMAP students outperforming the regular group on PASA scores. Qualitative analysis of students’ responses for structural development showed increased levels for the PASMAP students; those categorised as low ability developed improved structural responses over a relatively short period of time.

Modeling as a bridge between real world problems and school mathematics

This article argues for an interdisciplinary approach to mathematical problem solving at the elementary school, one that draws upon the engineering domain. A modeling approach, using engineering model eliciting activities, might provide a rich source of meaningful situations that capitalize on and extend students’ existing mathematical learning. The study reports on the developments of 48 twelve-year old students who worked on the Bridge Design activity. Results revealed that young students, even before formal instruction, have the capacity to deal with complex interdisciplinary problems. A number of students created quite appropriate models by developing the necessary mathematical constructs to solve the problem. Students’ difficulties in mathematizing the problem, and in revising and documenting their models are presented and analysed, followed by a discussion on the appropriateness of a modeling approach as a means for introducing complex problems to elementary school students.

An English-translated parallel corpus for the CJK Wikipedia collections

In this paper, we describe a machine-translated parallel English corpus for the NTCIR Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) Wikipedia collections. This document collection is named CJK2E Wikipedia XML corpus. The corpus could be used by the information retrieval research community and knowledge sharing in Wikipedia in many ways; for example, this corpus could be used for experimentations in cross-lingual information retrieval, cross-lingual link discovery, or omni-lingual information retrieval research. Furthermore, the translated CJK articles could be used to further expand the current coverage of the English Wikipedia.

Cross-Lingual knowledge discovery : Chinese-to-English article linking in Wikipedia

In this paper we examine automated Chinese to English link discovery in Wikipedia and the effects of Chinese segmentation and Chinese to English translation on the hyperlink recommendation. Our experimental results show that the implemented link discovery framework can effectively recommend Chinese-to-English cross-lingual links. The techniques described here can assist bi-lingual users where a particular topic is not covered in Chinese, is not equally covered in both languages, or is biased in one language; as well as for language learning.

Characterizing multi-agent team behavior from partial team tracings : evidence from the English Premier League

Real-world AI systems have been recently deployed which can automatically analyze the plan and tactics of tennis players. As the game-state is updated regularly at short intervals (i.e. point-level), a library of successful and unsuccessful plans of a player can be learnt over time. Given the relative strengths and weaknesses of a player’s plans, a set of proven plans or tactics from the library that characterize a player can be identified. For low-scoring, continuous team sports like soccer, such analysis for multi-agent teams does not exist as the game is not segmented into “discretized” plays (i.e. plans), making it difficult to obtain a library that characterizes a team’s behavior. Additionally, as player tracking data is costly and difficult to obtain, we only have partial team tracings in the form of ball actions which makes this problem even more difficult. In this paper, we propose a method to overcome these issues by representing team behavior via play-segments, which are spatio-temporal descriptions of ball movement over fixed windows of time. Using these representations we can characterize team behavior from entropy maps, which give a measure of predictability of team behaviors across the field. We show the efficacy and applicability of our method on the 2010-2011 English Premier League soccer data.

The science curriculum : the decline of expertise and the rise of bureaucratise

The content for the school science curriculum has always been an interplay or contest between the interests of a number of stakeholders, who have an interest in establishing it at a new level of schooling or in changing its current form. For most of its history, the interplay was dominated by the interests of academic scientists, but in the 1980s the needs of both future scientists and future citizens began to be more evenly balanced as science educators promoted a wider sense of science. The contest changed again in the 1990s with a super-ordinate control being exerted by government bureaucrats at the expense of the subject experts. This change coincides with the rise in a number of countries of a market view of education, and of science education in particular, accompanied by demands for public accountability via simplistic auditing measures. This shift from expertise to bureaucratise and its consequences for the quality of science education is illustrated with five case studies of science curriculum reform in Australia.

A new civics curriculum for Australian schools : is it national education?

In nation states and regions including Australia, Hong Kong, other countries of Asia, the European Economic Community and elsewhere, Civics and Citizenship education (CCE) is a contested concept. The development of The Australian Curriculum is providing a national opportunity for educators to rethink curriculum priorities and to decide on new emphases for learning in Australian schools, but policy documents have emphasized the importance of CCE for all young Australians. In this paper we discuss the notion of citizenship education as ‘national education’ in Australia. We suggest that while the development of CCE in Australia does include elements of ‘national education’, the new curriculum provides an opportunity to frame the civil, political and social components of CC for young Australians in ways that include local, national and global understandings. We argue that CCE should broaden young peoples’ world views and their passion and capacity to express their own identity, so they can be active and engaged citizens in diverse communities that include their own communities, the nation and beyond.