Factors mediating the routinisation of e-learning within a traditional university education environment

Technology-enhanced or Computer Aided Learning (e-learning) can be institutionally integrated and supported by learning management systems or Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) to offer efficiency gains, effectiveness and scalability of the e-leaning paradigm. However this can only be achieved through integration of pedagogically intelligent approaches and lesson preparation tools environment and VLE that is well accepted by both the students and teachers. This paper critically explores some of the issues relevant to scalable routinisation of e-learning at the tertiary level, typically first year university undergraduates, with the teaching of Relational Data Analysis (RDA), as supported by multimedia authoring, as a case study. The paper concludes that blended learning approaches which balance the deployment of e-learning with other modalities of learning delivery such as instructor–mediated group learning etc offer the most flexible and scalable route to e-learning but that this requires the graceful integration of platforms for multimedia production, distribution and delivery through advanced interactive spaces that provoke learner engagement and promote learning autonomy and group learning facilitated by a cooperative-creative learning environment that remains open to personal exploration of constructivist-constructionist pathways to learning.

Visual ambiguity in the oeuvre of the Gela Painter: a new lekythos from Thessaly

This paper presents a previously unpublished Attic lekythos and discusses visual ambiguity as an intentional drawing style used by a vase painter who conceptualised the many possible relationships between pot and user, object and subject. The Gela Painter endowed this hastily manufactured and decorated lekythos with visual effects that drew the viewer into an inherently ambivalent motif: a mounting Dionysos. This motif, like other Dionysian themes, had a vogue in late Archaic times but did not necessarily invoke chthonic associations. It had the potential to be consumed in diverse contexts, including religious festivals, by a wide range of audiences. Such images were not given to the viewer fully through visual perception but through interpretation.