From the Reliable and Unselfish to the Versatile and Independent : - desired qualities in two Swedish curricula

The process in which girls and boys are constructed and construct themselves to pupils takes place in a context where conceptions of “the good pupil” are distinctly manifested in national school documents. In different types of texts concerning school and education, the image of the pupil that society wants to create emerges. Documents from early childhood education up to university level prioritise qualities such as independence, initiative, accountability and freedom to make ones own choices. Qualities or competencies that are preferred during a certain period change as time passes and society develops. The idea of the democratic subject is not the same today as it was 25 years ago. The purpose of this article is to emphasise and compare different desired qualities described in two Swedish national curricula, competencies that pupils in the compulsory school are supposed to develop. The discussion encompasses the political ideas of the pupil during a period of twenty-five years in light of changes in Western societies during the last decades.

Independent Domain of Symmetric Encryption using Least SignificantBit : Computer Vision, Steganography and Cryptography Techniques

The rapid development of data transfer through internet made it easier to send the data accurate and faster to the destination. There are many transmission media to transfer the data to destination like e-mails; at the same time it is may be easier to modify and misuse the valuable information through hacking. So, in order to transfer the data securely to the destination without any modifications, there are many approaches like cryptography and steganography. This paper deals with the image steganography as well as with the different security issues, general overview of cryptography, steganography and digital watermarking approaches.  The problem of copyright violation of multimedia data has increased due to the enormous growth of computer networks that provides fast and error free transmission of any unauthorized duplicate and possibly manipulated copy of multimedia information. In order to be effective for copyright protection, digital watermark must be robust which are difficult to remove from the object in which they are embedded despite a variety of possible attacks. The message to be send safe and secure, we use watermarking. We use invisible watermarking to embed the message using LSB (Least Significant Bit) steganographic technique. The standard LSB technique embed the message in every pixel, but my contribution for this proposed watermarking, works with the hint for embedding the message only on the image edges alone. If the hacker knows that the system uses LSB technique also, it cannot decrypt correct message. To make my system robust and secure, we added cryptography algorithm as Vigenere square. Whereas the message is transmitted in cipher text and its added advantage to the proposed system. The standard Vigenere square algorithm works with either lower case or upper case. The proposed cryptography algorithm is Vigenere square with extension of numbers also. We can keep the crypto key with combination of characters and numbers. So by using these modifications and updating in this existing algorithm and combination of cryptography and steganography method we develop a secure and strong watermarking method. Performance of this watermarking scheme has been analyzed by evaluating the robustness of the algorithm with PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) and MSE (Mean Square Error) against the quality of the image for large amount of data. While coming to see results of the proposed encryption, higher value of 89dB of PSNR with small value of MSE is 0.0017. Then it seems the proposed watermarking system is secure and robust for hiding secure information in any digital system, because this system collect the properties of both steganography and cryptography sciences.

The "reflection protocol" - a way to develop learning and independent thinking?

It is now-a-days more and more common in the academic world to use new forms of “learning-tools”. One of those is the “reflection protocol”, which usually consist of a few pages of freely written text, related to something the students have read. There seems to be a lot of different opinions about the value to use this method. Some teachers and students are enthusiastic and others are rather critical. To write a “reflection protocol” is not in the first place to do a summery, a review, not even to analyze a text. Instead it is about to write down thoughts and questions that comes up as a result of the reading. It is also about doing associations, reflections and to interpret a text and relate this to a theme of some kind. The purpose to use “reflection protocols” is, as we see it, mainly for the student to practice independent thinking from a scientific point of view, but it also gives a possibility to a better understanding of another person’s thinking. This seems to open up for a fruitful dialogue and a way to learn. We will in this paper discuss if that could be the case.