Material world: learning and teaching chemistry

 In the Australian National Curriculum, the science understanding of overarching ideas of matter and energy covers science topics in the conceptual area of chemistry, such as the properties, forms and uses of different materials, the states of matter (solid, liquid and gas), and energy, such as forces, movement and electricity. This chapter focusses on explaining the abstract science ideas related to matter and energy through the use of appropriate vocabulary, examining ways of organising knowledge and linking scientific models and theories to observations and experiences. The particle model of matter is used to explain common observations, demonstrating the value of scientific inquiry and the role of models and representations in scientific thinking. A directed inquiry teaching approach in which there is a focus on the use of representations is recommended for these abstract topics. Representations are a vital component of communicating the abstract ideas of matter and energy. The use of the pedagogical approach in which students construct and evaluate representations of scientific ideas is used in the negotiation and development of their understandings.

Towards designing privacy-preserving signature-based IDS as a service : a study and practice

With the advent of Cloud Computing, IDS as a service (IDSaaS) has been proposed as an alternative to protect a network (e.g., financial organization) from a wide range of network attacks by offloading the expensive operations such as the process of signature matching to the cloud. The IDSaaS can be roughly classified into two types: signature-based detection and anomaly-based detection. During the packet inspection, no party wants to disclose their own data especially sensitive information to others, even to the cloud provider, for privacy concerns. However, current solutions of IDSaaS have not much discussed this issue. In this work, focus on the signature-based IDSaaS, we begin by designing a promising privacy-preserving intrusion detection mechanism, the main feature of which is that the process of signature matching does not reveal any specific content of network packets by means of a fingerprint-based comparison. We further conduct a study to evaluate this mechanism under a cloud scenario and identify several open problems and issues for designing such a privacy-preserving mechanism for IDSaaS in a practical environment.

Learning how to teach chemistry with technology: pre-service teachers’ experiences with integrating technology into their learning and teaching

The Australian Government initiative, Teaching Teachers for the Future (TTF), was a targeted response to improve the preparation of future teachers with integrating technology into their practice. This paper reports on TTF research involving 28 preservice teachers undertaking a chemistry curriculum studies unit that adopted a technological focus. For chemistry teaching the results showed that technological knowledge augmented the fundamental pedagogical knowledge necessary for teaching chemistry content. All the pre-service teachers demonstrated an understanding of the role of technology in teaching and learning and reported an increased skill level in a variety of technologies, many they had not used previously. Some students were sceptical about this learning when schools did not have technological resources available. This paper argues that teacher education courses should include technological skills that match those available in schools, as well as introduce new technologies to support a change in the culture of using technology in schools.