Tipping points in online-mediated learning environments

Teacher/Student engagement enriches learning experiences beyond the specifics of communicated information by encouraging connectivity and the fostering of learning communities. This paper is an analysis of student engagement in a postgraduate online-mediated learning environment, and considers how engagement may be an important factor in building communities of learning in conjunction with improved learning outcomes. This paper is informed by the conceptual framework for effective e-learning outlined by Garrison and Anderson (2003) as necessary for higher order knowledge building by students as part of skills development for participation in knowledge economies. Data collected through a pilot study infers that a correlation exists between the development of small groups of significantly contributing students within wider online student cohorts and the learning outcomes of all students within the cohort. The findings indicate that a number of small events have increased student engagement and motivation, and resulted in improved learning outcomes.

Embodied energy in buildings : wood versus concrete - reply to Börjesson and Gustavsson

We analyse the wood and concrete designs of the Wälludden building described by Börjesson et al. (Energy Policy 28 (2000) 575) in terms of their embodied energy, employing an environmentally extended input–output framework in a tiered hybrid life-cycle assessment, and in a structural path analysis. We illustrate the complexity of the inter-industry supply chains underlying the upstream energy requirements for the building options, and demonstrate that higher-order inputs are difficult to capture in a conventional process analysis. Our calculations show that Börjesson and Gustavsson's estimates of energy requirements and greenhouse gas emissions are underestimated by a factor of about 2, and that corresponding greenhouse gas balances are positive at about 30 t C-eq. Nevertheless, Börjesson and Gustavsson's general result—the concrete-framed building causing higher emissions—still holds.

Differential convergence of life-cycle inventories toward upstream production layers

We present an input-output analysis of the life-cycle labor, land, and greenhouse gas (GHG) requirements of alternative options for three case studies: investing money in a new vehicle versus in repairs of an existing vehicle (labor), passenger transport modes for a trip between Sydney and Melbourne (land use), and renewable electricity generation (GHG emissions). These case studies were chosen to demonstrate the possibility of rank crossovers in life-cycle inventory (LCI) results as system boundaries are expanded and upstream production inputs are taken into account. They demonstrate that differential convergence can cause crossovers in the ranking of inventories for alternative functional units occurring at second-and higher-order upstream production layers.

A primary numeracy : a mapping review and analysis of Australian research in numeracy learning at the primary school level : report

The outcome from this project produces a database of over 185 projects and 726 publications relating to numeracy research to systematically ‘mapped’ Australian research on primary school numeracy over the last decade. The database incorporates research summaries and findings that are easily accessible to teachers and teacher educators, and act as a valuable tool for determining further research directions. The project report examines the available research and organises the discussion of the research findings under a set of themes and sub-themes.

Some summarised examples from the report reveals that:

* Effective teachers of numeracy:
- have high expectations of their students;
- focus on children’s mathematical learning, rather than on providing pleasant classroom experiences;
- provide a challenging curriculum;
- use higher-order questioning;
- make connections both within mathematics and between mathematics in different contexts; and
- use highly interactive teaching involvement with students in class discussion.

* Effective professional development programmes:
- provide teachers with the time and appropriate resources to enable them to reflect on their teaching;
- provide continuing support and encouragement while teachers explore possibilities and trial new strategies in their classrooms;
- involve teachers in school-based and wider networks;
- are of sufficient duration to allow significant changes to habitual beliefs and practices; and
- create opportunities for the exploration of theory-practice relationships.

Organisational capabilities and the role of routines in the emergence of a modern life insurer : The story of the AMP

In 1954 the Australian Mutual Provident Society (AMP) undertook a major organisational restructure. This reform provided the foundation upon which the Society was able to develop into a diversified financial intermediary in the following decades. This paper investigates the changing organisational structure within Australia's largest life insurer as it evolved from a branch structure to a multi-divisional form of management in the 1950s. The specialisation encouraged by the divisional system allowed the development of higher order routines upon which the executive could draw. The resulting growth and sophistication of the organisation in the late 1950s ensured higher order routines were able to develop to promote further development.

Recent advances of finite elements for laminated composite plates

A large amount of finite elements have been developed for finite element analysis of laminated composite plates. The laminated plate theories are reviewed and summarized in this paper. The focus of this review is on the recently developed laminated finite elements since 1990. The 2-D triangular and quadrilateral displacement-based and mixed/hybrid-based finite element models, which were developed based on the first-order shear deformation theories, the higher-order shear deformation theories, the zig-zag theories and the global-local higher-order deformation theories, and the layer-wise laminated plate theories are reviewed in this paper and also their related patents. Finally, some points on the development of the laminated finite elements are summarized.

Investigation into the interactive multimedia production processes of novice multimedia designer /producers in a constructivist environment

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the instructional interactive multimedia (IMI) production processes of adult novice multimedia production course. The study aimed at discovering whether a constructivistic teacher-learning environment facilitated these multimedia novice designer / producers to further develop metacognitivestates of higher-order thinking like schema formation, problem-solving and cognitive construction when producing their interactive multimedia project. To achieve this study examined the facilitative and limiting activities in planning, design and development that have assisted or hindered the NMDPs during their multimedia production work This research utilises a qualitative paradigm and makes extensive use of multiple data sources such as the participants’ proposals, planning aids, logs and final projects for single as well as cross-case analyses and discussion. Three cases were selected for in-depth analysis in the study because they provided interviews and more complete documentation and "thick descriptions" of their multimedia production activities. Findings about the NMDPs multimedia production endeavours showed that they learnt best about multimedia technology for teacing and learning by producing an interactive multimedia project themselves. Factors that enabled some of the NMDPs to flourish in a constructivistic environment included their ability to utilise their new and extended schemata to problem solve, their self regulation and a creative and positive attitude to demanding multimedia work NMDPs who utilised facilitative planning aids and design strategies produced impressive work. The study further indicates that the NMDPs’ holistic multimedia production experience made them aware of the levels of complexity involved and boosted their confidence about multimedia production for educational purposes. Suggestions for further research include examining the production styles of adult multimedia novices and young novices and investigating the implications of designing multimedia for large audience presentation rather than for single or small group learner usage.

A factor-analytic study exploring the factors of co-worker cohesion

Despite the applied importance of cohesion within organisational settings, researchers have yet to reach consensus about the dimensionality of group cohesion, and therefore appropriate tools for its measurement. The way that cohesion has generally been conceptualised has changed over time, but the measures appear not to reflect the underlying theory. This deficiency has impeded attempts to explore the relationship between co-worker cohesion and group performance (Beal et al., 2003; Mullen & Copper, 1994). Given inconsistent findings from previous factor analyses of cohesion, the present study employed exploratory means to help clarify the factor structure of cohesion within the workplace. Potential participants were recruited via the researchers' social networks. This snowballing technique led to 236 participants completing the online questionnaire. Exploratory factor analysis revealed four first-order factors of team commitment, friendliness, interpersonal conflict and communication that collectively accounted for 55.17% of the variance shared among the 75 cohesion items. Subsequently, a single higher-order factor was extracted which accounted for over half of the co-variation among the first order factors. This higher-order factor seems to reflect a general cohesion factor, as it was loaded by a diffuse collection of items, including those from the four lower-order factors as well as items that failed to load onto these lower-order factors. While there were similarities between these results and those of previous studies, the present factor structure did not map perfectly onto any of the existing conceptual models of cohesion. This finding highlights the need to incorporate some alternate factors that have previously been given little consideration.

Relationship between verbal working memory and the SCAN-C in children with specific language impairment

Purpose: An ongoing concern with the evaluation of auditory processing disorders is the extent that assessment instruments are influenced by higher order cognitive functions. This study examined the relationship between verbal working memory and performance on the Test for Auditory Processing Disorders in Children--Revised (SCAN-C; Keith, 2000b) in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing (TD) children.

Method: Sixteen children with SLI and 16 TD children ages 8/4 to 11 years participated in the study. The children were presented with the SCAN-C and tests measuring verbal working memory.

Results: Initial comparisons revealed that the SLI group obtained significantly lower scores than the TD group on the SCAN-C. However, after controlling for verbal working memory, significant differences between the 2 groups were no longer observed. Correlational analyses revealed that the composite score from the SCAN-C was related to all tests assessing verbal working memory.

Conclusions: Performance on the SCAN-C may be related to working memory functioning. As a consequence, it is unclear whether difficulty on this task should be viewed as a problem with auditory processing or a problem with verbal working memory.

Integrating sociological concepts into the study of accounting : yielding the benefits of team teaching

In response to recent criticisms of business and accounting education, a team of educators introduced a new course in social and critical perspectives on accounting. The course sought to integrate sociological concepts into the study of accounting, with key themes of social construction and social power forming a core of the course. The express intention was to raise student awareness of the nature and functions of accounting in contemporary society. The core teaching strategy involved team teaching, which was used to enhance learning and develop higher order generic skills. Feedback from two diverse cohorts of students vindicated the approach undertaken and reinforced the importance of linking teaching and research in accounting programs. Change in accounting education can be directed towards regaining and rebuilding social relevance for a discipline too often associated with a narrow economic imperative rather than the broader public interest.

CM-based blind equalization of time-varying SIMO-FIR channel with single pulsation estimation

It is known that the constant modulus (CM) property of the source signal can be exploited to blindly equalize time-invariant single-inputmultiple-output (SIMO) and finite-impulse-response (FIR) channels. However, the time-invariance assumption about the channel cannot be satisfied in several practical applications, e.g., mobile communication. In this paper, we show that, under some mild conditions, the CM criterion can be extended to the blind equalization of a time-varying channel that is described by the complex exponential basis expansion model (CE-BEM). Although several existing blind equalization methods that are based on the CE-BEM have to employ higher order statistics to estimate all nonzero channel pulsations, the CM-based method only needs to estimate one pulsation using second-order statistics, which yields better estimation results. It also relaxes the restriction on the source signal and is applicable to some classes of signals with which the existing methods cannot deal.

More appraisal please : a commentary on Pfaff et al. (2007) 'Relations between mechanisms of CNS arousal and mechanisms of stress'

This article provides a brief commentary on Pfaff et al's timely review of the relations between mechanisms of CNS arousal and mechanisms of stress. Pfaff and colleagues use the review as a platform to propose the existence of a coherent stress-arousal state. We suggest that this proposal is, on a number of grounds, flawed. In turn, we counter that the while the states of stress and arousal are related they are as entities fundamentally separate. Moreover, we propose that any productive attempt to unite the two states must acknowledge the importance of and therefore centrally include higher order integrative phenomena, such as, appraisal.

Identifying film takes for cinematic analysis

In this paper, we focus on the ‘reverse editing’ problem in movie analysis, i.e., the extraction of film takes, original camera shots that a film editor extracts and arranges to produce a finished scene. The ability to disassemble final scenes and shots into takes is essential for nonlinear browsing, content annotation and the extraction of higher order cinematic constructs from film. In this work, we investigate agglomerative hierachical clustering methods along with different similarity metrics and group distances for this task, and demonstrate our findings with 10 movies.

On extending generalized Bonferroni means to Atanassov orthopairs in decision making contexts

Extensions of aggregation functions to Atanassov orthopairs (often referred to as intuitionistic fuzzy sets or AIFS) usually involve replacing the standard arithmetic operations with those defined for the membership and non-membership orthopairs. One problem with such constructions is that the usual choice of operations has led to formulas which do not generalize the aggregation of ordinary fuzzy sets (where the membership and non-membership values add to 1). Previous extensions of the weighted arithmetic mean and ordered weighted averaging operator also have the absorbent element 〈1,0〉, which becomes particularly problematic in the case of the Bonferroni mean, whose generalizations are useful for modeling mandatory requirements. As well as considering the consistency and interpretability of the operations used for their construction, we hold that it is also important for aggregation functions over higher order fuzzy sets to exhibit analogous behavior to their standard definitions. After highlighting the main drawbacks of existing Bonferroni means defined for Atanassov orthopairs and interval data, we present two alternative methods for extending the generalized Bonferroni mean. Both lead to functions with properties more consistent with the original Bonferroni mean, and which coincide in the case of ordinary fuzzy values.

Post-adjunct reading comprehension questions and meaning construction : a case of gender study

This article explicates on how the post-adjunct reading comprehension questions existing in the Iranian high school and pre-university English textbooks affect the comprehension of the related students. It further purports to see if there is a significant gender difference in the comprehension of reading texts by these student groups. To this end, 240 third-grade high school and pre-university students (equal number of male and female) participated in this investigation. The results demonstrated a significant superiority in the subjects’ reading comprehension when they answered the texts with the post-adjunct reading comprehension questions, designed by the researchers for this purpose. The results also showed non-significant gender disparities in the comprehension of given texts.