Reporting usability defects: limitations of open source defect repositories and suggestions for improvement

Capturing good quality defect reports is critical for ensuring quick resolution of defects. While a range of studies into defect reporting exists, to date, very few focused on usability defect reporting issues can be found. To better understand issues specific to usability defect reporting, we carried out a survey of 56 contributors to the Mozilla and Google Chromium software projects spanning both usability defect reporters and developers. We discovered a range of limitations and key issues in current usability defect reporting tools and approaches identified as important by reporters and developers. In addition, we highlight opportunities to improve defect-reporting tools based on these open source communities' needs.

Representing and learning in science

In this book we argue for an approach to representational work in school science learning and teaching that engages participants, is epistemologically sound, aligns with knowledge-building practices in the discipline, and draws on extensive classroom study. We review in this chapter current research agendas around student representational work in science learning, including the assumptions, rationale and research practices of these agendas. We do this (a) to clarify precisely what we see as the diversity of current mainstream thinking and practices around representational activity, and (b) to articulate what is distinctive about our own contribution, noting the traditions, influences and prior research we draw on. We begin by noting the current dominant role of image generation and analysis in much contemporary science, and its implications for science in schools.

Teacher stories of collusion and transformation: a feminist pedagogical framework and meta-language for cultural gender justice

This article examines data from two different studies concerning issues of social justice, gender and schooling and specifically the practices of secondary teachers, ‘Mr B’, a teacher from a school in Tasmania, Australia, and ‘Mr C’, a teacher from a school in Bedfordshire in the United Kingdom. Both teachers’ practices and relationships with students are analysed within a feminist interpretation of the Productive Pedagogies model of quality teaching and learning. The two different stories are presented as juxtapositions that serve to illuminate the capacities of pedagogy to, on the one hand, work in ways likely to re-inscribe the discourses of entitlement and privilege that perpetuate cultural gender injustice, and on the other, transform these discourses towards more equitable and just networks of multiple and intersecting differences.

Intensive mode learning and threshold concepts

Intensive mode teaching and learning refers to educational activities that occur on fewer days, and longer each day, than a “traditional” unit or module in the discipline. In traditional education, a full-time student would study between four and eight subjects or units per term or per semester at school, TAFE or university. Hence each subject or unit is effectively part-time study, taking up between 10% and 25% of the study hours available in each week. By way of contrast, an intensive mode subject might take between 30% and 100% of the available study hours. Examples include field trips and study tours, during which students devote 100% of the available hours to a single subject. In chemistry, the University of New England and Central Queensland University offer course by distance education, but students are expected to attend compulsory residential schools. During these residential schools, the students participate in chemistry laboratories and tutorials, all day, every day for up to one week.