Polster and Ross " Maths Masters" articles

Burkard Polster and Marty Ross's 'Maths Masters' articles (previously reviewed in Vinculum) now linked with the 'Education Supplement' in The Age online are recommended to readers. Polster and Ross will be sending out e-mail alerts with a short summary of the latest article plus a link to where it is sitting on The Age online. E-mail alerts can be requested via Polster and Ross's website mathsmasters@qedcat.com

Helping university students to 'read' scholarly journal articles : the benefits of a structured and collaborative approach

Academics often treat students’ discipline-specific literacy as unproblematic. In doing so they may underestimate the difficulties for university students as they move between subjects of study that may involve different disciplines, language genres and academic practices. This paper describes an initiative aimed at supporting students in reading academic articles in preparation for completing an essay for an assessment task. This initiative involved a structured and collaborative two-week tutorial exercise that provided students with practice in using a framework to extract the main ideas from academic readings. Students were surveyed after this exercise, and their reflections of its value are described in this paper. The findings of this study will inform further stages of the project which aim to develop and investigate practical ways to develop student’s academic literacy across several business disciplines.

Metadiscourse functions in English and Persian sociology articles : a study in contrastive rhetoric

This study on contrastive rhetoric reports on metadiscourse functions in sociology articles in Persian and English. The results have revealed a higher number of metadiscourse elements in the English texts. Among the different metadiscourse elements used, text connectors are the most frequently employed in both languages. Modality markers are the second most frequent in both languages although the English writers used nearly twice the number of these markers. Overall, it is found that the frequency of textual metadiscourse markers is greater than the interpersonal markers in both language samples. It was further revealed that the Persian writers of sociology texts are less interested in explicitly orienting the readers and some of the main points in an article, especially in the concluding section, are left for the readers to infer. This, we believe, is the result of less reliance on academic writing in the educational system of the country. Instead, the Iranians are largely encouraged to employ a flowery language and rhetoric to decorate their writing in their school years which makes them less attentive of their readers.

‘Else-where’ : essays in art, architecture, and cultural production 2002-2011

“Else-where”: Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002–2011 is a synoptic survey of the representational values given to art, architecture, and cultural production at the closing of the twentieth century and the opening of the twenty-first. Written primarily as a critique of what is suppressed in architecture and what is disclosed in art, the essays are informed by the passage out of post-structuralism and its disciplinary analogues toward the Real (denoted over the course of the studies as the “Real-Irreal,” or “Else-where”). The essays collected in “Else-where” cross various disciplines (inclusive of landscape architecture, architecture, and visual art) to develop a nuanced critique of a renascent formal regard and elective exit from nihilism in art and architecture that is also an invocation of the highest coordinates given to the arts – that is, formal ontology as speculative intelligence itself, or the return of the universal as utopian thought “here-and-now.”