Patterns of Religious Education Policy in Switzerland. The Long Arm of Distanced Christians?

In spite of its different cantonal jurisdictions and traditions, the development of religious education in Switzerland over the past decade has taken a common direction: the state has assumed a more active role in the field of religious education in public (state-run) schools. In this article, we ask the question: How do key social actors interpret these reforms and how do these interpretations relate to the social structure of religion in Switzerland, in particular with respect to the majority category of the so-called distanced Christians? Drawing on qualitative interviews with members of the schools’ teaching staff, school administrators, and church representatives, the article highlights a dominant interpretative pattern that frames the socially accepted representation of religion in public schools. Thus, rather than addressing the pedagogical dimension of religious education, we discuss the significance of this pattern for the debate on the public presence of religion in Switzerland and Europe.

Governing individual learning in the transition phase of software maintenance offshoring: a dynamic perspective

Prior studies suggest that clients need to actively govern knowledge transfer to vendor staff in offshore outsourcing. In this paper, we analyze longitudinal data from four software maintenance offshore out-sourcing projects to explore why governance may be needed for knowledge transfer and how governance and the individual learning of vendor engineers inter-act over time. Our results suggest that self-control is central to learning, but may be hampered by low levels of trust and expertise at the outset of projects. For these foundations to develop, clients initially need to exert high amounts of formal and clan controls to enforce learning activities against barriers to knowledge sharing. Once learning activities occur, trust and expertise increase and control portfolios may show greater emphases on self-control.

Learning by the Dendritic Prediction of Somatic Spiking

Recent modeling of spike-timing-dependent plasticity indicates that plasticity involves as a third factor a local dendritic potential, besides pre- and postsynaptic firing times. We present a simple compartmental neuron model together with a non-Hebbian, biologically plausible learning rule for dendritic synapses where plasticity is modulated by these three factors. In functional terms, the rule seeks to minimize discrepancies between somatic firings and a local dendritic potential. Such prediction errors can arise in our model from stochastic fluctuations as well as from synaptic input, which directly targets the soma. Depending on the nature of this direct input, our plasticity rule subserves supervised or unsupervised learning. When a reward signal modulates the learning rate, reinforcement learning results. Hence a single plasticity rule supports diverse learning paradigms.

Education and employment pathways from the end of compulsory school to young adulthood: the first ten years

Dieser Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit den Ausbildungs- und Erwerbsverläufen vom Ende der obligatorischen Schulzeit bis ins junge Erwachsenenalter. Als empirische Datengrundlage dient die Längsschnittstudie TREE („Transitionen von der Erstausbildung ins Erwerbsleben“). Die Auswertungen beruhen auf den Daten der ersten acht Befragungswellen von 2001 bis 2010.

Interprofessional Education in Anatomy: Learning Together in Medical and Nursing Training

Teamwork and the interprofessional collaboration of all health professions are a guarantee of patient safety and highly qualified treatment in patient care. In the daily clinical routine, physicians and nurses must work together, but the education of the different health professions occurs separately in various places, mostly without interrelated contact. Such training abets mutual misunderstanding and cements professional protectionism, which is why interprofessional education can play an important role in dismantling such barriers to future cooperation. In this article, a pilot project in interprofessional education involving both medical and nursing students is presented, and the concept and the course of training are described in detail. The report illustrates how nursing topics and anatomy lectures can be combined for interprofessional learning in an early phase of training. Evaluation of the course showed that the students were highly satisfied with the collaborative training and believed interprofessional education (IPE) to be an important experience for their future profession and understanding of other health professionals. The results show that the IPE teaching concept, which combines anatomy and nursing topics, provides an optimal setting for learning together and helps nurses and doctors in training to gain knowledge about other health professionals’ roles, thus evolving mutual understanding.