Teaching PSP: Challenges and lessons learned

Teaching the PSP: Challenges and Lessons Learned by Jurgen Borstler, David Carrington, Gregory W Hislop, Susan Lisack, Keith Olson, and Laurie Williams, pp. 42-48. Soft-ware engineering educators need to provide environments where students learn about the size and complexity of modern software systems and the techniques available for managing these difficulties. Five universities used the Personal Software Process to teach software engineering concepts in a variety of contexts.

Outcome of stroke patients admitted to intensive care: Experience from an Australian teaching hospital

The objective of this study was to determine the mortality rate and the functional outcomes of stroke patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) and to identify predictors of poor outcome in this population. The records of all patients admitted to the ICU with the diagnosis of stroke between January 1994 and December 1999 were reviewed. Patients with subarachnoid haemorrhage were excluded. Data were collected on clinical and biological variables, risk factors for stroke and the presence of comorbidities. Mortality (ICU, in-hospital and three-month) and functional outcome were used as end-points. In the six-year-period, 61 patients were admitted to the ICU with either haemorrhagic or ischaemic stroke. Medical records were available for only 58 patients. There were 23 ischaemic and 35 haemorrhagic strokes. The ICU, in-hospital and three-month mortality rates were 36%, 47% and 52% respectively. There were no significant differences in the prevalence of premorbid risk factors between survivors and non-survivors. The mean Barthel score was significantly different between the independent and dependent survivors (94 +/- 6 vs 45 +/- 26, P < 0.001). A substantial number of patients with good functional outcomes had lower Rankin scores (92% vs 11%, P < 0.001). Only 46% of those who were alive at three months were functionally independent. Intensive care admission was associated with a high mortality rate and a high likelihood of dependent lifestyle after hospital discharge. Haemorrhagic stroke, fixed dilated pupil(s) and GCS < 10 during assessment were associated with increased mortality and poor functional outcome.

Veterinary parasitology teaching in eastern Australia

There are tendencies in universities globally to change undergraduate teaching in veterinary parasitology. To be able to give considered advice to universities, faculties, governmental bodies and professional societies about a discipline and to establish how particular changes may impact on the quality of a course, is the requirement to record and review its current status. The present paper contributes toward this objective by providing a snap-shot of the veterinary parasitology courses at the Universities of Melbourne, Sydney and Queensland in eastern Australia. It includes a description of the veterinary science curriculum in each institution, and provides an outline of its veterinary parasitology course, including objectives, topics covered, course delivery, student examination procedures and course evaluation. Student contact time in veterinary parasitology during the curriculum is currently higher in Melbourne (183 h) compared with Sydney and Queensland (106-110 h). In the teaching of parasitology, Melbourne adopts a taxonomic approach (in the pre-clinical period) followed by a combined disciplinary and problem-based approach in the clinical semesters, whereas both Sydney and Queensland focus more on presenting parasites on a host species-basis followed by a problem-based approach. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Engaging with theories of dialogue and voice: Using Bakhtin as a framework to understand teaching and learning Indigenous Australian women's performance

In this paper I explore the Indigenous Australian women's performance classroom (hereafter ANTH2120) as a dialectic and discursive space where the location of possibility is opened for female Indigenous performers to enter into a dialogue from and between both non-Indigenous and Indigenous voices. The work of Bakhtin on dialogue serves as a useful standpoint for understanding the multiple speaking positions and texts in the ANTH2120 context. Bakhtin emphasizes performance, history, actuality and the openness of dialogue to provide an important framework for analysing multiple speaking positions and ways of making meaning through dialogue between shifting and differing subjectivities. I begin by briefly critiquing Bakhtin's "dialogic imagination" and consider the application and usefulness of concepts such as dialogism, heteroglossia and the utterance to understanding the ANTH2120 classroom as a polyphonic and discursive space. I then turn to an analysis of dialogue in the ANTH2120 classroom and primarily situate my gaze on an examination of the interactions that took place between the voices of myself as family/teacher/student and senior Yanyuwa women from the r e m o t e N o r t h e r n T e r r i t o r y A b o r i g i n a l c o m m u n i t y o f B o r r o l o o l a as family/performers/teachers. The 2000 and 2001 Yanyuwa women's performance workshops will be used as examples of the way power is constantly shifting in this dialogue to allow particular voices to speak with authority, and for others to remain silent as roles and relationships between myself and the Yanyuwa women change. Conclusions will be drawn regarding how my subject positions and white race privilege affect who speaks, who listens and on whose terms, and further, the efficacy of this pedagogical platform for opening up the location of possibility for Indigenous Australian women to play a powerful part in the construction of knowledges about women's performance traditions.

'Vigilant Hospitality': The Online Imperative and Teaching Cultural Studies

Information technology (IT) sees information as a fluid, to be stored, regulated and exchanged. This is a profoundly economic model, whose dreams are those of the marketplace – and now, university managers. But no teacher, of course, holds that teaching can be reduced to the movement of information from one point to another. Teaching is never quite absorbed into the models of IT. Where they meet, we do not have the utopia of the virtual classroom, at last freed from the strictures of timetables and the face-to-face; we have, rather, the grinding of two radically irreducible models. This has nothing to do with Luddism; on the contrary, it is the value and necessity of IT for us at present, as teachers. At a time when the tertiary sector’s massive investment in IT is motivated in part by its own dream of the teacherless classroom, one of the pressing tasks for us may be simply to argue as rigorously as we can the structural necessity of our own position as teachers, without nostalgia or humanist sentimentality.

Evaluation of cyclooxygenase 2 inhibitor use in patients admitted to a large teaching hospital

Background: The heavy usage of coxibs in Australia far outstrips the predicted usage that was based on the treatment of patients with risk factors for upper gastro-intestinal adverse events from conventional anti--inflammatory agents. This raises questions regarding the appropriateness of prescribing. Aims: To determine: (i) the relationship between prescriptions for cyclooxygenase 2 (COX-2) inhibitors and objective evidence of inflammatory arthritis, (ii) prior experience with paracetamol and/or conventional non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), and (iii) contraindications to the use of NSAIDs. Methods: Drug utilization evaluation and rheumato-logical assessment was conducted on 70 consecutive patients admitted on COX-2 inhibitors to a 480-bed metropolitan hospital. The main outcome measures were: the indication for COX-2 inhibitor; objective -evidence of inflammatory arthritis; previous trial of -paracetamol or conventional NSAIDs; and patient -satisfaction. Results: Only 11 patients (16%) had symptoms or signs of an inflammatory arthropathy, and met Pharmaceut-ical Benefits Schedule criteria for prescribing a COX-2 inhibitor. Fifty-nine patients (84%) had chronic osteo-arthritis, degenerative spinal disease, injury or malignancy, without overt active inflammation. Fourteen patients (20%) had trialled regular paracetamol prior to using any NSAID treatment. Conventional NSAIDs had been previously used by 51 patients (73%). Eleven patients (16%) reported previous adverse gastrointestinal effects from conventional NSAIDs. On the basis of significant renal impairment (creatinine clearance 5/10). Conclusions: Drug utilization data indicate that COX-2 inhibitors are frequently used first line for degenerative osteoarthritis in the absence of overt inflammation, without prior adequate trial of paracetamol and with disregard for the cautions and contraindications of these agents. These findings may explain the unprecedented Pharmaceutical Benefits Schedule expenditure on COX-2 inhibitors in Australia.

Lectures and other types of teaching

A questionnaire on lectures was completed by 351 students (84% response) and 35 staff (76% response) from all five years of the veterinary course at the University of Queensland. Staff and students in all five years offered limited support for a reduction in the number of lectures in the course and the majority supported a reduction in the number of lectures in the clinical years. Students in the clinical years only and appropriate staff agreed that the number of lectures in fifth year should be reduced but were divided as to whether lectures in fifth year should be abolished. There was limited support for replacement of some lectures by computer assisted learning (CAL) programs, but strong support for replacement of some lectures by subject-based problem based learning (PBL) and strong support for more self-directed learning by students. Staff and students strongly supported the inclusion of more clinical problem solving in lectures in the clinical years and wanted these lectures to be more interactive. There was little support for lectures in the clinical years to be of the same type as in the preclinical years.

Constructing and reconstructing teaching roles: A focus on generative metaphors and dichotomies

Over the last several decades, a shift in thinking has brought to the fore the power of language as more than simply a method of expression. Indeed, language is a constituent part of social practices and social identity. For teachers, both pre-service and in-service, teaching roles are often represented through surface and generative metaphors, the latter of which are tacit. In order to study the way in which language, and in particular metaphor, influences thinking about teaching roles, the authors of this article combined their data to examine the metaphoric discourse of both pre-service and in-service teachers. Contextualizing two separate studies in their respective teacher education programs, this article highlights the obstacle of unexposed generative metaphors and the value of ongoing professional development. In addition, it emphasizes the importance of deconstructing traditional dichotomies as central to teacher education reform.