Pellon pientareelta akateemisiin sfääreihin : Opettajuuden rakentuminen ja muuttuminen sotienjälkeisessä Suomessa opettajien omaelämäkertojen valossa

From the field to the academic sphere how teachers professional identities and roles have changed in post-war Finland This study explores teacher autobiographies. The span of the writings extends mainly from the Second World War to the new millennium. The autobiographers are mostly elementary and secondary school teachers in Finland, although there are a few who have worked in vocational schools, polytechnic institutes or one of the various adult education centres. The researcher is aware of the diversity among those educational institutions and their teachers, but wanted to concentrate on similarities rather than differences. The autobiographers have been explored with four different research questions in view. The first was to identify professional and personal elements and themes mentioned by teachers in writing about themselves. The second was to identify the factors that have affected those elements and themes. The third was to examine the kinds of literary forms teachers used in their autobiographies. The fourth was the most crucial and an endeavour to connect the previous questions: how teachers professional identities and roles have changed during the period studied. In the first five chapters the teachers voices come through clearly. Two of these chapters are organized in chronological order. The first is about childhood, youth and the time spent in school, the second deals with the years studying in university or teachers college and finally being recruited to the teachers. In these chapters the rural background of many teachers stands out, an issue that also emerged symbolically or de facto in the autobiographies. The chronological scheme changes to a thematic order, in which social matters (students, parents, colleagues) and teachers working circumstances are dealt with. Four selected autobiographies are examined closely. In these autobiographies five different types of teacher narratives can be identified. To begin with, teachers stressed their vocation, which is quite a normal work orientation for those working in the educational field. Others emphasised how they were looking for professional development; a few wrote about personal advancement as well. There are also narratives by teachers who simply drifted into the profession of teaching, while a few teachers felt unwelcome in their own schools. As for the changes that teachers have witnessed, there are also some themes that are widely shared. Most pointed out how the teacher has become more foster parent than educator, as real parents have withdrawn from their responsibilities of raising children. This theme was frequently broached, although attitude towards it and ways of handling the phenomenon differed substantially. Teachers also stressed how their profession has lost the aura and prestige it once had. At the same time teachers are being expected to collaborate more with their colleagues, which is not in line with the centuries-old tradition of working alone. Teachers seem to be in a state of flux, buffeted by elements of stability and change interacting simultaneously. Many teachers are demanding a re-examination of their working reality. Teachers long and intimate relationship with society and the state may be at a crossroads. Key words: teachers professional identity and role, autobiographical study, post-war Finland

Tapiolan kuoron pedagoginen merkitys vuosina 1963-2003

This study examines the impact that the Tapiola choir has had on its singers under its four decades. This pedagogical meaning was studied through the former singers of the Tapiola choir, their life choices and their choice of profession. The purpose of this study was to find out how the Tapiola choir has influenced its singers in the long run - their individuality and personality as well as their world view. The target group of this research were all the former members of the Tapiola choir. Altogether 400 individuals have sung in the Tapiola choir. One hundred of them could be reached and 87 of them answered the enquiry. The enquiry was divided in to the following sections: 1) background, 2) years in the choir, 3) hobbies, 4) statements, 5) complete the sentences and 6) with your own words. The main emphasis in this enquiry was on the 50 statements, which were used to study the respondents' attitudes towards the choir as a hobby, the choir's working methods and music education. Through the analysis of this section the researcher was able to generalize the impacts that Tapiola choir has had on its singers. The theoretical base of this study examines the subtext of musicality and musical development as well as music as a hobby. Communal music hobbies and the requirements for a functioning music community were also accentuated. This was connected to my hypothesis of an educative music community. A music community can't be truly educative if its members are unable to collaborate in different situations of practicing and performing. The research results support my hypothesis of the educativeness of a children's choir. The former choristers are socially skilled and self-confident individuals, who are well prepared for the challenges in life. In the Tapiola choir every member is a responsible individual as well as an important part of the whole. The different tasks given in the choir teach the choristers to trust their own skills. Working in a group for its part develops social skills. Many of the respondents also felt that singing in the Tapiola choir was more than a hobby, almost like a way of life. Many of them impress that they would be totally different persons without this period in their life. Children's choir, music education, life choices, social interest group, communal music hobby

Can teacher collaboration overcome barriers to interdisciplinary learning in a disciplinary university? A case study using climate change

A teacher network was formed at an Australian university in order to better promote interdisciplinary student learning on the complex social-environmental problem of climate change. Rather than leaving it to students to piece together disciplinary responses, eight teaching academics collaborated on the task of exposing students to different types of knowledge in a way that was more than the summing of disciplinary parts. With a part-time network facilitator providing cohesion, network members were able to teach into each other’s classes, and share material and student activities across a range of units that included business, zoology, marine science, geography and education. Participants reported that the most positive aspects of the project were the collegiality and support for teaching innovation provided by peers. However, participants also reported being time-poor and overworked. Maintaining the collaboration beyond the initial one year project proved difficult because without funding for the network facilitator, participants were unable to dedicate the time required to meet and collaborate on shared activities. In order to strengthen teacher collaboration in a university whose administrative structures are predominantly discipline-based, there is need for recognition of the benefits of interdisciplinary learning to be matched by recognition of the need for financial and other resources to support collaborative teaching initiatives.

The Hot Topic Community: Videoconferencing to reduce the professional isolation of teachers in rural Western Australia

Access to quality professional learning and the opportunity to collaborate with other educators can be limited for teachers in rural and remote areas of Western Australia. A recognised need to enhance the skills of rural teaching professionals and encourage teachers in small communities to join collegial networks was established by the members of several professional organisations. A working group consisting of representatives from the Australian College of Educators-WA (ACE-WA), the Rural and Remote Education Advisory Council (RREAC), the Society for the Provision of Education in Rural Australia (SPERA) and the School of Isolated and Distance Education (SIDE) provided teachers in rural areas with the opportunity to reduce professional isolation through the provision of relevant, convenient, and cost effective in-service education. Through a videoconferencing system, accessed within the Western Australian Telecentre Network and other educational organisations, the audience connected and participated with the presenter and studio based audience for two Hot Topics Seminars in 2008. This paper reports on the challenges and successes encountered by the working group and the findings of the research conducted throughout 2008.

Driving whole-of-life efficiencies through BIM and procurement

Building Information Modelling (BIM) is a digital process that encompasses all aspects, disciplines and systems of built assets within a single virtual model. This allows stakeholders to collaborate more accurately and efficiently than with traditional processes. Case study 1 Design: New Generation Rollingstock Maintenance Centre, Queensland. Case Study 2 Construction: Perth Children's Hospital, Western Australia. Case Study 3 Asset Management: Sydney Opera House, New South Wales. This project sought to provide the built environment industry with a framework to measure and maximize benefits from implementing BIM across the life-cycle phases of a built asset.

Curious hybrids: Creating 'not-quite' beings to explore possible childhoods

Communications between adults and young children can expose different ideas and opinions. Adults and children have different capacities to speak, these discursive spaces can become filled with assumptions, stereotyping and conventional thinking about power and agency. If communication shifts away from the purely discursive, what might be exposed about the explorations, investigations and fantasies adults and children indulge in? Some time ago my young daughter obsessively drew hybrid beings. Created from mixtures of animal, object, human and creature forms, these beings, which are ‘not-quite’, are becoming, able to transform via myriad mutations. We agreed to collaborate and draw additional hybrid beings to experiment with becoming-other through complex entanglements of forms, to complicate, morph and (trans)form from our human selves to hybrid others. The ‘not- quite-ness’ of our monstrous hybrids subvert the conventions of ‘being’ and prompt contemplations about childhood subjectivities, identities, conventionalities and actively interrogate the assumptive knowledges and subjectifications that are held about young children in early childhood professional and academic systems.

The InstaBooth: Making common ground for media architectural design

Media architecture has emerged from and relies upon a range of different disciplinary traditions and areas of expertise. As this field develops, it is timely to reflect upon the ways in which designers of different disciplinary stripes can be brought together to collaborate in a design process. What are the means by which design teams can establish a ‘common ground’ where design work can take place while recognizing the diversity of ways of working those different disciplines bring to the process? A co-design approach has been the fundamental backbone of the InstaBooth project, which has brought together a multidisciplinary design team of academics and practitioners. The intention of this project has been to explore the combination of digital and physical interactions within a small media architecture installation to intervene with urban environments and public places for the purposes of community engagement. It is by exploring the design process of the InstaBooth project that we highlight the value of multi-disciplinary collaborations, the lessons that can be learned, and the struggles and hurdles along the way. This paper highlights the iterative process of design, the materials and physical prototypes that were employed to ultimately create a working version of the InstaBooth, a media architecture that evolves as users push its boundaries and take ownership of the installation. The concept of the InstaBooth continues to develop not only as more data are collected on its mechanics and potentials through observations, interviews and workshops, but also as more and more users engage with the installation in their individual ways.

Time and Energy Complexity of Distributed Computation of a Class of Functions in Wireless Sensor Networks

We consider a scenario in which a wireless sensor network is formed by randomly deploying n sensors to measure some spatial function over a field, with the objective of computing a function of the measurements and communicating it to an operator station. We restrict ourselves to the class of type-threshold functions (as defined in the work of Giridhar and Kumar, 2005), of which max, min, and indicator functions are important examples: our discussions are couched in terms of the max function. We view the problem as one of message-passing distributed computation over a geometric random graph. The network is assumed to be synchronous, and the sensors synchronously measure values and then collaborate to compute and deliver the function computed with these values to the operator station. Computation algorithms differ in (1) the communication topology assumed and (2) the messages that the nodes need to exchange in order to carry out the computation. The focus of our paper is to establish (in probability) scaling laws for the time and energy complexity of the distributed function computation over random wireless networks, under the assumption of centralized contention-free scheduling of packet transmissions. First, without any constraint on the computation algorithm, we establish scaling laws for the computation time and energy expenditure for one-time maximum computation. We show that for an optimal algorithm, the computation time and energy expenditure scale, respectively, as Theta(radicn/log n) and Theta(n) asymptotically as the number of sensors n rarr infin. Second, we analyze the performance of three specific computation algorithms that may be used in specific practical situations, namely, the tree algorithm, multihop transmission, and the Ripple algorithm (a type of gossip algorithm), and obtain scaling laws for the computation time and energy expenditure as n rarr infin. In particular, we show that the computation time for these algorithms scales as Theta(radicn/lo- g n), Theta(n), and Theta(radicn log n), respectively, whereas the energy expended scales as , Theta(n), Theta(radicn/log n), and Theta(radicn log n), respectively. Finally, simulation results are provided to show that our analysis indeed captures the correct scaling. The simulations also yield estimates of the constant multipliers in the scaling laws. Our analyses throughout assume a centralized optimal scheduler, and hence, our results can be viewed as providing bounds for the performance with practical distributed schedulers.

Governance theory as a framework for empirical research : a case study on local environmental policy-making in Helsinki, Finland

Governance has been one of the most popular buzzwords in recent political science. As with any term shared by numerous fields of research, as well as everyday language, governance is encumbered by a jungle of definitions and applications. This work elaborates on the concept of network governance. Network governance refers to complex policy-making situations, where a variety of public and private actors collaborate in order to produce and define policy. Governance is processes of autonomous, self-organizing networks of organizations exchanging information and deliberating. Network governance is a theoretical concept that corresponds to an empirical phenomenon. Often, this phenomenon is used to descirbe a historical development: governance is often used to describe changes in political processes of Western societies since the 1980s. In this work, empirical governance networks are used as an organizing framework, and the concepts of autonomy, self-organization and network structure are developed as tools for empirical analysis of any complex decision-making process. This work develops this framework and explores the governance networks in the case of environmental policy-making in the City of Helsinki, Finland. The crafting of a local ecological sustainability programme required support and knowledge from all sectors of administration, a number of entrepreneurs and companies and the inhabitants of Helsinki. The policy process relied explicitly on networking, with public and private actors collaborating to design policy instruments. Communication between individual organizations led to the development of network structures and patterns. This research analyses these patterns and their effects on policy choice, by applying the methods of social network analysis. A variety of social network analysis methods are used to uncover different features of the networked process. Links between individual network positions, network subgroup structures and macro-level network patterns are compared to the types of organizations involved and final policy instruments chosen. By using governance concepts to depict a policy process, the work aims to assess whether they contribute to models of policy-making. The conclusion is that the governance literature sheds light on events that would otherwise go unnoticed, or whose conceptualization would remain atheoretical. The framework of network governance should be in the toolkit of the policy analyst.

Context based service discovery for ubiquitous applications

Service discovery is vital in ubiquitous applications, where a large number of devices and software components collaborate unobtrusively and provide numerous services without user intervention. Existing service discovery schemes use a service matching process in order to offer services of interest to the users. Potentially, the context information of the users and surrounding environment can be used to improve the quality of service matching. To make use of context information in service matching, a service discovery technique needs to address certain challenges. Firstly, it is required that the context information shall have unambiguous representation. Secondly, the devices in the environment shall be able to disseminate high level and low level context information seamlessly in the different networks. And thirdly, dynamic nature of the context information be taken into account. We propose a C-IOB(Context-Information, Observation and Belief) based service discovery model which deals with the above challenges by processing the context information and by formulating the beliefs based on the observations. With these formulated beliefs the required services will be provided to the users. The method has been tested with a typical ubiquitous museum guide application over different cases. The simulation results are time efficient and quite encouraging.

La protección de las invenciones mediante patentes en las universidades europeas, japonesas y estadounidenses

[ES] En los últimos años se ha producido en las universidades de todo el mundo una tendencia creciente a proteger sus invenciones a través de derechos de patentes. Este hecho refleja la mayor aplicabilidad de la investigación universitaria y la intención de transferir estos resultados al mundo empresarial.

O rito de tramitação das medidas provisórias e a questão da instalação das comissões mistas

Busca conhecer as razões pelas quais as comissões mistas não se instalam para apreciar as medidas provisórias. Para isso, foram analisados os precursores do instituto da medida provisória nas constituições republicanas no sentido de compará-los; observadas práticas políticas em detrimento às regras; verificadas manifestações das lideranças partidárias que colaboram para a instalação ou não das comissões; foram estudados casos de algumas comissões. Por último, foram analisadas propostas de emenda à Constituição na busca pela solução da questão, com a extinção ou criação de uma comissão mista permanente.

Pautas de conducta constructiva en psicomotricidad a los dos años

[Es]Este trabajo forma parte de una investigación empírica que aplica la metodología observacional a la incipiente actividad constructiva propia de la psicomotricidad espontánea a los dos años de edad. Es un estudio idiográfico, el diseño observacional utilizado es nomotético, de seguimiento y multidimensional. El instrumento de observación desarrollado ad hoc para el registro de la conducta conscontructiva es el formato de campo “la construcción en psicomotricidad durante el tercer año de vida”. La fiabilidad del instrumento se establece a partir del grado de concordancia entre los observadores. Los resultados, obtenidos mediante el análisis de coocurrencias, informan sobre las condiciones, modalidades, tendencias, evolución y niveles de acción que estas primeras conductas constructivas despliegan. Esta actividad de construcción, de acuerdo con la teoría psicogenética walloniana, puede ser considerada invención de nuevas conductas adecuadas a las nuevas situaciones. Su suspensión da lugar a símbolos enactivos, precursores del juego simbólico infantil.

Emerging Practice in a Digital Age: A guide to technology-enhanced institutional innovation

Since the launch of the JISC guide Innovative Practice with e-Learning (JISC, 2005), so much has changed. At that time, early adopters were exploring the potential of mobile and wireless learning. Since then, the increased availability of public and institutional wireless networks, the emergence of new and more powerful technologies and an increase in personal ownership of these technologies are changing the way we connect, communicate and collaborate. Emerging Practice in a Digital Age, one of a series of Effective Practice guides, draws on recent JISC reports and case studies and looks at how colleges and universities are continuing to embrace innovation and respond to changes in economic, social and technological circumstances in a fastchanging world.

Open Personalization: Involving Third Parties in Improving the User Experience of Websites

Traditional software development captures the user needs during the requirement analysis. The Web makes this endeavour even harder due to the difficulty to determine who these users are. In an attempt to tackle the heterogeneity of the user base, Web Personalization techniques are proposed to guide the users’ experience. In addition, Open Innovation allows organisations to look beyond their internal resources to develop new products or improve existing processes. This thesis sits in between by introducing Open Personalization as a means to incorporate actors other than webmasters in the personalization of web applications. The aim is to provide the technological basis that builds up a trusty environment for webmasters and companion actors to collaborate, i.e. "an architecture of participation". Such architecture very much depends on these actors’ profile. This work tackles three profiles (i.e. software partners, hobby programmers and end users), and proposes three "architectures of participation" tuned for each profile. Each architecture rests on different technologies: a .NET annotation library based on Inversion of Control for software partners, a Modding Interface in JavaScript for hobby programmers, and finally, a domain specific language for end-users. Proof-of-concept implementations are available for the three cases while a quantitative evaluation is conducted for the domain specific language.